Ivan & Alyosha "Fathers Be Kind"

Jesse Barnett of Right Arm Resource is our guest blogger this week. He spends his days on the phone with radio stations across the country, advocating for records he believes in. While PJ is on vacation, Jesse talks to you about 5 new songs he thinks radio, and you, will love.

We’re halfway to the finish line.

PJ’s coming home in a couple days and I can only hope he doesn’t regret his decision to let me sit in the captain’s chair.

The bad thing about vacations for radio programmers is, when you get back, the stack of the music on your desk is ridiculously high. Sometimes, without someone prodding you to listen to a particular project, it gets lost in the shuffle.

I can’t complain about this too much because I’m guilty of doing this myself. A manager I knew reached out to me at the beginning of the year about an ep for a band he was working with out of Seattle. And the download link sat in my inbox, ready to check out.

And sat there.

Then one morning I got an email from a regular client, whose impeccable taste and opinion is questioned by no one, telling me, basically “Hey idiot – would you listen to this guy’s band already? You’ll love it.”

Sometimes that’s all it takes.

It only took one listen.

The members of Ivan & Alyosha have been playing together since 2007. (Spoiler alert: no one in the band is named Ivan or Alyosha. They’re characters from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. You know, the book you lied about reading to the girl in the cute librarian glasses.) It wasn’t until the 2010 South By Southwest festival that they started to gain notoriety. NPR’s All Songs Considered picked them as part of their conference preview and one of their songs was later featured as NPR’s Song Of The Day.

Their ep called Fathers Be Kind was released last month and features five songs that celebrate the trend of glorious indie rock harmonizing. For a refresher, refer to the performances of Mumford & Sons and The Avett Bros that dropped jaws on the Grammys this year (and for a non-nationally-televised band, read up on personal favorite Good Old War).

The title track, “Fathers Be Kind,” is a plea to parents to do right by their offspring. “Fathers be kind to your children, you know it matters what you tell them, you gotta feel for them, you gotta steal for them.”

I’m a father of a ten-year-old son and a seven-going-on-seventeen-year-old daughter. Let’s just say it didn’t take much to suck me in to this one. Let’s see if it does the same for you.



Read a little more about Jesse in this previous post, and visit his site at Right Arm Resource.