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January 15, 2007
Shorties
Emily Haines talks to the Globe and Mail about the songwriting for her band, Metric, and for her solo album.
"The majority of Metric songs have come from compositions I wrote on the piano and were very much like the ones I released on Knives. I would just leave them unfinished and bring them to the band, and then we'd turn them into rock 'n' roll songs -- speed them up and make them louder," says Haines, who has been concocting songs on the piano since she was a child. "So with this album, there wasn't a big difference in terms of the writing -- I just kept the instrumentation in the mood in which it was conceived."
The New York Times reviews the new Sloan album, Never Hear the End of It.
The album is proudly kaleidoscopic. Those 30 songs run between 52 seconds and 5½ minutes long, and even among the short ones, only a few come across as fragments. The tracks are run together so the album works almost as a 77-minute suite. It’s a pop-rock marathon, galloping through songs about romance (“Last Time in Love”), music (“I Know You”), paranoia (“Living With the Masses”), media (“Set in Motion”), despair (“It’s Not the End of the World”) and willed optimism (“I Understand”).
John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, talks to the Wilmington Star-News.
"All writing is show business, in a very broad way," he said. "You can't get your point across unless you get your readers' attention - not by hyping or twisting or distorting the truth but by leading with the details that work and leaving out the things that aren't important."
The Observer has questions for Steve Jobs about the Apple iPhone.
Will its screen scratch as easily as the iPod Nano's does? Will it be as unreliable as the iPod range appears to be? (I speak from bitter experience.) Why does it have a built-in battery, just like the iPods? Will users have to send their phones back to Apple when the batteries give up the ghost? How robust is the mobile version of OS X - the phone's operating system? Why is the mobile connectivity not 3G? And how did Apple come to overlook the awkward fact that the 'iPhone' name belongs to Cisco?
The A.V. Club interviews actor Ricky Gervais, and discusses the best television of 2006.
Popmatters book reviewers choose their favorite books of 2006.
Cracked lists four things the television series 24 would have you believe.
NME reports that My Bloody Valentine will make another album.
However, recently discussing the possibility of a third 'proper' My Bloody Valentine album, Shields said the prospects looked very positive.
"I do feel that I will make another great record," he explained. "We are 100 per cent going to make another My Bloody Valentine record unless we die or something."
At Feedback, Mark Schwaber has a touching story about family, baseball, and indie rock.
In the Independent, author Martin Amis responds to reader questions.
Have you made up with your old friend Christopher Hitchens after your spat over Stalin? MARLIJN EVANS, London
We never needed to make up. We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.
Furia posts a critical alignment ranking of Idolator's Jackin' Pop music poll.
see also:
Largehearted Boy's favorite albums of 2006
2006 Year-end Music List Compilation
Largehearted 2006 Holiday Gift Guide
this week's CD & DVD releases
