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July 25, 2007
Shorties
Wendy Musick of Southern Bitch talks to the Charleston City Paper.
Dan Boeckner of the Handsome Furs talks to the Minnesota Daily.
"It's a completely different band, but I'm not so naive to think that this could be fully separated from Wolf Parade," said Boeckner, unaffected by the inevitable. "Obviously, a comparison will be made because people need that sort of reference point, but it doesn't really bother me."
In the Baltimore City Paper, Michaelangelo Matos profiles Britt Daniel and Spoon.
Nobody expects a good indie-rock singer to come near one of pop's half-dozen greatest vocalists. But Daniel's version of "Bring It on Home to Me" comes much closer than anyone but the president of the Spoon Fan Club might have imagined. The Daniel version sounds like a home recording, with a bit of tape hiss to set the scene, a minimum of musical backup (shaker and guitar and handclaps), and Daniel double-tracking his own voice. The singer sounds hungry and needful and up-front, claiming the song's lines without sounding overweening or desperate the way rock singers attempting R&B sometimes do. Daniel is in command, and more relaxed than you might guess.
GameSpy reviews the new PS2 game, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s.
Crawdaddy! finds music blogs disappointing.
With the exception of an exemplary few, 90% of the content on most blogs is simply regurgitated verbatim from other sources or the posting of other peoples music. People have gravitated to blogs over the years as a source of hearing new music and finding out snippets of information, like tour schedules of certain bands that were previously hard to find. But even in the half-decade since music blogs took hold, most of their value has been commandeered by even newer forms of new media. Myspace, whatever your take on that is, is even better than Pollstar's service to the music industry for finding out a band’s tour schedule. The Hype Machine has risen to provide a searchable by artist index of all the music being posted by bloggers worldwide. With one click a player streams all currently active links to tracks from a given artist on various blogs without ever having to visit the blog’s webpage.
Popmatters interviews singer-songwriter John Vanderslice.
So as far as promotional material goes, Vanderslice tends to stick with what he knows. “All I can do as far as promoting my own record is use the media that I use. I’m an online person. I read blogs every day. That’s how I find what’s happening music-wise. Someone can see a band on Friday night and then Saturday morning, at 1 am, they’re posting about the band with photographs and links to music. There’s like a four-month lead time to magazines. I mean we can see where that’s heading.”
JamBands.com interviews former Drive-By Trucker Jason Isbell.
AT- So let’s talk about the record. The old saying goes that you have your entire life to record your first album. I guess that’s true in the case of your debut album as a solo artist following your time in Drive-By Truckers as there have been delays in getting this out there. Can you put into context this album, when it was recorded, how many songs were finished and considered for the album itself?
JI: Well, we started on it probably three or four years ago now. I was pretty much just recording when I was off the road because we were so busy with The Truckers. The first batch – “Brand New Kind of Actress,” “Down in A Hole,” “Chicago Promenade” and “Hurricane and Hand Grenades” – happened fairly early. Then there was another session that was three or four more days where we got three or four more songs. We went back and did “Try,” “Grown,” and “The Devil Is My Running Mate,” all those songs probably a year and a half ago. More recently, I went in and did “Dress Blues” as the last tune to make the album. It was really a situation where I had to go in when I could because we were on the road so damned much with the Truckers.
My Old Kentucky Blog features some in-studio tracks by singer-songwriter Xavier Rudd.
MTV's movie blog reports that actress Julia Stiles will play the lead in the latest film adaptation of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.
Harp interviews singer-songwriter Tori Amos.
The Orlando Sentinel recommends recently published baseball books.
ipickmynose is an "SF-centric indie music blog," and will host a John Vanderslice live performance at 6 p.m. PDT today on KZSU.
Bad Gods has rewritten famous poems as limericks.
Cracked lists six movie formulas that must be stopped.
Drowned in Sound interviews Andy MacFarlane of the Twilight Sad.
The Futurist offers some in-studio tracks from the Minus Story's recent WOXY Lounge Act performance.
WXPN's World Cafe profiles singer-songwriter Devon Sproule, and features an interview and in-studio performance.
At 25, singer-songwriter Devon Sproule has already released four albums, lived on a rural Virginia commune, toured with the Dave Matthews Band and drawn from musical influences as diverse as Frank Zappa, Bikini Kill and an assortment of Canadian folk music.
VIRB is streaming the new Bishop Allen album, The Broken String.
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