Tomorrow night, Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers are doing a special New Year’s Eve show at the Ridgefield Playhouse that will, no doubt, be a celebration of the special power and excitement of live performance.
The band will be rolling into the Playhouse after a series of five East Coast holiday shows and Fairfield County is home to Kellogg so it should be a hot night.
But, Kellogg and the Sixers are also providing an exclusive digital bonus for everyone who attends — an instant live recording of the show.
“We’ve always been cool with taping,” Kellogg told me in a recent phone interview.
“You can’t fight the tide,” he added of the determination of music fans to record — and share — the work of artists they love via the new technologies.
“People are going through tough times right now so we wanted to give people something special,” Kellogg said of the drop cards audience members will receive for a digital upload of the band’s two live sets. Only those who attend the show will get the code.
Kellogg and the Sixers have been on the road for the past three months — the “Celebrating Five Years” tour — hitting some of the best venues in the country, including a two-night Thanksgiving Weekend booking at the Bowery Ballroom in downtown Manhattan.
Fans are still buzzed by the 2007 album, “Glassjaw Boxer,” with 11 wonderfully melodic and personal songs by Kellogg and his bandmates. Critics have compared the material to the work of everyone from Springsteen to Seger to Dylan, but there is a straightforward, intimate quality to the lyrics that isn’t quite like anyone else’s music.
Kellogg laughed when I told him that it seemed lazy for writers to put his work in someone else’s niche.
“That’s a mixed bag,” he said of the way critics have compared his music to other people’s stuff. “It helps bring people in the door.”
“But, hey, I don’t mind it when they are grabbing the names of the best people ever to play music,” he said, with a chuckle.
Kellogg has mixed feelings about this new and uncertain age for popular musicians, with the whole concept of an “album” of related songs under siege and the opportunities for making a living from recorded music dwindling for all but the biggest acts.
On the plus side, live music seems to be as popular as ever and the Internet — and file sharing — can bind fans much closer to their favorite acts than was possible in the “golden age” of album rock and pop.
“I do like the old school,” Kellogg said of the days when a new album by The Beatles or Nirvana would be studied track by track (and the album cover art was an integral part of the whole experience).
“You just have to try to roll with it, because you can’t fight the changes,” he said,
When Kellogg and the Sixers were putting together “Glassjaw Boxer,” the performer viewed the project in “old school” terms. “I still think of it as an album with two sides — track five is the end of side 1!,” he said of his pre-CD vision of the recording.
The musician hopes audiences will always see the value of a structured collection of songs: “Everything can’t be a single.”
(Tickets are $65 for tomorrow night’s show. The doors will open at 7 and the music will start at 9. The Alternate Routes will play before Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers. For more information, call 203-438-5795.)
