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April 26, 2008
Shorties
Kimya Dawson talks to the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Noise blog about the success the Juno soundtrack has brought her.
SFBG: How has the recognition changed your life?
KD: I'm the same person. I think a lot of the times when that happens, its with people who decide one day they want to be a musician, and they train and practice. I don’t know. I think I popped out of rehab and I was depressed and on medication, and I didn’t know how to function on this planet, and I picked up a guitar and it made me feel better. The first Moldy Peaches show was two weeks after I got out of rehab, and that was nine and a half years ago. Making songs helped me feel better. And people would come up to me and say, "You making songs makes me feel better," and that makes me feel good.
The Forecastle Festival has announced its lineup for the July 25th-27th Louisville music festival.
Billboard examines the marketing efforts of Bud Light Lime's indie rock marketing effort.
It's one of several events in such cities as Los Angeles and Chicago leading up to the national release of Bud Light Lime on April 28, a Mexican-style beer in the vein of Corona Extra. While Bud Light Lime takes its cue from Mexican culture, much of its $35 million launch will be directed at fans of indie rock, electronica and dance music.
Billboard examines the soundtrack budget for the video game Grand Theft Auto IV and its effect on the music industry.
A soundtrack of that size carries a hefty price. According to sources close to the deals, Rockstar is paying as much as $5,000 per composition and another $5,000 per master recording per track. If that deal applied to all songs, Rockstar's soundtrack budget may exceed $2 million.
That's welcome news to a music industry that has long struggled to convert videogame licensing from a source of mere promotion to one of actual profit. According to Cynthia Sexton, senior VP of strategic marketing and licensing for EMI Music North America, label negotiations with videogame developers have "changed dramatically" in recent years.
IGN, the OC Register, the Palm Springs Desert Sun, and Mother Jones' RiffBlog recap day one of the Coachella music festival.
Augusten Burroughs talks to the New York Times about his new memoir, A Wolf at the Table.
This new one, about his relationship with his father, breaks from the dark comedy that characterized the wildly popular “Running With Scissors.” Gone are the sharp one-liners, the exaggerated portraits and the wacky antics. In their place is a chilling and terrifying depiction of a soulless sociopath who can barely contain a murderous rage toward his youngest son and mentally unstable wife. It’s more Stephen King than David Sedaris.
The audiobook version offers exclusive songs inspired by the book written by Patti Smith, Tegan and Sara, Sea Wolf, and Ingrid Michaelson.
Matt Berninger of the National talks to Jambands.com.
It’s been almost a year since The National released its last album, Boxer. Is the Boxer material still relevant to you or have you already starting thinking about your next album?
We’re writing new things but we’re not in the mindset of thinking about a new album. For us it takes a long time. It’s a really slow gestating process, so I still really feel a part of Boxer. We did finish the record over a year ago and, you know, it’s literally been on the shelves for almost a year now but I still feel like I’m inside that record. And we’re just starting to look at other new things. Part of it is we were really, really happy with that record. So it’s been nice to go out and just play and continue playing this thing and slowly find more and more people coming to it.
IGN interviews singer-songwriter Mia Doi Todd.
IGN Music: Who or what are your non-musical influences and why?
Mia Doi Todd: Some writers I like and am influenced by are Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Pema Chodron, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lucille Clifton, Jeanette Winterson, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Some visual artists I like and am influenced by are Botticelli, Van Gogh, Henri Rousseau, Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse, Anselm Kiefer and my father Michael Todd. I love the dancer/choreographers Min Tanaka, Hijikata Tatsumi, and Pina Bausch. I am also influenced by the I Ching.
Author Michael Chabon talks to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
What Chabon also wants is for good, entertaining writing to be appreciated, and for appreciated writers to be willing to entertain.
"Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well," he says. "When done well, it raises the quality of human life."
The Guardian profiles Vampire Weekend.
Although no pop music can provide a really satisfying answer to the question "What am I doing here?", Vampire Weekend at its best can offer you a fantasy of total integration into a certain place and time in the world; it can transform your experience into a "vibe". There is something potentially sinister about this transformation; I suspect this is what the band's detractors are responding to, when they complain about elitism, exploitation, and so on. Well, that's the sinister side of the power of charm. ("Charm your way across the Khyber Pass," Vampire Weekend suggests, in the song "M79".) You can't predict it, or control it, but succumbing is a great pleasure.
Junot Diaz talks to the Australian about his Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
"I came back to comic books for the book," says Diaz, who is based at the American Institute in Rome while on sabbatical from his creative writing position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. "One of the great gifts of this book was to allow me to integrate my childhood back into my adulthood. It sounds crazy, but I gave all that crap up and now it is a part of my life again. I feel no shame about it and in some ways I wish I hadn't been such a simpleton and assumed that adulthood and girls required you to get rid of all these things because they're incredible."
ChordStrike is Amazon's new music blog.
At NPR's All Things Considered author Amy Tan examines the folk songs of the Dong people of China.
"Many of the songs are about nature, listening to nature," Tan says. "There's a lot about being out in the field working and realizing that even though your life is very hard and you're working constantly and it never stops, no matter what the season or the weather, there is this beauty."
The Guardian examines the musical legacy of surrealist writer Alfred Jarry.
Jarry's legacy was formalised posthumously in 1948 by the founding of the Collège de 'Pataphysique in Paris. Its constitution asserts that all people are 'pataphysicians whether they know it or not, but paid-up Collège members have included artists Asger Jorn, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, and the Marx Brothers. And its precepts have produced music more interesting and challenging than Maxwell's Silver Hammer.
NPR's All Things Considered interviews Beth Gibbons and Geoff Barrow of Portishead, whose third album Third comes out next Tuesday.
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
