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June 29, 2007
Shorties
The 2007 Bonnaroo download page has been updated with a lossless bittorrent download of the Hold Steady set.
Aversion interviews Arthur & Yu.
The New York Sun reports that though Antioch College is closing its doors, the Antioch Review plans to continue publishing.
Son Volt's Jay Farrar talks to the Aspen Times about his musical influences.
"It comes from growing up listening to bands like the Beatles. Especially the Beatles, who had so many influences," said Farrar. "I try to keep one foot rooted in the past, and one foot in the present. But there's an endless supply of music I haven't heard."
The A.V. Club interviews singer-songwriter Ryan Adams.
AVC: Do you keep track of your unreleased work as much as your fans do? There are websites that list your discography as including, like, Forever Valentine and Exile On Franklin Street alongside your "official" albums. Do you think of the bootlegs that way?
RA: Some of those were just things that happened at the time. For me, a record is valid when I actually hold the vinyl. Like, I've worked on the art for a while and I see the vinyl and I go "Ooh, it's an actual LP. How cool is that?" That's very sacred to me. You can't take that back, you know? But some of the things that didn't come out, I do really love. Especially the solo stuff, which is getting compiled, actually, this very moment. I'm sitting in the Atlanta studio where Jamie's compiling a box set of all the records that were between the Lost Highway records. Some of those things have been traded online in their very rough state. A lot of times when we're playing live, people will call out songs that were never on a record that you could buy in a store. They're just things that people know about because maybe a record was getting made, but then another one happened instead. But they never heard the finished version. So I think that playing catch-up is pretty interesting. But there's no way, I don't think, that all my stuff could've been records. Some, maybe. The ones that I really wanted to be records, those are the ones that are going into the box.
Harp interviews singer-songwriter Keren Ann.
HARP: The almost staccato voices of the choir do recall the work of Philip Glass or Steve Reich.
I’m crazy about repetitive music, and I wish I could listen to only repetitive music, but then I wouldn’t like pop. It’s all cycles: you need a lot of Philip Glass, then you go to Bob Dylan, and then you want Chet Baker, then you want Philip Glass again. Glass has really done a wonderful job with vocal instruments, human instruments. I wanted to explore that with this record.
Entertainment Weekly features an excerpt from Stephen Colbert's forthcoming graphic novel, Stephen Colbert's Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure.
Gothamist interviews Matt Allen, the Ice Cream Man.
Which New Yorker do you most admire?
Oooh... that’s tough to say. We gave away ice cream backstage at Bonnaroo a couple weeks ago and I was a little star struck when Jim Jarmusch came by the truck for a Mayfield Brown Cow ice cream bar. I guess I expect to see rockstars back there but not someone like Jim Jarmusch. He’s responsible for one of my favorite film moments involving ice cream. It’s the scene from Down By Law when John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Roberto Benigni are all in jail chanting “I Scream, You Scream, We ALL Scream for Ice Cream!”
Dinosaur Jr's J. Mascis gives a succinct interview to the Sydney Morning Herald.
I was pleased to find Mascis a pleasant if succinct interviewee. He was, however, prone to achingly long pauses between my questions and his answers. After a while I was convinced his taciturnity was a genius-like economy of words, with all extraneous matter removed. The man is not a chatterbox.
An example: You don't mind if people bootleg your live shows, why's that? "I don't know. Should I mind?"
Well, some people are uptight about copyright. "Yeah, I guess so," he says in a super-slow East Coast croak. "But I grew up in a hippie town and everybody was always listening to [Grateful] Dead bootlegs."
Spoon's Britt Daniel talks to the PDX Music Podcast.
Singer-songwriter Ryan Adams talks to the Sun.
“Sometimes, I only have energy to hit that one emotional place once a day because I let it wipe me out. I’m not a profoundly good singer or songwriter (He’s so wrong there!) and I have many records but I am nowhere near where I want to be. I’m just glad to be in the game. Like my favourite punk records by Hüsker Dü or Black Flag, all I got to do is f***ing mean it and it will ring like some huge bell. It’ll be real.”
Time examines the secrecy surrounding Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
"The boxes say HARRY POTTER on them, so people get all excited," says Dana Harper, who co-owns Brystone Children's Books in Fort Worth, Texas, with her mother and sister. "Behind the counter, we have them covered with a cloth before we cut into them, just in case. We do get nervous that someone will break in, but that hasn't happened yet." For owners of small businesses, trapped between the demands of millions of ravenous fans and those of a large corporation protecting a major asset, the experience can be disconcerting. "I can't even tell you where the books will be!" says Liz Murphy, owner of the Learned Owl Book Shop in Hudson, Ohio. "We had to sign our life away."
MTV holds a roundtable guessing how the series will end.
The Times Online measures the influence of folk legend Bert Jansch on today's generation of musicians (many of which visit him regularly).
Jansch has always gone his own way. Emerging from the early Sixties British folk boom that also gave birth to the bohemian singer Anne Briggs and the maverick guitarist Davy Graham, Jansch quickly established himself as the rebel of the scene, outraging folk purists by bastardising traditional songs. He became an inspiration to guitar gods such as Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend through his combination of virtuosity and imagination.
WBUR's On Point Radio features an interview with Min Jin Lee, author of the novel Free Food for Millionaires.
see also: Min JIn Lee's Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay for the novel
Cracked features a mock draft of the top 11 movie basketball players of all time.
WXPN's World Cafe features an in-studio performance with singer-songwriter Robert Gomez.
Rolling Stone's Rock & Roll Daily blog lists its three favorite online streaming music sites.
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