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August 28, 2006
Shorties
Torontoist interviews Belle Orchestre frontman Richard Perry.
Does it sometimes feel like the hype surrounding Montreal bands is being overdone? On one hand, it can feel like Canadian indie music is being sold as very trendy, but at the same time one might say that the music justifies the attention.
I think that a good amount of the Canadian acts that "people are paying attention to" are quite good. There are lots of great ones that are criminally overlooked, as always... and there are some Canadian bands in the spotlight that are terrible, as is always the case. I dunno. "Hype" usually amounts to a certain amount of people getting really really excited about something- a band, a city, whatever- and then relaying that excitement to other people, who relay their own excitement to others. As long as it is people being honestly excited about music or art or whatever, then it's great.
The LHB Pet Sounds contest ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. (central time), send your entry and win the colored vinyl or a CD/DVD of the 40th anniversary edition album.
New York magazine interviews Will Chase, star of the Broadway adaptation of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity.
Who’s your audience?
Nick Hornby fans, though I guarantee they’ll think, I’m going to hate this. And that’s cool. I’m just gonna do my shit and hope that I have work for a couple of years.
The New Yorker reviews Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews.
On most subjects that normal people talk about, Dylan seems either not to have views or to have views indistinguishable from the views of everyone else who’s hanging around the coffeehouse. His conversation is short and not always sweet. But there is one topic he does like. He is a songwriter. He likes to talk about songs. When interviewers figure this out, the work gets easier.
Dallas Good of the Sadies talks to Popmatters.
"I think our instrumentation is country, the fiddle and the upright bass, and we do a lot of traditional country covers. I guess a lot of our songs are influenced by that, but certainly not just country. I don't think that we really write in any specific genre. We just kind of sound like our record collection."
Setlist.com catalogs setlists for many bands.
Singer-songwriter Richard Hawley talks to the Independent.
"Up until now, all I set out to do was make the music that I wanted to hear, music that was gentle without being pedestrian," Hawley reflects in his soft Yorkshire tones. "This job is pretty selfish in that respect. You have to plough your own furrow and be a belligerent bugger. It is like a fish swimming upstream, doing what I do in the modern world, but I've always wanted my music to endure. I want it to be timeless. I want people to be playing it when I'm dead and gone."
The Baltimore Sun examines this year's "dark summer pop."
"'Crazy' and especially 'Hustlin' ' are like reflections of the fact that things aren't that great," says spoken-word artist Amanda Diva, host of Breakfast at Diva's, a hip-hop show on Sirius Satellite Radio. "Some moroseness is going to come through the music - if not lyrically, then sonically."
Some consider such musical "heaviness" to be progressive for pop.
The Columbus Dispatch interviews Flaming Lips bassist Michael Ivins.
Q: In songwriting, who brings the most ideas to the table?
A: I think, between (drummer) Steven (Drozd) and Wayne, the basic bulk of ideas comes in. Definitely, Wayne writes a lot of the lyrics.
And I think really by the time we hit Zaireeka or The Soft Bulletin we were able to be a lot more straightforward in a strange way — even though in some ways some of the music is more complex or chaotic.
Variety examines musicians like Wayne Coyne, Duncan Shiek, and Patty Griffin who are developing Broadway musicals based on their music.
A theatrical offering from a rocker can attract not only the artist's fan base, but also a younger demo that responds to the contempo edge in the music.
Gothamist reviews Marisha Pessl's debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more singularly well-defined teenaged heroine like Blue, especially in a first novel. What suffers in the book has nothing to do with her sharp outline and ebullient opinions. And you’d be equally hard-pressed to find a book that starts out so cerebrally and takes such a sharp left turn into gripping film-noir gumshoeing.
Shellac's Todd Trainer talks to Flagpole.
“When it's possible, we prefer to play our shows at non-traditional venues, or at the very least not at the rock club that every other show is at,” Weston says. “We do this to make the show more memorable. If we play at the same venue that you see all your shows at, they can start to blend together in your memory. But you may have a better memory of a Shellac show if you had to go to a park at 10 a.m. to watch us play on an outdoor summer theater stage around the set of Grease - this happened in Columbia, MO."
The Times Online previews fall's book releases.
