Make America wait again? Not a chance. Two all-new stand-up specials from Dave Chappelle premiering on New Year’s Eve, only on Netflix.
And Now, Here’s A Potato Doing A Cover Version Of Darude’s “Sandstorm”
To start your new year off right with some inspiration, here’s a potato doing a version of Darude’s 2000 hit Sandstorm.
David Crosby On The Difficulty Of Touring At 76 Years Of Age
It’s a good time to be David Crosby. The two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee is experiencing an unprecedented surge not only in prolificacy, but in creativity.
Sky Trails, his third album of original material in four years, takes the fearless folk rock legend in a new musical direction as the set tilts toward a full band sound with deep, soulful grooves. “It’s a natural thing for me,” says Crosby, who joyously embraced the challenge of the shifting song structures. “I’ve always felt more comfortable there. There’s complexity, intricacy and subtleties in the music. I like that stuff.”
But, being 76 years old and on the road isn’t easy.
“There’s about three hours of joy, and then around 21 hours of hard stuff. When I get to sing, I’m the happiest guy you ever met. I love it. But the rest of the time, when you can’t get more than three hours of sleep in a row and you’re eating at some crappy restaurant and you don’t get home cooking, then it’s hard. It beats the crap out of me. I’m an old guy and I don’t have the kind of stamina I used to, and so it’s daunting. In the first place, I love performing, and in the second place, it’s the only way we make any money now. We don’t make any money off records, so the only way we make a living is to go out and play live. And it’s hard. At my age, it’s really hard. But it’s also the only thing I’ve got.”
John Oates’ New Americana Song ‘Arkansas’
John Oates is one half of the best-selling duo of all time, Hall & Oates, as well as an accomplished solo artist. Now, he has teamed up with an amazing group of accomplished and rising stars in the Americana music world to bring his new album, Arkansas, to life.
The project originally began as a tribute to Oates’ idol, Mississippi John Hurt. It evolved organically, during a series of Nashville recording sessions, into a unique, retrospective collection drawing from a wide rand of Oates’ musical influences. Asked about the style and sound of Arkansas, he says, ”it’s like Dixieland dipped in bluegrass and salted with Delta blues.”
David Bazan on The Influence Of Tom Petty In His Music
Last spring, after 11 years of performing and recording under his own name, Dave Bazan’s growing fatigue with working alone hit a tipping point. “I missed the energy of making music with other people on stage and constantly traveling alone was starting to really sting”, Bazan recalls. “I needed to be in a band again”.
At that point, assuming this new band would be billed as “David Bazan Band” or similar, he began to set the wheels in motion to make it happen. He rented a rehearsal space again, hired a couple buddies for upcoming tours, and started fleshing out demos for the band to cue off of.
He didn’t realize it at first, but by mid-summer something big started to dawn on him: he had stumbled back into the very same process that yielded the first three Pedro the Lion records. “To my surprise, it felt a bit like coming home.” Bazan is very excited to be back playing rock & roll as Pedro the Lion again.
Last time I saw you in Pittsburgh, you covered Tom Petty’s “Climb that Hill.” Can you talk about his influence on you?
He’s the only person whose work I’ve known that intimately who’s died. I’m a big Bowie fan and a big Prince fan, but Tom Petty’s catalog I just know more intimately. It was more of a native language for me. And maybe it was because folk music — strumming an acoustic guitar, I know how to do that.
… Basically Wildflowers is how I got into it, because I didn’t listen to any secular music when I was a kid. So I didn’t know any of the earlier stuff, even the way that most people do because it’s just in the air. I was in a different air. But when Wildflowers hit me I kind of fell in love with it. … It appealed to me that he took standard — and almost stock — forms and imbued them with his real vibrant personality in a way that transcended the form. And he was able to take simple phrases and simple ways of doing things, and by being real within those forms was able to convey something totally unique and worthy of study, almost. Wildflowers is just a record of tremendous depth even though it’s really just strumming acoustic guitars to drums.
Sharon Van Etten On Her Time Working As A Music Publicist
Sharon Van Etten’s latest album because i was in love tends to get overlooked in Sharon’s discography, but it was the blueprint for what fans have grown to love about and expect from her. The lyrics were personal enough to tell her story but also universal, a blank canvas on which you could sketch your own desires and fears.
To hear Sharon tell it, because i was in love documented an innocent time, a specific moment in her 20s when her songs doubled as her journal (they still do). After a college stint in Tennessee, she had moved home to New Jersey, living with her parents and recording hundreds of songs in their basement on her laptop’s internal mike. She burned CD-Rs of her latest demos, which she’d give out at her shows in bars scattered across Brooklyn and New York. She worked at a wine store back then, and paper bags with holes in them ended up becoming DIY album artwork. If someone sent her an email to say her music had hit a nerve, Sharon made sure she wrote back.
That’s about as big as she dreamed. She wanted to connect with people by making music that was an act of both expression and self-exploration. And that’s still the heart of what Sharon values as an artist.
I remember when you worked as a publicist. Was it a difficult? You’re promoting other people’s music, but you likely just wanted to work on your own.
Yeah, I mean, I have to say Ben (Goldberg) is one of the most beautiful people I know. He has a heart of gold, that guy. I feel very lucky… I started as an intern and one of my friends that I went to college with at Middle Tennessee State was his assistant. She was teaching me what she was learning along the way, too. I had just moved to New York and was working at a wine store. I was interested in the business side of things because I knew that one day, I wanted to put out a record. I knew that I was so far from that when I started working. I didn’t even want him to know I was a musician, so I didn’t tell him. Then I was hand-making CDs out of my house and learning what blogs were. I had no idea.
I know it sounds silly, but it wasn’t like I was an employee for a little while. He hired me after some time, but I had no idea what I was doing. I had no real aspirations other than, I love music and I love playing. I wasn’t thinking of starting a real career. I just felt lucky to be able to live in New York and play at these dive bars at one in the morning. At the time, I just wanted to figure out how to keep a job and how to live in New York. Working at a label seemed really fun and working with my friend, and at the time Beirut’s following was growing so fast. I learned a lot because it happened at a really fast rate.
Sometimes bands grow so fast and then shoot back down just as quickly. You can learn a lot from watching a band grow quickly—what to do and what not to do.
Absolutely. I’ve always been a fan of the slow build. Whether it be with my career, or my songs, or life. Just growing at a slower rate. When I look at bands today, where it is like the SoundCloud phenomenon or whatever, it’s like you have one really big song and you get a record deal. Then that record does well because of that one song, but then you set the bar so high for yourself starting out, that the pressure’s too much. It’s much harder on kids today.
I’m in my 30s, so I’m not like a grandma by any means, but I feel like it’s happened at such a rate that I don’t even know what the music industry is, or how people find music anymore. I don’t know how kids don’t feel pressured after they have a successful song, let alone if one album’s successful. The kind of pressure that’s put on them by labels now… I feel bad for them.
The Hilarious World of Depression podcast interviewed Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy
Long before Jeff Tweedy was the founder and leader of the enormously popular band Wilco, he was a kid in Illinois with severe migraines and a tendency toward anxiety and depression. He cycled through alcohol, marijuana, and, finally, opioids to try to get to the point of feeling normal and okay, even relying on a fan who worked at Walgreen’s to score him the pills he wanted. Finally, a stint in rehab and a return of self-confidence got him back on track. There’s a really sad and darkly funny story in this episode involving a teddy bear and a jar.
Jessica Hopper and Oliver Wang Join American Music Series Editorial Team
Authors and music critics Jessica Hopper and Oliver Wang have joined David Menconi of the Raleigh News & Observer on the editorial team of the American Music series published by the University of Texas Press.
“We are at a particularly ripe time within music culture to interrogate what is American music; we’re overdue for an expansion of the canon,” says Hopper.
“There’s such great potential to publish more books about pop music that are smart and cogent but written for a broad audience,” Wang added. “It’s a thrill to play a role in helping shepherd some of those projects.”
The American Music series, which began in 2012, publishes cultural histories, essay collections, critical artist biographies, memoirs, and other forms of inventive storytelling that expand readers’ perceptions of music.
“There are so many incredible music journalists, critics, poets, academics, amateurs, and musicians writing right now whose perspectives and curiosities can serve to enlighten our own,” says Hopper. “My hope is that in this new phase of the series we can publish work informed by both fandom and scholarship, delve into regional scenes, and raise up marginalized sounds and ideas, contemporary and historic.”
Highlights from the series include Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chestnutt, one of NPR’s Best Books of 2015 and a finalist for the American Booksellers Association 2016 Book of the Year, and John Prine: In Spite of Himself, praised by Publishers Weekly as “an admiring portrait of an often restless though always canny songwriter.”
The newest release, Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives, edited by Holly Gleason, is a collection of essays from some of America’s most intriguing women writers on the female country artists who have inspired them, including Brenda Lee, June Carter Cash, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and Taylor Swift.
As the series has expanded beyond Americana and roots music, the editors have made it a priority to seek out manuscripts from diverse voices across genres.
“I’d like to see more books focused on particular music scenes, both historic and contemporary,” says Wang. “I like thinking about how music roots itself in neighborhoods and communities and the rich relationships that flow out of that.”
Adds Hopper, “We need more books by black and brown women. We need more books on music by trans and queer pioneers. We need more books about hip hop. We need more books about Latinx artists shaping American music. We need women telling their own stories. We need books to explain how the AIDS crisis impacted American music making. And we need books that get at the histories that are unGoogleable, before they ebb away entirely.”
Upcoming books in the series include A Spy in the House of Loud, a memoir from Chris Stamey, founding member of the dB’s, that will be available next April; and, tentatively slated for 2019, a history of women in punk by journalist, musician, and “Punk Professor” Vivien Goldman, and a critical biography of A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.
More information about the series, forthcoming books, and submissions can be found here.
One of Jennifer Lawrence’s first acting roles was the Whopper Jr’s girlfriend in this Burger King commercial
Everyone has to start somewhere, and here is the now-highest-paid actress in the world, with her films grossing over $5.5 billion worldwide, Jennifer Lawrence in a Burger King ad.
https://youtu.be/wfS_7Jb4JCk