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November 21, 2006
Shorties
Wilco bassist John Stirratt talks to Billboard about he band's new album, due next spring.
Stirratt confirms the song "Walken," which has been a fixture in Wilco's live sets of late, will make the cut. "Jeff had a lot of creative fire," he says. "And also, the way we recorded was so cool because a lot of the arrangements just grew right there with everybody sitting around. I'm over the moon about it. I think it will be a really beautiful record. It's a great time to be in Wilco."
The weekly CD & DVD release list will be posted Friday.
Islands frontman Nick Diamonds talks to the LSU Daily Reveille.
Business Week wonders why Bill O'Reilly hates the iPod.
In a recent radio rant, he held up Apple’s popular music player and the Sony Playstation 3 as example of how “American society is changing for the worse because of the machines.” Later, overcome with disgust, he loses his ability to speak in complete sentences: “I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America…”
Boston's Phoenix profiles Yep Roc Record's new Digital Singles Club.
Some of us still remember the famed Sub Pop singles club, and Simple Machines’ 1993 single-a-month series, which featured everyone from riot grrrls Bratmobile to slo-rockers Codeine. Some of us have probably even made a little cash selling those limited-edition vinyl gems on eBay. But unless you’re a DJ, the days of the vinyl single are long gone. Digital downloads are in a good position to take their place, and that’s the thinking behind Yep Roc’s “digital singles club.” The club launched on November 14 with five singles you can buy for 99 cents apiece or stream for free. Every week, the label will be adding another single.
Stylus lists the top ten "worst-sounding records, 1997-present."
Pitchfork interviews singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom.
Pitchfork: Were you intimidated at all? Van Dyke Parks is this iconic figure, and you're giving him dictation.
JN: Mostly not, because he chose not to be intimidating. I think he could've been. He did make it clear that he didn't want me to settle just because he's so great. Of course the first draft he sent me was genius; it was brilliant-- it had his mark and compositional voice all over it. It would've been so easy to fall in love with those parts because of how great he is and how much I love his sound. But the effort to bring those things closer to something that resonated with me as my own and bound me closely to these songs was a very huge and took a long time.
Said the Gramophone's Sean Michaels talks to the McGill Daily about music blogs.
“Blogs do have a capacity to break new artists, because it’s exactly equal. It’s really fantastic for young and emerging artists,” he says. “Various acts have been signed after being heard on our blog and other blogs.”
Cat Power's Chan Marshall talks to the McGill Daily.
She says, “I never realized that [audiences] liked me before. I was so filled with self-hatred; I never realized that people were coming to see me play. I never knew that before. These people stuck with me.”
The New York Times reviews Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Against the Day.
The problem is these characters are drawn in such a desultory manner that they might as well be plastic chess pieces, moved hither and yon by the author’s impervious, godlike hand. Sad to say, we really don’t give a damn what happens to them or their kith and kin.
LA-Lit is a litblog that "interviews writers and poets in the Los Angeles area."
Joe Pernice of the Pernice Brothers gives Harp a guided tour of his Toronto crib.
“My office looks like a truck full of tools and a truck full of recording equipment smashed into each other. I have one shelf full of bicycle parts, then another filled with MIDI controllers.”
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