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February 7, 2008
Shorties
This Is Fake DIY interviews Land of Talk.
Matt Reisenauer of Pale Young Gentlemen talks to the Badger Herald about Pitchfork's review of the band's self-titled debut album.
“What it comes down to is, it’s just one person, it’s just one writer,” says Matt. “I think a lot of people think of Pitchfork as this cohesive unit that thinks about things all together, as one. I don’t know, you’ve got to think of it like… it just wasn’t exactly what we wanted, but it still wasn’t terrible. It was a good review.”
The Tufts Daily lists the ten albums that should have been nominated for the best album of the year Grammy.
Peter Hughes of the Mountain Goats talks to the Anchorage Press about joining the band.
“We were both part of this community of people making music,” Hughes recalls. “It was centered around the Shrimper label and also this little bar in Pomona named Munchies. I was a huge Mountain Goats fan just based on these cassettes, and his live performances. He had only been playing for a year, but he was a very charismatic performer. Even then I thought ‘of all of us who are doing this, these songs are so good.’ It’s funny, because he was so adamant about only ever recording to a boom box. There was this very, almost religious purity to his aesthetic. But I always thought, ‘man, if you could make this a little bit slicker, it could appeal to so many people, to a much wider audience than just cassette traders.’”
For the coding geeks, Agile Ajax lists the top 15 music APIs to power your next mashup.
The New Yorker features new fiction by Alice Munro, "Free Radicals."
Charles Baxter talks to Minnesota Public Radio about his new novel, The Soul Thief.
Drowned in Sound offers a ten-point guide to making it in music A&R.
Read other people’s post and email. David Geffen used to steam open letters at the William Morris agency. In most industries this is called mail fraud and is punishable by a jail sentence. In the music business it is called ‘initiative’ and is rewarded by cash and promotion.
Charles Bock talks to NPR's All Things Considered about his debut novel, Beautiful Children.
The Baltimore Sun explains the difference between hipsters and indie kids.
The Philadelphia City Paper interviews Gregg Foreman, a member of Cat Power's backup band.
CP: And the thing you notice immediately about Jukebox is the grittiness.
GF: [Laughs] Yeah, well, we've had a few complaints from fans that want to hear Moon Pix. That sound. People lament for what they know. It'll take time. But it's a comfortable fit. And she's happy. There hasn't been one show where she's left the stage. She's smiling. The "old sad Chan" is nowhere to be found. And this album's the biggest-selling CD in Matador history. She's blessed. And I stand beside her 150 percent. I mean, I do my own stuff. But for now ...
IGN lists the ten albums every music snob name checks.
Pavement's Slanted & Enchanted
If there's anything music snobs detest, it's selling out to society and getting a real job (which is why most of them work in coffee shops, record stores, or book shops). The debut album from the indie rock act Pavement was deemed "slacker rock," and from frontman Stephen Malkmus' wry vocals to the haphazard song arrangements, this legendary album embodies the high-brow arty aesthetic more than any other album on Earth. Hey, even the most cynical snobs love guitar solos.
The Times-Picayune lists five books for young readers focus on African-American experience.
MInnesota Public Radio's The Current features Bob Mould with an interview and in-studio performance.
Queerty interviews Neil Smith, author of the short story collection Bang Crunch.
AB: The entire collection is soaked in this melancholy - even the stories that end on a touching note, for example “Bang Crunch,” the titular tale, the reader walks away feeling maybe a little depressed, maybe a little nostalgic for something they never experienced. I’m assuming that’s something you went for intentionally. What is this fascination with depressive situations?
NS: Well, I think that the book balances the melancholy with a lot of humor. If I hadn’t done that, it would have been really depressing to read. I’ve always been drawn to black comedy and drama and that’s what I was trying to capture. I also wanted the stories to have varied tones - some of them are really quite silly, some of them are much more poignant, some of them are serious, but I wanted to use comedy throughout because that’s how I see life: melancholy with comedy. Even in a story like “Isolettes,” the first story - although it’s about a situation where a premature baby ends up dying, there’s comedy thrown in the mix throughout the story.
In the Times Online, filmmaker Ken Russell explains the talent of Ingmar Bergman.
He's not a grumpy old man, he's a psychological laser light. If he weren't so compelling, with those prolonged close-ups of people's faces, and the superficially simple characters and settings - a family holiday, a parish church, an amateur play in the back garden, a promise kept in a letter to a small boy - one might be tempted to forego those unsparing journeys where Bergman squeezes you through a needle's eye.
Creative Loafing offers an mp3 interview with Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings, author of Ken Jennings’ Trivia Almanac: 8,888 Questions in 365 Days.
Alex Trebek’s moustache: “I’m a big-time fan of the moustache. I think he should bring back the moustache. Name another game-show host with a moustache. They’re not like porn stars. He was a real trailblazer.”
Newsweek profiles author Paulo Coelho and his unique marketing methods.
Coelho believes his online activities have only increased his already healthy sales. When he first came across a pirated edition of one of his books, in Russian, on the Internet in 1999, he put the link on his site, and the impact was immediate. Bookstore sales in Russia, a market in which Coelho was having distribution problems and where he had sold only 1,000 books, rocketed to 10,000 in 2001. He has since sold 10 million copies of his books, his agent says. His fans have downloaded complete editions of his books, in languages ranging from Spanish to Swedish, more than 20 million times in the past seven years. By publishing online, he says, "you give the reader the possibility of reading books and choosing whether to buy it or not."
The Independent Weekly interviews author Julia Alvarez, whose novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents was just banned in Johnston county, North Carolina, about literature and censorship.
Does the book banning in Johnston Country reflect a trend toward discrediting free expression?
When we see our leaders lie—when we go into a war that has cost so many lives with the misinformation that there were weapons of mass destruction—you're modeling it also at that level.
Pop Candy is offering a "comics crash course," part one is Whitney Matheson's 25 essential graphic novels.
The Futurist features mp3s from the recent WOXY Lounge Act in-studio performance by Nashville's De Novo Dahl.
also at Largehearted Boy:
2007 online music lists
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
