The moment you get a look at ALA.NI behind the Tiny Desk, you’ll notice it in the foreground: The singer asked us to record her set using her vintage RCA Ribbon microphone, which she carries around in a small briefcase between shows. It’s a security blanket, a bit of visual branding, a statement of stylistic intent — and, not for nothing, a big reason ALA.NI’s voice carries with such warmth and intimacy.
The microphone isn’t the only element of ALA.NI’s sound that seems to have been transported from another era. The London-born, Paris-based singer draws inspiration from her uncle, a British ’20s and ’30s cabaret star by the name of Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson, and writes her own songs in the style of the standards he sang. You & I, her debut album, reverberates from the same spirit: It captures and conveys a reverent love of early-20th-century music, while injecting those sounds with charisma and charm well suited for any era. Here, she performs four songs from You & I, before closing her set with a heartwarming, crowd-aided “Happy Birthday” to her accompanist, Marvin Dolly.
Following the overwhelmingly massive reception to the MTV Video Music Award-nominated, Mainstream Rock #1 track “Run,” Foo Fighters have delivered a second consecutive contender for rock anthem of 2017 in the form of “The Sky Is A Neighborhood.” Described by Grohl as “the biggest thing sonically that we’ve ever done,” “The Sky Is A Neighborhood” is also the piece de resistance that effectively completed Foo Fighters’ forthcoming ninth album, Concrete and Gold.
“One night I was lying out looking up at stars,” Grohl recalls. “Just imagining all of these stars as places that have life on them as well, and I decided that the sky is a neighborhood, that we need to keep our shit together in order to survive in this universe full of life. But I had no music yet. I just had the title. So everyday I would walk around, kind of humming this thing in my head.”
The melody of the song came to Grohl without even touching a guitar,so it follows that “The Sky Is A Neighborhood” would come just as naturally to the band: the song was recorded in a single afternoon by Grohl and fellow Foo Fighters Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiflett, Pat Smear and Rami Jaffee. “And once we were finished,” Grohl says. “I thought ‘OK now we have an album. This is it and we’re done’… as we were mixing, I realized that we’d actually done what we set out do: to make this gigantic Foo Fighters record but with Greg Kurstin’s sense of jazz and melody and arrangement, something that we’d never done before.”
Of course “The Sky Is A Neighborhood” deserved an equally ambitious visual representation, and together with director of photography Brandon Trost and with production by Therapy Studios, director Grohl, Foo Fighters—and family—have more than delivered: “The Sky Is A Neighborhood” is a kaleidoscopic sci-fi mini-epic as massive as the slow burning rock anthem that gave it life. Hypnotic swirls of color of extraterrestrial origin, glowing eyes, levitating children and more combine to create an otherworldly cinematic palette equal parts beautiful and creepy—the result being arguably the most striking video in the Foo Fighters’ multiple award-winning canon.
Simultaneously, Foo Fighters are launching a constellation viewer, enabling every FF fan to transform to their phone into a tool for exploring the sky in their neighborhood: Go to https://sky.foofighters.com/ from your phone to configure a realistic constellation map in the viewer’s 3D sphere, then let it identify the constellations in your night sky—all while tiny Foo Fighters soundtrack your explorations at the bottom of the screen.
“The Sky Is A Neighborhood” is the second song to be unveiled from Concrete and Gold, following the June 1 surprise release of the Billboard Mainstream Rock Chart-topping, MTV Video Music Award-nominated “Run.” With more than 2 million YouTube views in its first 24 hours, “Run” smashed into the top 5 of the iTunes video chart and the top of the 15 iTunes singles chart—quickly amassing the highest first-day numbers of any single in the Foo Fighters’ career. Both songs were performed during Foo Fighters’ epic 3.5 hour 32-song marathon Lollapalooza aftershow August 4 at Chicago’s Metro club, and are sure to be live staples of the coming Foo Fighters U.S. tour. That tour kicks off October 7 with the band’s Cal Jam 17 festival at Glen Helen Regional Park in San Bernardino, CA: a non-stop 100% live 12-hour rock n roll extravaganza featuring Queens Of The Stone Age, Cage The Elephant, Liam Gallagher, The Kills, Royal Blood, Japandroids, Wolf Alice, Bob Mould, The Struts, Bully, Circa Waves, Babes in Toyland, Adia Victoria, Fireball Ministry, The Obsessed, Pinky Pinky, Starcrawler, White Reaper… as well as camping, carnival rides, a water park, attractions, a mobile recording studio & so much more. On Friday night, October 6, campers will also experience the world’s best Go-Go band Big Tony & Trouble Funk, an outdoor movie theater and many other surprises.
Folkways Records was founded in 1948. Led by Moses Asch (1905-1986), Folkways sought to document the entire world of sound. The 2,168 titles Asch released on Folkways include traditional and contemporary music from around the world, spoken word in many languages, and documentary recordings of individuals, communities, and current events. Folkways grew to be one of the largest and most influential record companies in the world. Folkways Records and the label’s business papers and files were acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987. Every recording is kept in print.
And in the age of music streaming, leave it up to the fans to create massive playlists, including this one – 35 hours of the label. That’s 837 Tracks Featuring Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and more.
Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, now going by William Patrick Corgan, has announced that his new solo album, Ogilala, will be hitting stores on October 13th. The album is produced by legendary Rick Rubin, and the first new single for the record, “Aeronaut,” can be heard below.
The vocalist states, “For as long as I can remember the delineation point between songs I wrote for myself and songs I’d pen for whatever band was something I couldn’t explain. And it remains so, for they all feel quite personal to me, no matter their time orera. The lone difference on songs for Ogilala is that they seemed to want little in the way of adornment.
“Having written the songs for voice and guitar, I put myself in Rick’s hands to take the music wherever he’d like. Normally I would have done more, and tinkered more on production, but rather Rick put the onus on me to deliver at a molecular level via live takes. The rest was simply a reaction.”
William Patrick Corgan, Ogilala Tracklist:
01. Mandarynne
02. Antietam
03. Amarinthe
04. Half-Life of an Autodidact
05. The Long Goodbye
06. Aeronaut
07. The Spaniards
08. Processional
William Patrick Corgan Tour Dates
Oct. 14 – Brooklyn, N.Y @ Murmrr Theatre
Oct. 15 – Brooklyn, N.Y @ Murmrr Theatre
Oct. 18 – Wilmington, Del. @ Grand Opera House
Oct. 20 – Toronto, ON @ Queen Elizabeth Theatre
Oct. 24 – Chicago, Ill. @ Athenaeum Theatre
Oct. 25 – Chicago, Ill. @ Athenaeum Theatre
Oct. 27 – Nashville, Tenn. @ CMA Theater
Oct. 29 – Boulder, Colo. @ Boulder Theater
Nov. 01 – San Francisco, Calif. @ Herbst Theatre
Nov. 02 – San Francisco, Calif. @ Herbst Theatre
Nov. 09 – Los Angeles, Calif. @ The Masonic Lodge At Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Nov. 10 – Los Angeles, Calif. @ The Masonic Lodge At Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Nov. 11 – Los Angeles, Calif. @ The Masonic Lodge At Hollywood Forever Cemetery
In May 2017, the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency (CMRRA) announced its acquisition by a behemoth American counterpart, SoundExchange. Last year, Re:Sound and Connect Music Licensing streamlined their businesses, and SOCAN is also shaking things up with recent acquisitions to stay ahead of the modern curve.
How does it all affect indie companies, artists, creators and copyright holders in general? What channels are your royalties going through now, and how does this changing landscape affect your livelihood when it comes to various streams of royalty collection?
Prep your questions and get the nitty-gritty from the organizations that make your rights their business!
This crucially important session will be streamed for our colleagues around the country who may not be able to attend in person. Details to come!
Panelists:
CAROLINE RIOUX – President, CMRRA
IAN MACKAY – President, Re:Sound
JEFF KING – COO, SOCAN
ERIC ALPER – Publicist, Eric Alper PR (Moderator)
Register now: Where the $$$$ is My Money?!
Sept 6th 2017 | 3:00pm – 4:30pm | FREE
When: Wednesday, September 6th 2017
Where: Artscape Youngplace (180 Shaw Street, Toronto, ON) https://cimasept62017.eventbrite.ca
The original handwritten score for the Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby” is to be sold at auction, alongside the deeds of the grave of the woman said to have been immortalised by the Fab Four.
“Each item is fantastic, unique and of significant historical importance in itself, so to have both come up at the same time is an incredible coincidence,” said Paul Fairweather from Omega Auctions, which is selling the items.
As for how and why this is a thing, The Guardian explains that the law usually gives people or families an “exclusive right of burial” for a period of 99 years when they buy a specific grave space, with Eleanor Rigby’s grandmother apparently purchasing the spot in 1915. However, nobody new can be buried in that same spot until they buy the rights and wait until 75 years have passed since the last person was buried in it. According to the records, the last person placed in this grave was buried in 1949, so as The Guardian says, “whoever buys the deeds could be buried alongside the Rigby family in seven years’ time.”
“I expect there to be fierce bidding from across the globe,” he said.
The score, expected to fetch £20,000 ($26,000, 22,000 euros), is written in pencil by the Beatles’s late producer George Martin and signed by both Martin and Paul McCartney. It also includes notes specifying that it was to be recorded at London’s Abbey Road Studio number two and that four violins, two violas and two cellos were to be used. “Eleanor Rigby” was released in 1966 as the B-side to “Yellow Submarine”, and depicts its heroine as “wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door”.
McCartney previously said the name Eleanor was inspired by actress Eleanor Bron, who starred in the Beatles film “Help!” in 1965, and that Rigby came from the name of a wine merchant. It emerged in the 1980s that the name is inscribed on a headstone in St Peter’s churchyard in Woolton, Liverpool, where McCartney met John Lennon at a party in 1957. The two Beatles also revealed that they used to take short cuts through the church grounds.
According to the grave, Eleanor Rigby died in 1939 at the age of 44. But McCartney has stayed true to his story, saying in 2008 that “Eleanor Rigby is a totally fictitious character that I made up. If someone wants to spend money buying a document to prove a fictitious character exists, that’s fine with me,” McCartney said at the time.
The deeds of the grave will be sold in a lot that includes a miniature Bible, dated 1899, with the name Elenor Rigby handwritten inside, and are expected to sell for £5,000.
The Beatles Memorabilia Auction will be held in Warrington, near Liverpool, on September 11.
This video describes the different kinds of scream heavy metal vocalists do, and how they’re made, too, using your throat and past as a devil worshipper. Ha! Just kidding on the last part. I don’t know where this school is, but I’d give him an A+ all around.
