Music-related links and other stuff that caught my eye this week:
The trouble with easy listening - latimes.com. "There' no question that technology has made music cheaper and more accessible. But I wonder if it hasn't been made less sacred." I can relate. Almost all of my listening is done with earbuds while staring at a glowing LCD rectangle, and I miss being able to pour over liner notes.
Mixr | iPad DJ App. The iPad is gonna change a lot of things. I can't wait to stream a concert from my bedroom studio to your iPad. Somehow!
The Collapse of Complex Business Models - Clay Shirky. The article is mostly about television, but the big-time music business suffers from the same problem: revenues from digital music may be trending up, but it's not enough to support their complex/expensive business systems. (My overhead is a website, Paypal fees and a few stamps.)
I used to post a lot more music recommendations on this blog, and it's something I'd like to get back to doing, so here we go: music I'm listening to when I'm not trying to write my own.
Feel free to make your own recommendations — I often find myself in a desperate, desperate rut and needing new things to listen to. Seriously, educate me.
(All links are to Lala.com, which has almost every album in the universe and smartly allow you to listen to full-length songs once for free. (And no, they don't pay me.))
Ear Candy by King's X. I still love this album, their last on Atlantic. Sadly also the last one I really paid attention to as I grew tired of the metal-with-harmonies thing.
100 Broken Windows by Idlewild. Our hosts Andy and Laura played some of this for me when I was visiting Nottingham and I had to track it down. Very Monster-era R.E.M. sound, but released in the mid-00's.
Hollow of Morning by Gemma Hayes. Apparently I missed both this and her second album, geez. Songwriterly stuff + noisy rock in the vein of MBV. Love it.
The Rush Experiment: Conclusions. Amusing, but this was doomed from the start. The real way to become a die-hard Rush fan is to be 15 years old in 1986, be taking guitar lessons, and have your older brother's friend give you a dubbed cassette copy of 2112.
And that’s why Big Star is so important. The band expressed emotions, both musically and lyrically, that squared exactly with ours.
This made it tough for radio. Radio plays to a theoretical everyman. And Big Star was personal.
But that’s why Big Star lives on. You may not recall who scored the winning goal at the basketball game, but you can never forget with whom you shared your first kiss.
And then, this:
We have a fantasy that our heroes live on a higher plane, live a better life than us…that they’re surrounded by bucks and babes.
But watching Alex Chilton perform you were struck that his life was much more difficult than yours. He had to go from town to town, playing to appreciative, but tiny audiences, who loved him, but that love won’t keep you warm at night, it won’t pay your bills, it won’t pay your health insurance.
My internist told me heart attacks are preventable. If you get treatment. Change your diet, take the appropriate drugs, get monitored.
But I doubt that Alex Chilton had the cash, never mind the wherewithal.
And now he’s gone.
Never to be forgotten by a small coterie of fans.
Is that enough?
I don’t know.
Vic Chesnutt, Mark Linkous, now Alex. It's a sad year for songwriters thus far.
Word is that Thor shot the whole thing on a Nikon D300s. Kids these days with their gadgets! Lead singer Patrick has more to say here.
So yeah, things are cookin' on both the Explone and Kirby Krackle front lines. With any luck, I'll have something wholly Scott Andrew-related for you next week.
I'm off to a mythical land called "France" for a few days. In the meantime, please enjoy these photos from Explone's gig at the Crocodile Cafe last month.
One of the bummers about taking photos at the gig is they're almost exclusively done onstage, during soundcheck, to an empty room, and I end up searching Flickr and the rest of the internet for weeks after the gig hoping someone in the crowd posted a few snaps. The Croc was filled all night, rare for a rainy Thursday after New Year's.
If you follow rock/metal at all, you probably know that Alice In Chains, one of the "big four" rock bands to break out of the Seattle scene as part of the whole "grunge" thing in the 90s, has a new lead singer, William DuVall. They're currently touring with a new album.
I was reading a little bit about DuVall online. He's from Atlanta, he's founded and played in a bunch of notable hardcore bands, and he's worked with some decidedly non-hardcore artists like Dionne Farris and Michael Tolcher.
Wait, Michael Tolcher? Didn't I see him play a gig at the day job a few years back? With a band? Didn't I snap a phonecam pic? I did a quick search through my Flickr stream:
