The Good Thing Archive

Les Filles De Illighadad - Eghass Malan

Sahel Sounds has become one of those record labels that has gained my full trust. Similar to Matador records in the late 90s, I try to pick up everything they put out. It started with stumbling upon Etran De L’aïr (you gotta check this out!) which led to Mdou Moctar (this too!) and most recently Les Filles de Illighadad. This record gets a ton of play at our home - especially in the evening during dinner or all of the winter backyard COVID campfires. Our kids - usually more inclined to want to listen to musicals - also love this record. Our seven-year-old was awestruck by the pounding of the calabash—a traditional drum that floats in water—when he found some of the group's live performances on YouTube. Les Filles de Illighadad was founded by Fatou Seidi Ghali in Illighadad, Niger. Fatou is considered the first professional guitar player in Niger, teaching herself in secret at the age of 10 on her older brother’s guitar. Their sound is a blend of two traditional types of Nigerian music: Tende, percussive music performed exclusively by women, and Tuareg, a newer guitar-based style played mostly by men. The Tuareg style of playing has always drawn me in. Much in the same way that Beethoven’s Pastoral plops you down in a pasture surrounded by the sounds of birds and rushing streams, the sound of the Tuareg guitar brings to mind vivid images of the Sahara and I can’t get enough of it.

- Will Pratt 4/1/21

Astrid Medina - Tolima, Colombia

Our menu just wouldn't look right without a seasonal offering from our dear friend Astrid Medina. Astrid suffered through a couple seasons of wonky fermentation and trouble with evenly drying her coffees, but her determination really paid off in the long run. This lot of coffee is one of the best we've tasted from her in a long time, with tons of tropical fruit flavors and tea like body that made us think it was really an Ethiopian coffee. Continued success is the least we could hope for Astrid, as she is not only one of the best producers we know, but also one of the best people in general.

Gene Russell - New Direction

This album comes to you by way of one of those glorious serendipitous moments where I inquired about the availability of this record with our distributor just as it was about to be repressed. Perfect timing! I had caught it just in time to get a large pile pressed just for our subscribers. I have been hooked on this record since I first heard the opening piano bass line on “Black Orchid”. I’ve yet to put this record on at work without someone saying, “What’s this?!” within the first 30 seconds. It’s one of those records. Gene Russell founded the Black Jazz label with percussionist Dick Schory in 1969 withNew Directionbeing the first release. Gene Russell’s previous album,Up and Away- a collection of pop standards covered by his piano trio - featured a full color picture of him on the cover being shot out of a jet engine with balloons in hand.New Directioncould not have been a more fitting title for his next endeavour. The iconic cover art set the tone for all later Black Jazz albums - a black and white photo in a black frame with white type. While Black Jazz Records lasted only 4 short years, it released some of the most sought after and collectible jazz records of all time. For that and so many other reasons we are so excited to get to share this gem with you all.

La Folie - Antigua, Guatemala

There aren't many coffees we like to see appear back on our menu more than La Folie. This is such a stunner every year, and this year is no exception. La Folie has been managed since 2003 by Luis Pedro Zelaya, a coffee agronomist who also owns and operates the Bella Vista Beneficio. It is orderly and clean; the rows of coffee are evenly spaced, the rows of gravillea shade trees are perfectly spaced and nearly identically sized. It’s a sight to see! It is an impressively managed farm and the continued growth in output and increase in quality over the years are testament to the detailed care that goes into it. This is our first offering from Antigua this year, and one that shouldn't be missed. It's got tons of really sweet stone fruit qualities with the classic toasted nuttiness that we've come to love.

James Elkington - Ever-Roving Eye

“It’s time for you to move, better get somewhere to go” - James Elkington, “Nowhere Time”

We were first introduced to the Paradise of Bachelors label last fall when we worked with them to bring you Terry Allen’s Juarez record. Wanting to know more about their label, the owner Brendan pointed us to a Spotify playlist filled with music that the label had put out. Kathleen and I both started listening individually to the playlist pretty regularly and eventually discovered that we had both been especially enjoying all of the songs by some guy named James Elkington. It didn’t take long for us to stray from the playlist and start going straight for the Elkington. When something starts to get that much play at home it usually starts to get tossed around as a potential Good Thing record. We kept talking about how we heard so many of our favorite sounds in this record - Davy Graham, Jim O’Rourke, a little Nick Drake - but from someone we thought was new to the scene. As we learned more about him, our interest in his music made so much more sense. Turns out he’s been around some time and spent years in the Chicago music scene playing with the likes of Tortoise and Jeff Tweedy and fronting another new favorite band of ours - The Zincs with the one and only Jon Mcentire on drums. What? We knew this guy was awesome! Learning all of this really sealed the deal for us. Ever-Roving Eye is good, real good. There’s a reason we seem to put it on together at home, on our own, at our bakery or at our roastery on an almost daily basis. His finger picking throughout the Ever-Roving Eye is enough to make you want to quit practicing but his solos on “Nowhere Time” and “Late Jim’s Lament” will make you want to smash all of your guitars into a million pieces that would be impossible to ever glue back together.

Kerche - Guji, Ethiopia

Rounding out our natural offerings from Ethiopia this year is another dynamite coffee from the highlands of Guji. When we selected our offerings all the way back in January, the team at Snap Specialty Coffee had a table full of coffee right when we walked in to the lab. Of those coffees, we tasted three naturals back-to-back and chose all of them. This particular natural coffee is processed at the Teshome Gemechu wet mill, which is supported by farmers in the surrounding areas whose coffee is cultivated under cloud forest canopy, or in small, personal gardens. Kerche tastes like a tropical fruit bomb that's backed up by white tea qualities and delicate melon acidity. Naturals seem to keep getting better and better each year, and we're excited to see what the next harvest brings from our favorite origin.

Pedro Lima - Maguidala

Duromina - Jimma, Ethiopia

We just had to sneak in this delightful washed Ethiopia from the west before the year was over. It's a shining example of what coffees from western Ethiopia can taste like, and a great way to celebrate the end of a long, long year. This coffee comes to us from farmers who contribute to the Duromina farmers cooperative society in the Kata Muduga union, specifically from those near Goma in the Jimma zone. We had already purchased the bulk of our Ethiopian coffees by the time we first cupped this sample, but it was so good we felt like we had to fit it in somewhere. This coffee has intense sweetness and juicy stone fruit qualities, but don't overlook the floral components as well, which perfume the cup rather nicely if we don't say so ourselves.

Ludwig Van Beethoven

About five years ago my mom became extremely obsessed with Ludwig Van Beethoven. It seemed to happen out of nowhere. One day she showed up at our house and she spoke of nothing but Beethoven for her entire visit. For a good three years he and his music were pretty much the only thing she would talk about. You’d try to change the subject and she would always find a way to bring it back to Beethoven. Around this same time the Portland Symphony Orchestra was working its way through the nine symphonies and my mom bought us a pair of tickets to see the Third Symphony, titled Eroica. I thought I’d better brush up in preparation. A mere forty-seven seconds into the first movement and everything she had been going on and on about was verified. Damn! She was right again! I, and anyone who has been within earshot of her, have learned so much from my mom’s obsession. Did you know Beethoven invented ragtime? Well, she will tell you it is so (see Sonata no. 32). Did you know that after conducting the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, one of the singers on stage had to physically turn Beethoven around to see the audience giving a rousing standing ovation because he was unable to hear them due to his deafness? I’ve heard that story and many others like it so many times!

I’ve known that we would do a Beethoven record for December 2020 for over a year now but it was hard to choose which. I ended up going with the Third because it is the symphony that orignially turned my mom onto Beethoven (careful, people!). She still says that its first movement is her favorite among all of his symphonies. High praise! Bruno Walter’s rendition is amazing. I’ve heard so many versions of Eroica that play it too fast, too bouncy, too clean. Walter’s is a little slower, full throated, raw and muddy. Just the way Beethoven would have wanted it.

At the time of its composing, Eroica was the longest symphony ever written and completely changed the idea of what a symphony could be. Eroica was originally intended to be an ode to the French Revolution and the great liberator of people : Napoleon. When Napoleon crowned himself emperor of France in 1804, Beethoven, disgusted, erased Napoleon's name from the music. The Bonaparte Symphony became Eroica or “The Heroic”.

Beethoven turns 250 this month. My mom also turns 70 this month. We were going to spend her birthday in Vienna (Beethoven’s adopted city) to enjoy some Beethoven birthday festivities but coronavirus has made us postpone the trip. Until then I will prepare for the trip by going down another Beethoven rabbit hole. I expect to meet you down there by the :47 second mark in the first movement.

- Will Pratt 12/2/20

Jingle Beans Ethiopia

Our annual holiday blend! Each year we go out of our way to make this blend as viciously fruity and seasonally outlandish as we can. This year we wholeheartedly went for it by blending two merry coffees that triumphantly coalesce into the best interpretation of aqueous fruit cake in a cup. This year we achieved a holiday spectacular by combining 3/4 washed Duromina from Agaro, Ethiopia with 1/4 natural Rogicha from Guji, Ethiopia. Simply splendid.

Rudy De Anda - Tender Epoch

Like Vitamin D, a bottle of wine, an extra $20 and a hug, Rudy De Anda is just something most people need right now. - Garrett Bethmann

Whoa! A brand new album for The Good Thing! We never get to do this, but we really should do this more often. We’ve been so focused on reissues and must-have classics that we forgot how good “new” music actually is. Hey, it turns out the kids are all right! I happened upon this record through an ‘upcoming releases’ email from Secretly Distribution. I saw the cover and thought, “Oh, I bet that’s pretty good.” I had a hard time figuring out what era the record was from—I couldn’t immediately tell if it was new or an exciting reissue. All I knew was that I loved the album cover. I checked out the only single that was available at the time—the amazing "Espume”—and still couldn’t really define the era. Half way through my first listen I started sharing the songs with many friends. We got hooked and very much looked forward to the full album coming out in September. “Espume” was so good—I’m just such a sucker to super precise, jangly guitar playing—that we considered doing the record for the October subscription without ever hearing it in its entirety, but something held us back. After its release and a few weeks of spinning it at home, we were validated and decided it was more than worthy to be in the club and we got very excited to share it with you all. In fact, there is no better time for an album like this one to drop on your doorstep.Tender Epoch brings me to life. It reminds me I’m alive. It moves me from the inside out. Though I don’t understand most of the words, it speaks my language. So, while the world tumbles down the terrible tubes, allow Rudy De Anda's beautiful tunes to lift you up.

Terry Allen - Juarez

Guided By Voices - Alien Lanes

“As you probably know, Dayton is the home of the Wright Brothers, the Dayton Peace Accords, and Guided By Voices, the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of the modern era, in my humble opinion.” - Jay Carney, Obama's Press Secretary

Remember that excited feeling you used to have when you found out a band you loved were coming to town? When I was a freshman in college in Boston I would make sure to get the Boston Phoenix on the day it came out every week. I would get it out of the bin and pour over the club listings there on the sidewalk to see if there was anyone I'd heard of planning on coming to town. When a band I knew appeared my elation would be abounding. I'd immediately start assembling a group to go to the show with me. Then I would go to the actual real life box office on the day tickets went on sale. I'd take those tickets home, stick them in my dorm room desk drawer and check on them daily to make sure I still knew where they were until the night of the show. This is exactly how it all went down when I saw that Guided By Voices were playing downstairs at the Middle East. 18-year-old me could not believe it. How could I be so lucky? I assembled a group - even brought a few high school friends up from boring Connecticut for this one. As I was underage, my usual fun-times-rock-show trick at that time was to fill an empty Snapple bottle with Captain Morgans and sneak it in. Blech! But it worked every time. We got there early and got my usual spot right front and center. Before every Guided By Voices show actually begins - while the mics are checked and the guitars tuned - there is the ceremonial wheeling out of the big red cooler. Inside this cooler is at least 30 12oz cans of Budweiser - all of which singer Robert Pollard will drink on stage during the next couple of hours. The show was a bit of a Snapple blur but did not disappoint. We all ended up getting exceptionally drunk and I'm not sure if the band was trying to keep up with us or we were trying to keep up with them. Either way something pushed us all to the limits. The show ended with someone bringing a giant silver bowl of potato salad onto the stage. One of the roadies proceeded to pull down their pants, jump high in the air and land bare ass-first in the bowl. Potato salad on us all. I was recently told that I shot off a bottle rocket inside of a laundromat on the walk home from the show. Sheesh! How did they even let me into the club with fireworks? Anyway, enjoy the GBV but avoid the Captain Morgan's, kids.

- Will Pratt 9/1/20

Jesus Antonio Urquina - Acevedo, Colombia

Our other release from Acevedo this year comes from third generation coffee Farmer Jesus Antonio Urquina. Jesus' farm, El Mirador, is located at 1,600 meters above sea level, which is the absolute sweet spot for coffees coming from this region. The surrounding cloud forests keep temperatures cool and promote flavor development that you might find more at higher altitudes. The passion Jesus has for his coffee is evident in how it tastes, but finding adequate help in this region of Colombia is difficult even for farmers who pay premiums for pickers. When Jesus brought his coffee to the Acevedo Cup this year he placed ninth overall, tieing with our friend Gloria Silva.

The Shaggs - Shaggs’ Own Thing

I first heard The Shaggs in a closet in Hadley, Massachusetts. My friend, Dan (a performer and artist as ragged and wild as the Wiggin sisters themselves), played them for me in the actual closet that was his bedroom in the old schoolhouse we lived in. I was sort of mid-journey from my highschool love of all things witchy and goth (Stevie Nicks, X, Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, etc.) to falling HARD for something new. I reveled in the off-kilter, a lack of consistent time signature and new-to-me styles of discord. I spent nights listening to every Ornette Coleman record I could get my hands on, Sun Ra, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Frank Zappa, New York Art Quartet, and was blessed enough to see Professor Milford Graves perform several times. Something about The Shaggs really clicked together my love of actual songs, and pop, with this bonkers version of music I was learning to love. I'm not sure there's a more culty origin story. The Shaggs were created from a fortune, a palm reading. Their grandmother brought them into being by mentioning offhand to their father about having daughters who'd become a famous rock band. And in the tiny town of Fremont, New Hampshire, where most folks made their living sewing handkerchiefs at the textile mill, this was probably an intoxicating dream. For Dot, Betty, and Helen, it probably felt more like a nightmare. There's no way to talk about The Shaggs and their music without talking about abuse. They were forced to practice and practice and practice, as well as do calisthenics all day, every day. And on Sunday, church. The girls weren't allowed to date, and rarely to socialize. They did most of their performing at a local nursing home or the town hall talent shows.They stuck together, they wrote songs about what they knew. Their parents, their cat Foot-Foot, school. The brutal practice schedule inflicted by their father never quite materialized into skill. Or, maybe it bore them along. The result is a record full of bent, awkward, arrhythmic songs. Once they were deemed 'ready', dad shuttled them along to a recording studio and shelled out a fair amount of family savings to make 1000 copies of Philosophy of the World. Legend has it the recording engineer stole 900 of them and disappeared. Whatever the truth, the remaining physical copies made their way into the world and eventually became the darlings of the proto-punk and outsider music collectors. Zappa dubbed them 'better than the Beatles'. This new re-release is pretty special. It's remastered from the original tape from a 1982 release of Shaggs' Own Thing helmed by Terry Adams of NRBQ. That release brought together tracks that the sisters had re-recorded with several more years of independence and experience and growth. It doesn't matter how many times I listen to these songs—each time they feel new, awkward, guileless, imperfect. Hearing them for the first time around the age of 19 or 20 was a pivotal moment for me and those feelings don't go away. Letting go and leaning into a loose and spacious new way of listening. I just love this record.

- Briana Holt 8/1/20

Gloria Silva - Acevedo, Colombia

Oh man are we excited for these next few coffees, especially this one by our friend Gloria Silva Cordoba. Last year Gloria submitted her coffee to the Acevedo Cup, a friendly competition hosted by our mutual friends at Fairfield Trading and the Collaborative Coffee Source. The competition showcases coffees grown in Acevedo, which has unique geography that mimics some of the highest growing areas of Colombia while only averaging between 1,400 and 1,800 masl. We loved Gloria's coffee last year so much that we knew we'd be buying her coffee come what may this year. Fortunately, Gloria placed in the top 10 again this year, and we're so excited to continue this relationship. Her coffee has tart citrus, sweet stonefruit, and creamy chocolate flavors. It's a pretty small lot, so get it while you can!