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February 2, 2007
Shorties
SF Station interviews Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks.
SFS: Most of the bands that started in the same scene as you aren’t around because they didn’t make it out or they quit.
KM: They died, or quit to have a family, or became lawyers, astronauts, brain surgeons (laughs).
SFS: How has your band maintained longevity?
KM: Stupidity.
Scott Allen of Thunderbirds Are Now! talks to the Denver Post about Enon's John Schmersal, who produced the band's latest album, Make History.
"We were starting to realize that there was a good balance between us writing conventional pop songs and the weird factor that we wanted to retain," said Allen. "We all look at (Schmersal) as somebody who is really good at combining the two. His guidance in the studio was cool. He's really a genius freakazoid kind of dude.
"He's a solid pop songwriter ... but his ear for melody is really spot-on, and he helped us explore all the different facets of this band."
The Denver Post interviews Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura.
Q: You've said that despite your '60s influences, you don't romanticize the decade completely, what with its turbulent political climate. Do you think nostalgia confuses people's sense of history?
A: Absolutely, it's got to. You just want to take the best from the records and the era. I don't want to listen to '60s records and think about wars and bloody racism and sexism.
The Age examines Australians ("Thirty-seven performers, several hundred songwriters, managers, promoters, retailers, publishers, journalists and agents") headed to this spring's SXSW festival.
South by Southwest has hosted a number of Australian success stories, including Missy Higgins, John Butler, Powderfinger, Delta Goodrem, the Living End, Ben Lee, and Wolfmother, who were signed to their US recording deals based on the buzz generated by their performances at the conference.
The Baltimore Sun talks to local directors whose films are at the top of the city's Netflix popularity charts.
"That's great," says Levinson, Forest Park High Class of '60, who lives in Connecticut these days but still remains firmly rooted in Baltimore - as anyone who read his piece in The Sun last month about his still-beloved Baltimore Colts certainly understands. "I'm especially happy about Liberty Heights, because it was a film that the studio sort of disregarded in many ways. They didn't think it was enough of a mainstream movie."
Stylus lists the "top ten breakup songs that instill an ironic sense of hope."
Locus magazine recommends science fiction, fantasy, and other books from 2006.
The Indypendent reviews a graphic novel on my growing "to read" pile, Joe Sacco's The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo.
Zlata Filipovic, author of Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo, talks to NPR about her collection of children's war diaries, Stolen Voices.
NPR profiles the RPM Challenge, an online contest that encourages musicians to produce an album from start to finish this month.
The Handsome Family's Rennie Sparks talks to the New Zealand Herald about songwriting.
"The way I try to explain it to people is when you wake up you haven't always lived the things that have happened in your dreams but you understand them even though it may take place somewhere you've never been and with people you don't know. But the language of dreams is kind of like the language of songs; it's just a language of symbols. Some things in everyday life can be very upsetting, but in a dream world it's not because it's really just a symbol for a feeling."
In the Guardian, Will Hodgkinson will be chronicling the formation of his record label, Big Bertha Records, for the next year.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch reviews Jeff Tweedy's Charlottesville performance.
When he sang, his raspy, maple-sugar voice filled the theater and made the idea of a full band seem extraneous. Not that Tweedy was really alone. On "California Stars," the crowd sang along while Tweedy sang the harmony.
Columbia's The State reviews the Wilco frontman's Atlanta show.
I promised myself that I wouldn’t use the word “intimate” to describe Jeff Tweedy’s solo show at The Tabernacle in Atlanta Monday.
Or eclectic.
Or melancholy.
But it was all of those things. And, oh yeah, awesome.
The Brooklyn Rail offers a "pre-history of live experimental music in Brooklyn."
The last book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, is available for preorder at Amazon.
Drowned in Sound interviews comic book artist and singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis.
So do you see yourself as a comic book artist that makes music, or is the music an extension of what you do as a comic book artist?
Well, it’s become something quite different. I’ve got the illustrated songs which we’ve now switched to projections for these tours where we’re playing to bigger places, so in a certain way you could say it’s taken one more step removed from the comic books. Whereas I actually used to show the books, it’s now turned into this projection thing. I find it very hard to make comics while on tour, so now I let it fall by the wayside and I do comics when I get back home.
iConcertCal is an iTunes plugin that tracks concerts for artists in your music library.
Blipster.info is "the only black blog at the indie rock show," taking inspiration for its name from the Cocker Spaniels song, "The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show" (mp3 link). [via]
see also:
Largehearted Boy's favorite albums of 2006
2006 Year-end Music List Compilation
this week's CD & DVD releases
