The Modern Skirts play three shows in our area this week. They’ll be at Schubas in Chicago on November 18th, Mad Planet in Milwaukee on November 19th, and the Project Lodge in Madison on November 20th. Please take this chance to catch these guys live if you can. If you have not heard their fantastic 2008 release, All of Us in Our Night (that’s the awesome album art above), please add it to your collection. You won’t be disappointed.

Speaking of great albums, Jo Jo from Modern Skirts was generous enough to share some of his favorite albums with us for our continuing 5 albums feature. Some great selections below, many that I’m excited to revisit.

Belle and Sebastian – Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant
This album was the soundtrack to my years of poverty and depression. Just before Modern Skirts started, the singer and I were living in a house in a bad part of Athens, squeezed between two housing projects. We were working as cart pushers at Wal-Mart, boiling water on the stove so we could take hot baths because our gas was cut off. Dead car in the parking lot, etc. The old piano was out on the front porch, and at night I would drink wine and play as the hookers and homeless people passed by in the street. I would go downtown every night during this time and spend all my money at the bars and come home and read War and Peace cross-eyed drunk and listen to this album. I would sleep three hours and wake up and go into work, and then sneak out to my car and sleep till the managers would call me on the walkie talkie to find out why the carts weren’t getting in. Every time I hear “Fold Your Hands,” I think of boiling my bath water and wishing I could get a girlfriend. It’s hard to get a nice girl to go out into the projects with you at night.

Okkervil River – The Stage Names
“The Stage Names” was the my first road record. It came out during our first year of heavy touring. A lot of the lyrics have to do with being a small touring band on the road, which really resonated with me at that time. Being on the road had gotten really lonely and difficult fir me at that point, and it was nice to have a record to romanticize it for me again. We were in Florida when I realized how much I loved some of those songs. I remember sleeping on our friend Jeanice’s floor in Gainesville, Florida after a show and playing “Plus Ones” over and over again.

M. Ward – Post-War
Post War is my New Orleans album. We had been recording the self-produced songs from All of Us in Our Night for two weeks and all had our first Mardi Gras in the middle of all that. We had gotten really close with our friends down there, and our last night in town we went out in the French Quarter, which was pretty quiet in the wake of all the festivities. We were way back in the back of this bar called the Erin Rose, me and Jay and our friends Mary and Erin, and when we walked out, the sun was rising and casting a bright orange across the balconies on Conti Street. The sky was a deep pink and bright blue and the air was soft. It was a Monday morning and most people on the street were just getting up and getting to work. We got in Erin’s car and headed home and the first song on Post-War came on and it was just the most beautiful moment; sad, because we were going to be leaving the city I was in love with to go home, and beautiful, because we were with new friends on that beautiful morning in the city I was in love with. It occurred to me that I would remember that for the rest of my life. We went home and had a 7 am breakfast of leftover pork loin and king cake and packed our bags and left for Athens.

Tom Waits – Mule Variations
I was in a jeep with with our singer and our friend Bruce on a pitch black dirt road in our hometown of Elberton, Georgia when I heard Tom Waits for the first time. We drove deep into the woods and stopped on an old metal bridge for a while and Bruce played this album for us, and it felt like Elberton to me. Buying beer on a Sunday from an old black man at a shack out in the country with a cooler buried in the ground under an old piece of tin roof. The junkyards with the broken down school buses stuffed floor to roof with discarded clothes. Boiling peanuts in an old oil drum with the goats all around. I could hear the dirt on the floor in those recordings. There are better and stranger Tom Waits records, but this one feels the most like home to me.

Ween – Quebec
I had been listening to Ween for a little while when Quebec came out. It was the first Ween album I was able to anticipate before it was released. I was really taught to appreciate this band by some guys that lived across from my bandmates at the time; they were always taking these crazy drugs no one had ever heard of and watching midget porn and art films (kind of like what it’s probably like being in the studio with Ween, actually…) There was one night where they were putting these drops on their tongues and kind of lolling around the apartment, and they were listening to Quebec. To my ears, it was a different direction for Ween and I was sucked in immediately. I’ve had some of my own weird times with this record.

Buy: Modern Skirts – All of Us in Our Night
++
MP3: Modern Skirts – “Soft Pedals”