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September 15, 2005
Shorties
The Kills' Allison Mosshart talks to the Pitch.
"Bands tend to seek out a place that's really comfortable, with couches and catering," Mosshart says. "There's no adrenaline. I can't create like that. We're talking about living in Russia for a month next time, doing something different that will wake us up and freak us out."
Matt Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces talks to Flagpole.
Matt Friedberger describes the upcoming Rehearsing My Choir: "It's a regular rock album with an old woman on it," he says. This album is a quasi-concept album centered on the biography of his and Eleanor's grandmother, Olga Sarantos.
Newsweek lauds the state of rock songwriting today.
We're in a golden age for pure songwriting, with rare talents like Gibbard, the Shins' James Mercer and Wilco's Jeff Tweedy revitalizing the four-minute pop song and making a case that, in fact, it hasn't all been done before. If there's one knock against this new school of rock, it's that no one seems willing to step up and become class president. "At some point, Bono looked at Elvis and said, 'Yeah, that's what I'm gonna do,' " says former Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. A fractured pop climate and a general cynicism about musical saviors, he argues, has made young bands even less likely to pursue grand visions than Pearl Jam and Nirvana were. "There's just as much talent in this generation, but the constant message to kids starting new bands is: this is really not that important."
It is "fall fiction week" at Slate.
Google launched their blog search engine.
John Dieterich of Deerhoof talks to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
"Mistakes are a big catalyst for incredible moments," he said. "I could name hundreds of them in this band. Basically, we welcome them."
Moebius Graphics has a comprehensive catalog of the works of Frank Miller.
Flagpole interviews the genre-defying M.I.A.
FP: More than anything else, your music is dance music. Are lyrics important in something meant to make bodies move?
M.I.A.: You can make people dance with a really good beat. "Galang," the last bit, doesn't really have any lyrics at all. But if you sit down at home, it's nice to have something to think about. Music should serve more than just the one purpose. It'd be nice to carry an album around; you could take it to the club and dance to it; you could bring it home, listen to it, talk to it. Work out to it. [Laughs] I want my art to have many different aspects. If you want something to look at, it's there.
Author Bret Easton Ellis talks to Toronto's Eye Weekly.
"I think as you get older you look inward, and you tend to want to write more about the personal than the political. I've got the kind of sensibility that no matter where I set a novel and no matter what I write about, I have a kind of eye that tends to make fun of certain elements of the world that my characters inhabit."
Stylus reviews the new CocoRosie album, Noah's Ark.
While their first record joined avant-folk with the music-box surrealism of a Catskills Bjork, on Noah’s Ark, the duo finds focus in their freakf*ck Amazonian drawl, and the result is one of the year’s more promising follow-ups.
"Our whole attitude about our lives and our creativity during [the time of this recording] was a lot more open, a lot more social, a lot more interactive. When we came back from Europe, we were feeling very social and very wild. We were hanging out in the streets, and we had a lot of people in our house, and we were just really enjoying the community of people in New York."
Singer/songwriter/banjo player Sufjan Stevens talks to Newcity Chicago.
"'Michigan' is more inward, introverted and emotional, based on memory--which is a bit unreliable. 'Illinois' is more explicit, more celebratory, and it's based on research, which can be equally unreliable. Each record is rendered through my imagination."
Stevens also chatted with The Pitch.
"Superficially it probably looks like a lot of gimmicks, but it's been really good for us," he says of the "cathartic" clapping and chanting the group breaks into between songs. "It's disarming, I think, to put on sweat pants and a cheerleading shirt. And, you know, wave pompoms."
Kristin Hersh of 50 Foot wave and Throwing Muses has started a tour diary/blog.
Author Kurt Vonnegut lists liberal crap he never wants to hear again.
