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October 28, 2007
Shorties
The San Francisco Chronicle interviews Nikki Sixx about his memoir, The Heroin Diaries.
Q: What's a member of Mötley Crüe doing on the New York Times best-seller list?
A: Well, I guess I'm more than a one-trick pony. What I'm really happy about is that so many people are coming up to me and saying, "I read your book on recovery," or, "I'll never do drugs because I read your book." I get 14-year-olds coming up to me in the same airport as 80-year-olds.
Matt Friedberger talks to the New York Post about the band's new album, Widow City.
"We thought we'd make not so much a '70s-sounding record, but a record full of '70s sounds, if that makes any sense," says Matthew Friedberger, who writes the songs and plays all the instruments, except for drums, while his sister, Eleanor, sings.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram interviews Spoon frontman Britt Daniel.
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is, for the most part, a pretty spare record. Are you guys continuing to consciously strip down your sound?
Maybe that's what ends up happening, yes. We try to not repeat ourselves but -- we've been working with the same producer [Austin-based Mike McCarthy] for four albums; we do certainly have a way we work that I just know the way it's going to work every time at this point.
The San Francisco Chronicle reviews Michael Chabon's new novel, Gentlemen of the Road.
"Gentlemen of the Road" is laced with surprises and humor, both of which keep nudging the 21st century bibliophile along the path of this improbable journey. And though the novel was serialized in the New York Times Magazine, it contains new material by the author. Chabon writes in an afterword that when he was writing the book he was tempted to title it "Jews With Swords," but says he felt readers might have a hard time circumnavigating an image of "Woody Allen backing toward the nearest exit behind a barrage of wisecracks and a wavering rapier," rather than a memory of "dueling Arabized courtiers at Muslim Granada, or even, say ... the memory of some ancient warrior Jew, like Bar Kochba or Judah Maccabee, famed for his prowess at arms."
The Edmonton Journal offers emo lifestyle and music tips.
The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer makes a Halloween mix CD.
Cooleh lists the ten worst rappers of all time.
Harp profiles popsters Georgie James.
Who the Hell Are They?
John Davis, the drummer from now-defunct Q and Not U, and D.C.-based songwriter Laura Burhenn met through friends and discovered a shared love of bands like the Flamin’ Groovies, the Jam and the Kinks. Their project Georgie James, with debut Places (Saddle Creek), marries power pop’s hooks and harmonies to the spiky rhythms and political content of post-punk.
Cracked lists the top 10 cowbell songs.
In the New York Times, Andrew Kuo recaps a summer's worth of indie rock shows at Brooklyn's McCarren Park Pool.
“After I saw about 18 bands,” he said, “I realized I’d developed a weird routine. First I’d check out the merchandise table, then I’d buy some watermelon and eat it near a corner of the pool, then I’d walk around repeatedly in a horseshoe shape, trying not to look at all the jiggling belly flesh on the Slip ’n Slide.”
Asobi Seksu's Yuki Chikudate talks to the Scotsman.
"We tend to veer our love from soul sounds and French pop to Sixties girl group stuff and today's Japanese indie bands: often something begins as one thing and takes a journey in a totally different direction, that's part of the fun of it."
NME reports that the Arcade Fire covered the Smiths' "Still Ill" in Manchester.
The New York Times gives a glowing review to my favorite short story collection of the year, Vincent Lam's Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures.
Lam excels at this kind of steady accumulation of truths, a tangling of action and incident that renders judgment of the characters difficult, and futile besides. The writing is often lovely — Fitzgerald, jilted by Ming, longs “to tip over the meniscus of anger that grew like water perched higher than the rim of a glass” — and generally understated. So subtle is the narration, and so committed is Lam to the primacy of showing over telling, that dramatic potential sometimes goes underrealized. In “Contact Tracing,” for example, when Chen breaks through a glass partition to save Fitzgerald when he stops breathing, the scene is recounted through a banal evening news clip, lending an otherwise harrowing story an air of anticlimax.
T-shirt of the day: "The Guitar Hero"
MakeUseOf.com offers a tutorial for moving your music from iPod to PC.
NPR is streaming last night's Washington performance by the New Pornographers.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Daily Downloads
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week's CD releases)
this week's CD releases
tags: music books popculture indie news
