Heather Browne is sharing some great Eddie Vedder demos from his work on the Into the Wild soundtrack. She also posted four tracks by M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel from their KRCW Open Road performance.
If you’re in another mood entirely, Aquarium Drunkard is offering classic funk from The Meters, live in NYC @ The Bottomline.
Rounding out today’s tour of MP3 blahgs, My Old Kentucky Blog has some tracks from The Blakes that were featured on the Sirius show, Blog Radio.
Legendary Grateful Dead lyricist, Robert Hunter, was asked by Simon Carmody, formerly of Golden Horde, to contribute to “The Ballad of Ronnie Drew,” a tribute song that honors one of the founding fathers of modern Irish music.
The song became a collaborative composition between Hunter, Edge, Carmody and Bono. And when they approached other singers about getting together to record the track the response was uniformly positive. “Every musician we asked has said ‘Yes’,” said Bono. “Kila agreed to be involved as a band, so it’ll be Kila and U2.”
Hot Press Editor Niall Stokes says the song is a fitting tribute to the performer who first became famous with The Dubliners, and was the singer on their 60s chart hit ‘Seven Drunken Nights’ among other classic recordings.
‘The song is powerful and poetic, with a number of brilliantly crafted standout lines. But with Bono, Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore and Damien Dempsey all taking verses, the performances are amazing. And Sinead, Andrea and Moya are wonderful on the chorus. It’s a certain Number 1.”
[via U2.com]
A political reporter showed up for work yesterday. His name is Glen Johnson and he works for Associated Press. While covering the Mitt Romney for President campaign, Johnson tripped up the candidate, not with a line of questioning, but with a direct challenge as to the truth in a Romney claim.
Romney said he didn’t have any Washington lobbyists running his campaign (the presumption being that others do). Johnson begged to differ. “That is not true. Ron Kaufman is a lobbyist,” said Johnson. The fact that he did so publicly inside a Staples store in Columbia, South Carolina with cameras rolling, confounded the man who would be President. And it angered his travelling press secretary, Eric Ferhnstrom, who scolded Johnson repeatedly, saying, “Don’t get argumentative with the candidate.”
Ferhnstrom’s response is maddening and outrageous. What would Mencken say?
How about, don’t lie to the press unless you want everyone to know about it.
I’ve never been one to favor the incompetence argument when it comes to our present day administration. I’ve always figured they’re doing exactly what they want, and that it must take considerable skill to do that in Washington, even if it’s not readily apparent to the layman. But a good documentary film can jar a stance from the arms of its carrier. No End In Sight by Charles Ferguson is such a film.
After getting his Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T., Ferguson conducted postdoctoral research at MIT while also consulting to the White House, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Department of Defense, and several U.S. and European high technology firms.
In 1994, Ferguson founded Vermeer Technologies, one of the earliest Internet software companies, with Randy Forgaard. Vermeer created the first visual Web site development tool, FrontPageâ„¢. Â In early 1996, Ferguson sold Vermeer to Microsoft, which integrated FrontPage into Microsoft Office. After selling Vermeer, Ferguson returned to research and writing. He was a visiting scholar and/or lecturer for several years at MIT and Berkeley, and for three years was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC.
In other words, this guy knows his shit and so do the long line of ultimate insiders who detail for Ferguson the many mistakes made in Iraq by the Bush League. It’s scary stuff.
Big Head Todd and the Monsters are joining the “give it away and see what comes back to you” tribe at just the right time. With a new album out and a 60-date tour underway, the band is making All the Love You Need available for free on their website for those who join their mailing list.
Big Head Todd is also supplying radio stations like KBCO in Boulder and KGSR in Austin with the record. According to Billboard, the strategy involves customizing CD artwork with a participating station’s call letters along with the imprint of a corporate sponsor and distributing it via direct mail, using each station’s listener database. The band plans to distribute half a million CDs via this channel.
The endgame is to distribute the CD to hundreds of thousands of existing and potentially new fans in the hope that many of them will support the live show. “I am not sure yet how it will all really shake out for us; we probably won’t really know for a year or so,” Big Head Todd manager Bill Rusch said. “It will either have been a brilliant idea or a major blunder. It just seems like a natural next step for us, and we feel we are in a position where this will provide a strategic advantage.”
“I’ve always rejoiced at the crumbling of the old empire,” Todd Park Mohr told the Denver Post. “Digital music diversified the music that is being created, and it also makes a level playing field for artists. Culture is a lot more interesting when there are a lot of little things going on instead of a couple big things happening, and that’s why this is the Wild West—it’s so fun to be listening to music right now.”
SOUNDS: Track 04, “Cash Box”
The Library of Congress has a new Flickr page, where they plan to share some 3000 images with no known copyright restrictions.
If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.
In other words, the Library is seeking to enhance its metadata and is turning to the wisdom of the crowd for help.
The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.
Flickr hopes this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions will pick up, thereby increasing the sharing and redistribution of the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.
Largehearted Boy kindly points to Southern Shelter, a live music blog from Athens, GA that features live music by Athens bands performing in Athens.
Here are two Springsteen songs, “Badlands” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” performed by Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers on 12/1/07.
There’s a treasure trove of live material on this site. William Tonks is here, Vic Chestnutt, Acetate (yet another Dave Schools’ side-project), Deerhunter (from Atlanta), King of Prussia, The Tom Collins, Hayride and more are all represented. It’s quite the find for any fan of Athens, GA-generated music.
Chris Corrigan walks some pretty literary streets–the kind that don’t exist in strip malls.
A few months ago as I was walking in Government Street in Victoria I met a woman standing beneath a tree outside Munro’s Books. The tree had small pieces of paper attached to them and when I looked closer I saw that they were poems, hanging on a “poet tree.†The poet turned out to be Yvonne Blomer and she asked me if she could read me a poem. When I said, with delight, “of course!†she asked whether I preferred any particular subject. I replied that I wished her to read me a poem about the territory of the open heart. She looked at me for a second and then reached into a file folder and pulled out this one:
To watch over the vineyards
O carrion crow, pulpy skull of scarecrow
going soft in your black bill,
in this fetish-orange field lies worship:
the sweep of glossed plumage over glistening
membrane; lies the sweet blood of purple skinned grape
cut on your sharp edged tomia,
shimmering there; sun-light on wet earth.
You too sweet to ripe; you black in the shadows, calling when you’re calling – –
the herds fly in dust gone crow, gone scare,
gone trill in clicks and shouts of krrrkrrr.
It seems to me that poetry belongs outside, in the town square or on the street, like this. It’s a spoken form that doesn’t always translate well from the page, nor make the kind of impact it might otherwise.
I let my Last.fm subscription lapse for a few months, but picked it back up the other day. Now I see they’re directing me to videos I might want to see and offering up the embed code in case you too would like to view them. Smart.
The video above is Okkervil River from their European tour in late 2006, when they had a day off in the area surrounding the walled city of San Elpidio a Mare, Italy.
“What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.” -David Byrne in Wired