Sunday morning coming down

We went to see the The New Standards perform one of their annual pre-New Year’s shows at the Dakota on December 30 — the first of two shows they played that night following two shows the night before. We’ve gone for at least the past 10 years and have loved the band since we first saw them at one of their pre-New Year’s shows (they call them “preeners”).

The band is a Twin Cities supergroup. Pianist Chan Poling made his name with the punk/new wave band The Suburbs. Bassist John Munson scored with Trip Shakespeare and Semisonic. You can look it up. Vibes player Steve Roehm is the youngest member of the trio. He looks to be 25 or 30, but he’s 55. He started out on drums in the Texas punk outfit Billygoat and the avant-jazz Electropolis. He is a multi-instrumentalist who teaches at the MacPhail Center for Music in Minneapolis.

We loitered at our table after the show. Steve Roehm came out onstage and answered our questions about his life in and out of the band. He does almost no talking onstage during the show but is a warm and open gentleman. I asked him who had the idea that they could make those three instruments work together in a trio. He said they began playing together as friends for fun and thought they had something going. They have kept it going now for nearly 20 years.

Here is their cover of “Innocent When You Dream.” The original is by Tom Waits on Franks Wild Years (1987). The Standards’ performance of the song in this year’s show blew me away. Chan Poling obviously has a deep feeling for the song — a song about lost love with a dream of redemption. That’s my take. This is in any event the impetus for my post on the group this morning. I wanted to share their cover of the song from Sunday Morning Coming Down (2012).

Here is their cover of “Hey Ya!” by Outkast (2003), written by Outkast’s André 3000 (Andre Benjamin). The recording is from the Standards’ 2008 disc Rock and Roll.

Chan Poling himself wrote “Love Is The Law” when he was a teenager and recorded it with the Suburbs on the Suburbs’ album of that title (1986, produced by my friend Steve Greenberg). The group makes it new again with a special assist from Steve Roehm on vibes. This song is always a highlight of their shows. It never fails. As Roehm struck up the figure that runs through the song, you could feel the emotion ripple through this year’s packed house. Here is a 2021 studio performance recorded live for Minneapolis’s public radio station KCMP (89.3, “The Current”). It conveys a sense of what it sounds like in concert. Their recording of the song is on the band’s self-titled disc of 2005.

In this old-fashioned video of their recording of “Such Great Heights” (2002, written by Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello, original recording by Postal Service), Chan Poling and John Munson trade off the lead vocal before joining together on the chorus. Steve Roehm makes it sing in his own way. The recording is also from Rock and Roll.

I thought some readers might appreciate the introduction to the group afforded by the video below. It leads off with a short clip of their cover of the Replacements’ “I Will Dare” (1984, written by the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg), another of the highlights of this year’s preener’s show, and intersperses a few other clips to illustrate the comments.