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March 16, 2006
Shorties
Buffalo's Artvoice interviews Nikki Sudden.
What was your reaction when taste-making indie imprint Secretly Canadian decided to overhaul and reissue much of your back catalog between solo work and Jacobites albums? How did it all come about?
“Chris Swanson from the label tried contacting me for six months before I responded. Other companies had approached me with a view to reissuing my material but never wanted to do it properly. Chris and I chatted and he was in agreement with me about how the albums should be re-presented. 24-page booklets, remastered and, in some cases, remixed. John Rivers and I remastered everything then I wrote the sleevenotes and chose the photographs…then I got the artwork assembled and sent off. It was Secretly Candian’s idea to include the bonus tracks. I think the albums stand better on their own, but the extra numbers do add something.”
Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis talks to the Toronto Star.
"There are a lot of great women in rock 'n' roll, but fewer of them were introduced to me at a young age. I always felt that I could really understand Dolly (Parton) and Tammy Wynette and then later Lucinda Williams. Even though an 8-year-old girl singing `d-i-v-o-r-c-e' isn't necessarily accurate, I gravitated to those strong women telling their tragic tales."
Totally Wired in Toronto's Eye Weekly features mp3 blog Big Rock Candy Mountain.
What's the most exciting trend in music you've seen in recent years?
I've been really happy to see guitar rock come back with bands like the Strokes and Franz Ferdinand. Also, insightful young songwriters with something to say like Conor Oberst and Sufjan Stevens.
In the "new releases" section, he motioned to a fellow comics enthusiast. "Notice he took every book from the back." This, he explained, is because serious comic collectors don't want books that are wrinkled or have been thumbed through. In another section, he marveled at the organization: "This is like a level of nerd that other nerds look down on."
Keep up with the Silver Jews tour with Flickr photos.
Thomas Bartlett offers a guide to SXSW for Salon's Audiofile.
MP3.com interviews Hank Williams III.
Chris: So Wal-Mart didn't want to carry your record?
Hank: Not at first. And that slowed the whole f******...and I nailed it. I just...I had the big meeting today. Forty percent of country music sales goes through Wal-Mart. And since they rejected the record, everything was all great, everything's fine, and then, whoa, hold on a minute, our number one friend isn't gonna take it. So I'm like, "Dude, look at the reality of the situation. The majority of our fan base is not gonna buy at Wal-Mart. You will maybe have 8 percent of those people buying our records." And sure enough it was only like 10 percent sold at Wal-Mart. So it's, you know, but that slowed everything down six months."
LA Weekly calls the connection between music and video games "an endless, wretched love affair."
The Guardian profiles the recording industry's full-track music download agenda.
Pulse of the Twin Cities interviews singer-songwriter Haley Bonar.
Pulse: It seems like there’s been a really serendipitous turn of events for you in Duluth. How did it all come about? How did you get linked up with Alan [Sparhawk of Low] and Chairkickers?
Bonar: I was playing around for a year and a half, just doing little gigs or whatever. I got the album kind of in the works at Sacred Heart [a studio in Duluth] last fall and then I decided to play at “Experimental Tuesday” one night at the NorShor Theater and I had just bought a Farfisa organ so I brought that with me and an acoustic guitar and just did a few songs.
Alan was there and I was kind of freaked out and he was just, like, “Hey you want to open for Low on a bunch of dates?” and I was basically (says in shaky voice) “uh… cool.” And then after the record came out he approached me and said, “I want to put out your record, I like it and think it should go further than Minnesota.” I was just, like, “OK” and that’s sort of how it happened.
Flagpole lists Athens artists scheduled to play SXSW this year.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah talk to Tucson Weekly about their ascent to fame.
"I don't think we did it differently than a lot of bands," said Tyler Sargent, who plays in Clap Your Hands Say Yeah along with his twin brother, Lee (Alec Ounsworth had lost his voice at the time of the interview). "It just really caught on, so it turned into a story, but we started out just making a Web site, posting songs on it--I think we posted rough mixes after we were recording."
San Diego City Beat compares the band to Stella Artois.
Kori Gardner of Mates of State sits down with Indie Interviews this week, and her partner Jason Hammel talks to the Falls Church News-Press.
Science fiction author Bruce Sterling gave the closing speech at SXSW Interactive.
"This is the year of Web 2.0," Sterling said. "This is the hottest period of invention since the invention of the browser...Flickr is not a copy of anything else, it is not a hippie knock off a commercial product, (and) Wikipedia is not a copy of anything else... The Net community is no longer hanging on the coattails of Gates."
