Top Five Must-See Shows This Week

By Phoenix New Times Staff Mon., Aug. 13 2012 at 3:00 AM

Categories: Five Must-See Shows This Week

Sharon Van Etten is scheduled to perform Wednesday, August 15, at Crescent Ballroom.

Yeah, yeah, yeah...we get it Mondays suck (we've read Garfield). But it means the start of a new week, which means a bunch of killer shows in and around Phoenix. And here are a few of the coolest, our top five must-see shows this week.

Photo by Neko Case

Kelly Hogan

Monday: August 13: Kelly Hogan @ Crescent Ballroom

Kelly Hogan knows the audacity of favors.

But if you're going to make an album, starting with a fantasy batch of songwriters and ending with a fantasy band is a hell of a way to go about it.

For I Like to Keep Myself In Pain, her first solo album in 11 years, Hogan started by writing 40 fan letters, buttering up songwriter friends like Andrew Bird, Robyn Hitchcock, and Vic Chesnutt to ask for contributions.

"I sat down and had a good think about all the people I've worked with since I was playing at bars when I was 17. It was one fan letter skeleton that was swerved to each person. It was really, really frightening to send it," says Hogan.

Frightening, but fruitful. Hogan ended up with more than 30 songs, from M. Ward, the Mekons' Jon Langford, Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt, John Wesley Harding, and Robbie Fulks.

"They trusted me with their songs, which meant a lot. I can't even explain how humbled I was."

Some of the early results were a surprise. Hitchcock said he'd already started writing a song for Hogan a few years earlier, after an e-mail exchange. The one song Hogan penned, "Golden," was written years earlier for Neko Case but emerged as a good fit. And "Ways of This World" from the late Chesnutt was so customized for Hogan it's as if he were psychic.

"Vic Chesnutt just blew my mind. It was one of the first ones I got back and it became the masthead of my album ship," she says. "I'm not surprised the song is so great because I love Vic and his work. We're both from Georgia, so maybe it's our shared DNA, but he surprised me because, lyrically, it was the story of my life."

Hogan selected 12 to record and began the process of discovering her own way to approach the songs.

"I feel like a hippie, but the songs just reveal themselves. It's a weird thing. I have to live with them for a while," she says. "At first, I like to have it sneak into my head. I'll always listen to a song while doing something else, like washing dishes or [shaving] my legs. I don't put it on and stare at the speaker. I'll let it get into my groundwater by doing something else for a while." -- Eric Swedlund

(Read more about Kelly Hogan.)