Daytrotter is a nice place to score unique tracks from bands like The Slip, The Pony’s, These United States and Evangelicals.
Here the Daytrotters explain their set up and attraction to road weary bands seeking their own raw sound and some interweb love:
These fine people — as they’re traveling through America’s heartland — take two hours out of their travels between shows to stop in for a Daytrotter Session at Futureappletree Studio One in downtown Rock Island, Ill. The name of the city is not ironic. They use borrowed instruments, play with their touring mates, utilize a often unkempt toilet, eat some food and then cram back into their vans for the last half of the drive. What they leave behind is a pile of ashes, sometimes a forgotten stocking hat and four absolutely collectible songs that often impart on whomever listens to them the true intensity that these musicians put into their art, sometimes with more clarity than they do when they have months to tinker with overdubs and experiments. These songs are them as they are on that particular day, on that particular tour — dirty and alive.
Alanis Morisette just did herself a big favor. Her April Fool’s remake of the Black Eyed Peas’ ubiquitous hit “My Humps” is currently the most-viewed video on YouTube, with well over one and a half million streams to date. The video mimicks the moves of booty-shaking, bling-wearing Fergie. One pop diva imitating another…it’s hard to go wrong.
Leftover Salmon will grace two festival stages–High Sierra and All Good–this summer. The band has been on indefinite hiatus. They last performed together on New Year’s Eve 2004 in Boulder.
Returning to the band for the first time since Salmonfest in 2000, Jeff Sipe, a.k.a. “Apartment Q-258,” will be on drums this summer.
EMI announced in London today that they will begin to offer DRM-free digital music to online retailers like Apple’s iTunes.
Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group, said, “Our goal is to give consumers the best possible digital music experience. By providing DRM-free downloads, we aim to address the lack of interoperability which is frustrating for many music fans.”
“Selling digital music DRM-free is the right step forward for the music industry,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “EMI has been a great partner for iTunes and is once again leading the industry as the first major music company to offer its entire digital catalogue DRM-free.”
Apple will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads, with their DRM removed, at a price of $1.29 per song.
Artists on EMI labels include Lily Allen, Coldplay, Corinne Bailey Rae, The Good The Bad & The Queen, Gorillaz, Norah Jones, The Kooks, Korn, Kylie Minogue, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Joss Stone, 30 Seconds To Mars, KT Tunstall, Keith Urban and Robbie Williams.
Ben Turner, owner of Native Guide Tours took us on a two-hour May River kayak excursion yesterday. It was a great way to learn some things about the local environment. For one, Ben says pet waste is the biggest threat to the river at the present time. He said people think golf courses are the worst offender, but they’re not because the fertilizer they use for the most part drains back into course holding ponds (by design).
We saw dolphins actively feeding throughout the paddle. Ben explained how the dolphins stun fish by slamming into them with their sides. We also watched as dolphins worked together to corral fish up against sand bars and the river’s banks. At one point Ben said, “Dolphins are all muscle and teeth,” negating the Flipper image we like to hold onto (even as adults). We also saw a stingray, ducks, a variety of seabirds, osprey, oysters, Spartina grass and pluff mud.
At the end of the trip Ben mentioned that the May River had a Triple-A rating when he was growing up here, but it has since slipped to an A rating. He claimed the May needs the help of legal professionals at this time. He said local environmental group Friends of the River does a good job executing its educational mission, but their work needs to be complimented by the threat of litigation to keep unchecked development from ruining the quality of life in Bluffton.
According to The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.), Apple’s iTunes Store is offering a new service, “Complete My Album,” that allows consumers to purchase at a reduced price the remaining songs from an album for which they’ve already bought single songs on iTunes.
“The idea here is simple — once you bought singles from an album, we’ll give you credit for it,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president for iTunes said.
Mr. Cue said about 55% of the music bought through iTunes is sold as individual tracks, a figure that has been consistent since iTunes was introduced.
As part of the service, Apple is giving consumers a motivation to act soon to buy the remaining songs on albums that they don’t already own: The offer is good for 180 days after customers purchase individual songs from an album. For iTunes songs bought before yesterday, Apple is giving customers 90 days from yesterday to purchase the corresponding full albums.
In a surprise finding, online readers finish news stories more often than those who read in print, according to the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack study released Wednesday at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference here.
When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.
In addition, nearly two-thirds of online readers read all of the text of a particular story once they began to read it, the survey revealed. In print, 68% of tabloid readers continued reading a specific story through the jump to another page, while 59% did so in broadsheet reading.
That Little Round-Headed Boy looks critically at Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley’s Ten Days In The Hills.
According to his review on New Critics, Smiley’s novel concerns a group of Los Angelenos who, the day after the 2003 Oscars, gather in a film director’s spacious home and try to shield themselves from the Iraq war, even as raging debates break out among the characters.
The book is 449 pages, in really small type, and it sometimes gets lost in its tangents, but Smiley has a marvelous gift for creating characters with compelling flaws and for writing great gabs of free-flowing dialogue. It’s a book that may wear you out getting to the finish line, but it keeps pulling you forward nonetheless. It has the rounded pleasures of those old-fashioned pop blockbusters that weren’t afraid to lace a little intelligent dialogue and subtle characterization in between scenes of beautiful people having sex in gorgeously appointed homes.
The book begins with Max and his lover Elena, in bed, the morning after attending the Oscars. They are talking about the glamorous evening, and Michael Moore getting booed, and the war, and how Max wants to make a small movie of him and Elena that would do for the indie sex film what My Dinner With Andre did for the indie yapping-and-gnoshing film.
The most fascinating character to me is Elena, a woman who is obsessed with the Iraq War. I’ve met her type in real life, but never in fiction: the person who simply boils with righteous, unceasing hatred for the Bush administration and everything it stands for. What Smiley captures here, almost without you realizing it at first, is this notion of how people endure during dark ages.
Just found a new MP3 blog. A really good one. It’s called LullaByes. This is their claim: “Serving up the sweetest Soundboard recordings and MP3s you’ve ever heard.”
If The Rosebuds’ Saturday South By set at Club de Ville is any indication, LullaByes ain’t lying. This is the kind of stuff that reminds me why we cherish the internets so.
While introducing “Get Up Get Out,” The Rosebuds frontman, Ivan Howard, says, “We just want to say thanks you guys, the blog community, for inviting us out. You guys seriously need a better name than the word blog. The blog is coming!”
