A Big Arrow
Chris Thile doesn’t like musical boundaries, and the mandolin player seems to almost relish pissing off those who would prefer to pigeonhole him.
Music
Continuing on
The future of Ra Ra Riot sounds as if it’s in doubt. The New York group has an album that’s being mixed and mastered, but it doesn’t have a label. The band is hoping for a May release, but that could be pushed to September. It’s now considering its options – such as self-releasing a digital version of the album – if it doesn’t find a corporate home soon. It wants the album out there, but it wants a label push, too.
Tagged: Interviews, Milo Bonacci, Ra Ra Riot
Earning the Buzz
As dismissive as many people are when it comes to blogs, what’s often neglected is that they can sometimes represent genuine grassroots movements. And Minneapolis’ Tapes ’n Tapes has been a major beneficiary.
Tagged: Interviews, Josh Grier, Tapes 'n Tapes
I Will Make You Like Me
Philip Dickey had a burning question about the pizza place that his band, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, would be playing in January. It was not about the size of the room, or the setup, or the acoustics. “Is it really good pizza?” he asked.
Rough-Edged Perfection
When Spoon was finishing its 2001 album Girls Can Tell, the band didn’t know what to do with “Chicago at Night,” which would close the record. In an interview last week, drummer and co-founder Jim Eno told this story about what he and guitarist, singer, and chief songwriter Britt Daniel decided to do: “I never would have tried this, but Britt and I were so young, and we were just like, ‘Oh yeah, let’s do it.’ We had to turn all the mixes in for mastering. … We have these two versions, and we like different things about each version … . So Britt says, ‘Why don’t we use the left side of this mix and the right side of this mix?'”
Tagged: Interviews, Jim Eno, Spoon
My 2007 Album
This isn’t a list of the “best” songs of 2007, or even my favorites. It’s a personal 2007 compilation that tries to capture my experience with music over the past 12 months. The songs are meant to play off each other – sometimes in obvious ways, often not – and there’s a purpose to the sequencing.
Tagged: Album for a Year, Art Brut, Grinderman, Kings of Leon, Lists, Modest Mouse, Monster Magnet, Pelican, PJ Harvey, Queens of the Stone Age, Radiohead, Self-Involvement, Serj Tankian, Shannon Wright, Shins, Sunset Rubdown, Tegan and Sara, The Avett Brothers, The Good the Bad and the Queen, The Noisettes, White Stripes
None More Black, Turned Up to 11
On “Puttin’ People on the Moon,” the Driver-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood sings a litany of tragedies personal and regional: “Mary Alice got cancer just like everybody here / Seems everyone I know is gettin’ cancer every year / And we can’t afford no insurance, I been 10 years unemployed / So she didn’t get no chemo so our lives was destroyed / And nothin’ ever changes, the cemetery gets more full / And now over there in Huntsville, even NASA’s shut down too.” The song is typical Drive-By Truckers: bleak, detailed, populist, Southern, and with enough twangy muscle that you can play it loud and ignore the skill of its songwriting and the loving attention it pays to the downtrodden, heard in the indignant desperation of Hood’s damaged falsetto on the chorus.
Tagged: Drive-By Truckers, Interviews, Mike Cooley
No Stock Footage
There is nobody like Andrew Bird in the world, a songwriter and a performer who makes his whistling, his glockenspiel, and his violin at home with guitars, drums, and vocals in detailed, pitch-perfect pop songs that never seem precious or forced, as eccentric as they are. But when you’re as idiosyncratic as Bird is, that means there aren’t many people whose vision matches your own.
Tagged: Andrew Bird, Interviews
Keepin’ It (Mostly) Real
Some things are too embarrassing for public consumption, so the man born Garrett Dutton and known as G. Love exercised some control over the content of his new documentary and concert DVD, A Year & a Night with G. Love & Special Sauce.
Tagged: G. Love, Garrett Dutton, Interviews
Beyond Sacred Steel
In an interview, pedal-steel guitarist Robert Randolph once suggested that somebody would come along and be the instrument’s Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix.
When I asked him recently where that put him in the pedal steel’s development, the singer/songwriter/guitarist appeared to backtrack a little. “Somebody has to put me there,” he said of the class of guitar revolutionaries that includes Hendrix. “I wouldn’t put myself there.”
But based on his own criteria, that class is probably where Randolph belongs.
Tagged: Interviews, Robert Randolph
