T-HUD's CD to T-HUD: Thud!

I'm not being mean-spirited about this, but man, you might want to reconsider looking for a buyout to pursue a rap career when you only sell 78 CDs in the first week of your album's release.

More from the blues ...

In the wake of my column on Otis Rush's Classic Cobra Recordings on Reveille, I got into it a little bit with singer/songwriter/baller extraordinaire Stook about blues guitarists at the Nomad. See, apparently Stook and I have some differences of opinion. I love Spoon. Stook not so much. I love Otis Rush. Stook loves Albert Collins. I love Collins, too, but for pretty much every guy I talked about, he had a counter-proposal.

So eventually we got around to discussing a ridiculous topic, namely, who's the greatest blues guitarist of all time. Yeah, I know. But, I made my statement with the proviso that I'm making my pick for myself, and no one else. See, I used to play a lot of blues guitar—it's pretty much all I did in high school and college—and to a large extent, I feel like I can't say Albert King or B.B. King or basically any black blues guitarist could really be my personal pick because I could never have done what they did. We can fight about it all day, but being a white blues guitarist is being a white blues guitarist, and so while I might have looked to all the greats (Muddy Waters in particular) for inspiration, for a role model, I looked to one man: Peter Green.

If you haven't checked out his work with the original Fleetwood Mac, I suggest you get on that shit. It's incredible: better than, in my opinion, Clapton's work with the Bluesbreakers or Mick Taylor with the Stones or Stevie Ray Vaughan or pretty much any white guy playing blues.

What kills about him is his taste: the man almost never took more than one chorus for a solo in a slow blues, and every note he played was delicious. Here's a video from YouTube as proof. And yes, they're lip synching and no one really knew what to do with themselves in videos in 1969, but the song's great:



Stook, for his part, was all about Roy Buchanan. So here's a vid of Roy. You can make your own decision. Or not. I mean, this isn't a contest.



On a different note, Oliver Sacks has a great piece in this week's New Yorker that begins by talking about a man who was struck by lightning and suddenly developed an intense and overriding passion for music, first picking up the piano (you know what I mean) again, then starting to write his own music where before he had never had any real musical inclination. Sacks goes on to discuss more about this strange neurological phenomenon where people can suddenly become intensely passionate after traumatic brain injuries or surgeries.

Pitchfork taking the piss out of Tapes 'n' Tapes?

Picking apart Josh Grier's blog

You be the judge. Is nothing sacred? I guess this is the price of fame. I pulled these sentences out of a hat.

Tullycraft getting jacked by hot dogs and Nutter Butters

I may not know much, but I know my demographic, and I know Jesse Stensby reads this blog from time to time. I also know he loves Tullycraft, because he threatened to strand me in Austin during this past SxSW if I didn't get out to see them. I did, and yes, they were great. This disturbing news comes courtesy of Idolator. Is nothing sacred? And by nothing I mean licensing rights, I guess.

Forgotten instruments

Salon's Audiofile has a great piece on forgotten instruments like the Stroh violin (a violin with a metal horn attached to it for amplification) and the Birotron, which, man, just listen to this thing. Pretty badass, but good luck finding one--there are only four in the world.

Crazy instruments can lend some really interesting textures to straight-ahead stuff, like Mercury Rev's copious use of saw, or Ben Harper's use of the Weissenborn, which gets a mention in the Salon piece. Regine from The Arcade Fire was using some kind of strange instrument that you played by winding, kind of like an organ grinder. Maybe that's what it was. And they also made great use of horns like the bass clarinet, euphonium and flugelhorn, which has always been one of my favorite instrument names.

Or what about Don Cherry's pocket trumpet that he played on so many Ornette Coleman records from the '60s? Or the oud from John Coltrane's Village Vanguard shows from that same era? Sometimes all it takes is a subtle tonal shift to dramatically alter and enhance the setting of a song.

I'm sure there are some Minneapolis/St. Paul bands that play some pretty weird instruments, but I'm strapped to come up with them. Anyone?

Guerilla marketing? Or just slimey?

I managed to drum up some music-related content, although I'm really just passing on info from The Onion's A.V. Club. Thing is, looks like this stuff is going down right in my own backyard. Here's the text of the e-mail that the A.V. Club got on Friday:

A party was going on a few doors down from my friend's apartment complex in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. My friend said that she'd been invited to the party earlier in the day by the tenant of the apartment (with whom she was only a casual acquaintance) with promises of "Guitar Hero on the XBox360, great tunes coming from the Zune, and free beer." When we stopped by we found two dozen college students relaxing, drinking, playing Guitar Hero, in a room covered with posters for Microsoft's mp3 player, the Zune. After some free social lubricant (MGD), the host told us the whole story: Microsoft paid him to host parties like this. As long as he documented the party with pictures, he was reimbursed for all the expenses and paid a little extra for his "trouble." What sort of marketing is this? Does it happen with a lot of other mega-corporations? If so, how do I get such a sweet gig?

This just seems kinda icky and scummy. And you know, what's actually the worst part is the Guitar Hero on an Xbox 360 part, because what it screams is that they can't drum up enough interest in their crappy product, so they're reduced to pimping their successful product. Is there anyone out there who would've heard an invite to a party with Guitar Hero on an Xbox360 and sweet tunes on a Zune and gone, "Wait, you have a Zune?!"

Plus, how do you play Guitar Hero if there are tunes coming from an off-brand mp3 player? And? MGD? Gack.

Review of The Pipettes with Smoosh

I know, I know: it's like Pipettes central around here recently. We'll be getting onto some other new stuff once I crawl out from under all the freelance writing I'm doing at the moment. For now, here's a link to my review of The Pipettes show on City Pages' website. Photos are by the illustrious Dan Corrigan, and you can even see the back of my head in one of them. I'm right in front of the stage right Pipette in the second photo.

The Pipettes and Happy 200th Post

Just got back from The Pipettes at the Seventh St. Entry. This is all I have to say about that for now:



Also, happy 200th post to Signal Eats Noise.

[Balloon drop goes here]

Can't resist another Minnesota music LOLcats

Can't resist.

Oh hai.

You know lolcats? Perhaps not, since I know there's some part of my demographic (hey, Dad) that might not be standing on the bleeding edge of Internet geekdom, so here's the short explanation.

Pictures of cats doing funny things + captions in poor English and usually rendered in the Impact font (you know I had to throw that observation in there) = lolcats

It's kind of hard to explain why it's funny precisely. All I know is that my introduction came one night when I was checking out a show at the Triple Rock Social Club and Rob Skoro was doing sound. He had his laptop open and this was his screensaver. I couldn't look away and I couldn't stop laughing.

So go spend some time on icanhascheezburger.com. Check out this one, this one, and this one.

Familiarized? Okay, then go check out the thread of people doing much the same thing but with embarassing promo photos of bands right here. Just try to appreciate the fact that part of the appeal is that only one in ten is going to make you laugh, but when it works, it's kind of like magic. I made this one:



It's The LOL Steady.

She used my head like a revolver...

In all the foofera surrounding the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's, I'm pretty sure that Chris Molanphy has written the last word. You can check out the full text of his column right here over at Idolator.

In essence, he argues that the current re-ascendance of the single song over the album form has vaulted Revolver over Sgt. Pepper's in the critical consciousness as the best Beatles album. I particularly like the part where he calls Revolver the Beatles' greatest mixtape, which sums it up nicely.

I just went back and listened to all of Revolver myself, and with a quite different set of ears than I had on the last time I listened to it, I'm sure. See, I'm an album guy going way back, and for a long time, my favorite Beatles album has been Abbey Road. Plus, like many people, Sgt. Pepper's was the first Beatles album I fell in love with.

But listening to Revolver, and trying to evaluate it a.) on its own merits, and not within the canon of Beatles albums and b.) with something approaching fresh ears, I'm struck by a couple of things.

First of all, the album sounds amazing. I listened on headphones, and it's striking how few of the techinques that make Revolver such a unique sounding record are used today. Panning, people. Menomena's Friend and Foe is actually the current album that it most closely resembles it in the stark separation between the component parts. The bass and drums, particularly on a track like "Taxman" act as a unit. The guitar on "Taxman" sits way to the left and the vocals are right down the center. What makes this sonic picture challenging is that there's absolutely nothing on the right side of the stereo picture. It's like a giant dead spot until first the tambourine, then the cowbell and finally the guitar lead come in. Show me a band bold enough to leave such a giant swathe of space not just unoccupied, but postively and purposefully empty.

The cumulative effect is that it feels like you can hear every single thing, and yet everything is sliced so thin that you're not getting the whole picture of any individual instrument. Check out "She Said She Said": The drums are completely restricted to the left side of the stereo picture, reduced to just a kick, snare rolls and cymbal crashes. The cymbal crashes are the particularly brilliant part, because if you map the kit out over the whole stero picture (as the bulk of engineers are wont to do these days), that crash would wash out the whole song, but as it is, it's like a velvet punch that echoes the overtones of the sitar.

Secondly, "Eleanor Rigby"'s achievement as a pop song built around strings and nothing more hardly needs to be restated, but how about "Good Day Sunshine" being built entirely around two pianos? And not Elton John or Billy Joel-style piano songs, but more like what Spoon would eventually do with "The Way We Get By." And then there's the French horn solo on "For No One." It's bold and amazing, indicative of Paul McCartney at the peak of his game. It's like he's realizing he can do whatever the fuck he wants, and no one can stop him. Well, except himself, which is really what happened, post-Beatles. McCartney always played to the level of his competition, like so many forgotten basketball teams that would beat good teams and lose to bad teams. When he was pushing against Lennon and against himself, he wrote classics. Once he had conquered those two competitors, who could stand up to him? So he wrote "Spies Like Us."



Which leads me to my third and final point about Revolver. It's ripe. It feels like the moment when The Beatles had just gotten a handle on exactly what they were capable of. They weren't doing exactly what they were capable of, but the album's shot through with a sense of invulnerability. Ringo sounds muscular and authoritative on the drums (!), the vocal harmonies are crisp and clear, and they whip back and forth between guitar-driven pop numbers and exploratory, boundary-pushing structures without making either direction feel played out.

By contrast, Sgt. Pepper's feels almost overripe. They were hitting their stride as an album-making, studio-wizard band, but is full-stride ever as compelling as the moment just before? That's part of the beauty of the music industry system that was in place then: bands put out albums every six months, so there was a much greater "lightning in a jar" quality built into the release of albums. Revolver is an album teetering right on the brink between two ways of making music, as much a capper on an era of singles-based albums as Sgt. Pepper's is the keystone of an era of albums qua unified works.

OK, I just used qua. Must be time to wrap this up. Please note all discussions of the critical merits of different Beatles albums stem from an understanding that the best Beatles album must generally be considered the best album of all time, and even the fifth best Beatles album is at worst the tenth best album of all time.

SEN [hearts] Parts and Labor

Because I don't like just complaining about stuff, here's some positive Parts and Labor content for y'all, courtesy of the Twin Cities' own Minneapolis Fucking Rocks:

Links to Parts and Labor's performance on Sound Opinions

Also, the Currently Bumping section of the website (it's over on the right there, down a ways) has now been updated.

[insert 40 years ago today joke here]

I've been reading a couple different things about the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band coming out.

But the best thing I've read so far is Aimee Mann's Op-Ed in the Times. I can really identify with Mann's contention that it's almost children's music--it was the first Beatles album I can remember listening to, and I definitely played with the fake mustaches and all the stuff that came with the record (Why? They could be worth some money, now). Damn. Check out those mustaches, seriously.

And I agree with her that it doesn't stand up quite the way that other Beatles' albums have. Marchese over at Audiofile touched on the same thing, although I think a little more callously, and without as nuanced a reading of the way that people relate to the disc.

In a lot of ways, I think it's a very successful stepping stone for people in their appreciation of music. Whenever it gets at you, you can bet it's probably more thick with care than what you've been listening to before. If you're a little kid, you're going to respond to the bright colors of the jacket, the bright colors of the songs. And as Mann alludes to, if the shimmer of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" draws you in, "A Day in the Life" plants a darker seed, and isn't that what growing up is often about? A recognition not of nothing so much as a wider world out there that's both more wondrous and more strange than the one behind you?

When I re-discovered the album after I had begun playing guitar, I was drawn to the structures--the cleverness of the "Sgt. Pepper's" reprise, the massiveness of "A Day in the Life." Do those things come off as too clever by half now? Yeah, they do. Abbey Road has held up as an adventurous and unbelievably cocky album--what other band would throw five amazing pop songs at you, then only play them for a minute apiece? And Rubber Soul and Revolver are now feted as the hipster favorites when it come to the Fab Four. Revisionist history has led us to the conclusion that you can hear the Beatles' growing disinterest beginning with Sgt. Pepper's, continuing through The White Album, and only getting brushed aside on Abbey Road. Keep in mind, however, that the Beatles are really only competing with themselves when it comes to the album format.

Anyways, for no other reason than Mann wrote that Op-Ed and because I've been listening to her a lot recently in the wake of watching "Magnolia" again, here's an article on her I wrote a while back ...



A majority of songwriters I hear treat songs more or less like diary entries. But there are also songwriters who treat songs like chemistry experiments, blending words and imagery together until they achieve a reactive compound. Here I’m thinking of Jeff Tweedy’s experiments with chance operations to mix up Wilco’s palette, or The Books work with found sound and snippets of spoken dialogue. And of course, the vast majority of music produced in these United States treats songs like candy bars or light beer. A song is a commodity, a blank screen onto which to project a pop singer’s personality, image and attitude in an attempt to sell more. And then there’s Aimee Mann.

“I’m from a different era,” she says by phone from Los Angeles.

I’ve caught her in the studio a few weeks before she’s set to start an acoustic summer tour, and she’s busy tracking, of all things, a Christmas album. “Probably half of it is traditional stuff,” Mann says. “I did write one song for it and there’s a Michael Penn Christmas song that I thought was really great that I did. A couple of goofy things like ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.’ You have to throw in a little humor.”

A Christmas album is probably not the first thing you’d think when you think Aimee Mann, provided you’re familiar with her history. After doing time in the major label pop world with ‘Til Tuesday, Mann struck out on her own with two solo albums (1993’s Whatever and 1995’s I’m With Stupid) that both received critical acclaim but very little in the way of support from Imago and Geffen Records, respectively. Most people probably picked up the plot with her breakout contributions to the soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” in 1999. Since that time, she’s released three studio albums (2000’s Bachelor No. 2, 2002’s Lost in Space and 2005’s The Forgotten Arm) and a live album. She’s a unique talent who’s managed to forge her own path through the music industry.

What makes Mann unique is her approach to songwriting. She creates characters who aren’t just thinly veiled slices of her own personality- they’re living, breathing people with psychological depth. Think about it this way: Whenever an author (or songwriter) creates a narrative, there are at least three people involved- the author, the narrator of the story and the story’s protagonist. In confessional songs, these three personas are squished so close together as to be almost indistinguishable from one other, whereas at the other end of the spectrum, with someone like Britney Spears, the goal is to completely hide the author and the narrator from view so that the persona of the song’s protagonist becomes overwhelmingly dominant.

Bear with me here, because this is about to get hairy. Whenever I get into talking about this, I have to talk about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. To make this as painless as possible, I’ll just say that for Tolstoy, his characters are tools created to demonstrate a point whose meaning they may or may not have access to. For Tolstoy, the narrator retains what Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called “a surplus of vision.” This allows the narrator to draw the reader to the conclusions that the author wants them to be led to. Dostoevsky, meanwhile, created psychologically complete characters who were basically wound up and set free to bump against each other within the pages of the book. Dostoevsky’s narrators don’t hold the secret to his novels; the secret lies within the characters interactions with each other. This is what Bakhtin meant when he talked about Dostoevsky’s dialogic style.

I swear to god this is a useful way to think about music. The key is recognizing that the narrator, when it comes to songwriting, is not the person who wrote the song (since plenty of singers don’t write their own material), but is instead an amalgamation of the person singing it and the musical arrangement around it. Let’s take “It’s Not,” from Lost in Space as an example. It’s the story of someone who feels detached in some essential way from the world, and Mann sets up the song beautifully with this image: “I keep going ‘round and ‘round on the same old circuit/ A wire travels underground to a vacant lot/ where something I can’t see interrupts the current/ and shrinks the picture down to a tiny dot/ and from behind the screen it can look so perfect/ but it’s not.” Note the consistency of the metaphor here. As the song progresses, she moves on to talk about waiting at a stoplight and watching as the lights cycle through: “All I have to do is depress the pedal/ but I’m not.” The protagonist is caught on the horns of a Hamlet-esque dilemma here- the problem is not deciding which way to go, it’s deciding to do anything at all. The bridge gives a hint at the cause of the dilemma- the protagonist has been hurt after showing him or herself to be vulnerable to someone they trusted. And then we get the sucker punch in the last verse: “So baby kiss me like a drug, like a respirator/ and let me fall into the dream of the astronaut/ where I get lost in space that goes on forever/ and you make all the rest just an afterthought/ and I believe it’s you who could make it better/ though it’s not.”

What’s entirely brilliant about this is how Mann finds a middle way between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky here. The last verse shows that the protagonist is fully aware of the essential problem that’s keeping resolution at bay- a desire to put your faith completely in someone else- but at the same time he or she simply cannot move past it. The structure and arrangement of the song, however, provides the listener a way out. The way the setting moves from an electric circuit out to an intersection and out into space; the delicate way in which Mann’s voice climbs up into a vulnerable falsetto before landing back on earth with the last line of each verse: The musical structure provides the narrative framework to show us, as the audience, that this situation that feels unbearable will pass with time.

“It’s like everything in the arts,” Mann replies when asked about her experiences in the music industry. “You can’t do it unless you really love it because there’s no guarantee that you can make any money or get any ego satisfaction out of it. You can’t get into that headspace of competing with other artists—where am I in the charts, or how many records am I selling. I have a manager to kind of think about all that other sort of stuff and I get to worry about making records and writing songs and what I’m going to do for cover art. Of course, nobody buys CDs anymore, so that’s kind of becoming an obsolete idea.

“I definitely come from a different era.”

Prejudice: The best laxative when it comes to crapping on bands

Lindsay Anne Arnold is a former intern for The Village Voice and is currently studying communications at NYU. Idolator had her thumb through the music section and wipe her ass with it, which I'm not saying is a bad idea, exactly. I don't think it's news to anyone that The Village Voice has gone pretty far downhill in recent years, and I'm not contesting that it's probably a den of iniquity filled with former music directors from college radio stations, but here's what I have an issue with:

Michael D. Ayers wrote about a band called Parts and Labor who play "art-jam-noise." I like jam bands, so I downloaded some of this stuff. It sounded like a sheep taking a dump with a Green Day album playing underneath it! Maybe the sheep pooping part is the "art" part, I dunno. Like one time, back in Baltimore, the music editor told me, "art in music is like pornography--you know it when you get a hard-on." That's when I asked to be moved down to the IT offices.

What blows about this part is it's a classic fallacy in several parts. First, it's begging the question. You're nominally evaluating VV's music section to see if it's any good, but you've already decided it's no good. So as proof that it's no good, you're simply positing that the bands the critics are writing about are no good. Now, obviously, there's no yardstick for measuring creative virtue, but do you really think she gave an open-minded listen to Parts & Labor?

I mean, the hypocrisy is staggering if you really look into it. By quoting Ayers, she sets up an expectation--and a false one at that, because the quote is completely removed from the original context of the article. She then complains that the band didn't sound like what she wanted and then makes a simple-minded simile in an attempt at humor. Sheep! Green Day! Poo!

When you break it down, this is really nothing more than someone saying a publication is crap because they have a writer who likes a band that isn't good. And why aren't they good? Because aside from how they sound, they were inaccurately described by a crap writer for a crap publication.

Call me crazy: I happen to like Parts & Labor. I'm sorry Ms. Arnold had such a rough time at The Village Voice--it sounds like a terrible place, really, but does a hard-working and inventive band have to get splattered with shit because of it?

Rolling Stone gathers Maerz

Former City Pages music editor Melissa Maerz is headed to Rolling Stone

It's weird how nowadays in music journalism, as you move up, it just gets worse. I mean this as no crack on Melissa, who's always struck me as a stand-up gal and great writer, but Rolling Stone hardly seems to be a paper to aspire to anymore. I guess their longer articles can often be good, and I did really enjoy their look at whether George Bush is the worst president in history, or merely one of the top five. Maybe they're like the reverse of Pulse--a music magazine where their political coverage is the best thing they do.

Still, though, their CD reviews have become laughably vanilla in recent years. Look at any given page of the reviews section and you'll find that nine out of ten CDs get three stars. Stars are so ridiculous when it comes to reviews; if you just want to know quickly whether a reviewer liked a CD, read the last sentence. How hard is that?

I always liked Maerz's piece on Friends Like These where she spent 10 days on the road with them.

Best of luck to Ms. Maerz. We at Signal Eats Noise are above mentioning your boyfriend.

First Judas Priest, then video games, now ... emo?

You might as well blame music

I first heard about this from Steve Seel on the Current, and you can go ahead and file it under ridonkulous. Ah well, emo was always kind of a bullshit name anyways, right? I mean, I'm pretty sure what's generally considered the first emo band, Rites of Spring from D.C., predates the Internet actually, and I always think of the good "emo" stuff as being from the late '90s, i.e. Jets to Brazil, The Promise Ring, etc.

The term "emo" has obviously taken on a different connotation nowadays. For instance, a whole lot of shirts over at Threadless are what I would now call "emo." This one, say. And I used to get a lot of CDs that were covered in blackface fonts and had a lot of black and a lot of red and maybe some silver hits, and these were often considered "emo." When exactly did emo go from being cute little Davey von Bohlen and the boys in The Promise Ring to being My Chemical Romance? It's weird, because stuff like The Get Up kids and Promise Ring always seemed to have the straightforwardness of punk, but stripped of all desire to change the world, acknowledging that it was hard enough just to change ourselves. Somehow this got all bound up a kind of dark, black, gothic thing, somewhere between Thursday and Taking Back Sunday. Ha. That's a days of the week joke.

Anywho, it hardly needs to be said that Salt Lake City is off its rocker. Spurs in 5, I say.

Who doesn't love a mashup?

As Gorilla vs. Bear pointed out, the new Lupe Fiasco joint samples Thom Yorke's "The Eraser" rather ingeniously. So I guess this isn't strictly a mashup, since it's not two pre-existing songs, but it feels like it. Anyways, you can grab it over at Spine magazine right here:

Lupe Fiasco - US Placers

Andrew Bird :: Armchair Apocrypha :: Making the album with Ben Durrant

Ben Durrant runs Crazy Beast Studio in Minneapolis and has recorded local artists from Dosh to Roma di Luna, but last year, he began to work with Chicago-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird after Bird began working with Martin Dosh as a duo. His last album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, was something of a breakout hit for Bird, who first came to prominence as a member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers and later as the leader of Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire. He's a notoriously restless and genre-devouring musician, a virtuoso violinist, a mellifluous and sometimes acid-tongued singer and certainly a decent enough guitarist. When all the diverse elements of his repertoire are combined with a nimble talent for looping parts and harmonies, Bird becomes a virtual one-man band, and Dosh brings many of the same abilities to the table. Translating all this work from a live duo into a full studio album was Durrant's task, and I recently got to sit down and talk with him about his part in making Bird's latest album, Armchair Apocrypha, and his general approach to recording.

Signal Eats Noise: How did you get hooked up with Andrew Bird?

Ben Durrant: It was totally because of Dosh. I don't remember how it first happened. They had been here after tour and went and did a couple songs at Third Ear [Studios, owned by Tom Herbers] and they were still just trying to figure out where and what and what kind of songs and how they were going to work together for recording purposes. So he had told Andrew about working at both places, and I got a call from his manager one day and they wanted to do, like, two days to see how it would go. Martin [Dosh] told me that he's kinda ... not fickle, because fickle wouldn't be the right word ... decisive about what he likes and doesn't like. Then [the manager] was telling me the stories about how, with the last record [The Mysterious Production of Eggs], they had done it three times and scrapped it and started over. So I was thinking, we'll see how it goes, but it probably won't be a match.

But we did "Fiery Crash" first, which is kind of loop-based, so it was sort of along the lines of something that Martin and I would've done on one of his albums, and we just ended up clicking pretty good. A lot of it was that we personally clicked well, too. Liked a lot of the same kind of stuff when we were talking about music. So we did those two days and it ended up going well, so they came back for another five days in a few weeks. All along, you didn't really know--it certainly wasn't one of those things like, we're gonna do these 14 songs. It was very much a just-keep-going, see-which-things-work thing. In the end, most of it worked out really well. There are pieces from different places and people, which made it kind of tricky, within the same song, to meld different places, different people playing different instruments, kind of different songs, but in the end it all jived.

SEN: So there was stuff that had been recorded other places that you then had to mix with stuff that you were recording?

BD: In some cases. "Heretics" was the main one. That one, the drums were done in Chicago with his other drummer. I don't know if that was done before any of this other stuff--I'm not sure of the order of things. And I think they did the bass at Third Ear and then I got the tracks for that. On that one in particular, nothing was labeled. The drums were amazing sounding, but I didn't know what any mic was. I think it was like 20 drum tracks and no idea what any of them were. The left side of the room? An overhead? That one was nuts. "Armchairs" was another one that was a shared one. Most of the basic tracks on that one were from Third Ear. Then we did the vocals and guitars and some of that sort of stuff. I don't think, in the end when I listen to it, it doesn't seem like, that was this and this was this. There's enough mixing of things that it seems unified.

SEN: Well, it seems like it has a sonic identity that's cohesive. Sometimes you hear albums--you know Feist?--Feist's first album had 12 tracks that sounded like they were recorded at eight different places because they were all approached so differently. Armchair Apocrypha seems like it has a unity of purpose to it. Is going from place to place way that he had worked before? Is that his general way of doing things?

BD: It seems like it. Mostly just from hearing stories about the last one. I don't know if it's restlessness or trying to get the right sort of vibe for a particular song--whether that's a different place or a different space, I'm not sure, or people--he definitely seems to be someone who really absorbs the people that he's playing with and the people that are around him. For better or for worse. It seems like he can definitely get ... if he gets in a bad mood or he feels like the takes aren't good, he can definitely get [to feeling like] everything sucks. So, from my standpoint, definitely a chunk of this whole thing was to get him to do his best. To feel like he was doing his best, to get him comfortable. I think a lot of that happened because we jived pretty well and when it wasn't working out, it would be OK.

I think that had a lot to do with him moving around to different places, especially with that last one, because I looked at the credits for that and it was like, Whoa. Every song was different places, although I think in the end David [Boucher] mixed all of it, and he obviously did a great job of making it all seem pretty cohesive. It didn't seem as crazy as you'd think it would be.

SEN: Well, I think the role of the person who's running the boards--especially if someone's particularly sensitive to it--has such a huge effect on the album, because ultimately I feel like albums are a collection of little things. You might have an idea about some big thing, but it's going to be made up of all these little choices and little decisions you make. If you have somebody who's attuned to those things--I've always had to work in situations where you go in and do five tracks or ten tracks and then you're done, because I haven't had the luxury to do it any other way. But, if you've got somebody who wants to make sureeverything's right before they proceed to the next step, then you've gotta have the right people working around you.

So did he come to you with distinct ideas about where he wanted things to go, or did he just feel it out as they progressed? It seems like when you've got somebody who can do so much live by themselves--I mean, by himself he's a whole band, and then you bring in Marty, who's by himself a whole band. You've got two guys like that--is that a lot different than working with somebody who just has one perspective from one instrument?

BD: Oh yeah. On a given song, he had a pretty good idea of how he wanted to approach laying down that song. It wasn't like he had a road map, but it seemed like in a given song, there's a pretty good idea of at least the basic elements of what was going to be there and how they would do it. Would it start with Martin doing a loop? Or was it live drums and he plays guitar and sings? Some of them started with him on the guitar and then the drums came afterwards. Almost every song is done in a completely different way. Overall, he had a pretty good idea of how he wanted to do it, or between the three of us, we would sort of figure out what seemed like the right feel for that particular song, but again, a lot of it sort of morphed along the way and kind of took on the collective identity of all the people that were working on it and along the way it got more streamlined as it went.

The earlier [songs] were still sort of--not only were they [Bird and Dosh] figuring out how they played together, but also how they were going to record together, and we were figuring out how we were going to work together also. So some of the earliest ones, in the end, were the hardest because they took the longest to figure out. Some came together incredibly fast. Like "Simple X": I think we did that from end-to-end in like an hour and a half. The lyrics, I think he wrote really fast. Another funny thing is that there's a line in there about "scattered about from hell to breakfast? My friend--that's a saying he uses all the time and I used that in the course of a conversation that day, talking about all our crap spread around the studio. And he just looked at me and said, "What did you just say?" And I told him and what it meant and everything and he said, "That's the weirdest sounding phrase I've ever heard," and sure enough, he drops it into the song. As we got more in tune to how to approach things, it got a lot faster.

SEN: Aside from Marty, there are a lot of other local musicians on there--Haley Bonar and other people. Did you work with them on that stuff or did their tracks come separate?

BD: Yeah, they came here. The Haley things, he had a pretty good idea of which ones he was going to use her on because I think she had sang on a lot of those songs on their tour, because she had opened for him. Chris [Morrissey, bassist], I think it was the same kind of deal because he was touring with Haley at the time. He didn't play with Andrew, but Andrew knew who he was. Jeremy [Ylvisaker] totally happened by accident. We went to see Haley at the Cedar Cultural Center and Redstart opened [Ylvisaker's band with Wendy Lewis, Mike Lewis, Greg Lewis and Martin Dosh] and we got there right at the end of their set and they were playing one of their real pastoral kind of tunes and Jeremy was playing fingerstyle electric. We'd been working on "Scythian Empires" at the time, and that was one where he wanted to add fingerstyle guitar and he had laid down a good fingerstyle part that worked pretty well, but then when we went to that show, he was like, "I love that; I have to work with that guy." He went back to Chicago with some rough mixes of things, knowing that we wanted to do something on that one song. So when [Bird] came back, Jeremy laid that on there and did some other things that were on songs that didn't get on there, but again, [Ylvisaker's] one of those people that, musically, they hit it off and next thing you know he's in the band and playing on Letterman.

SEN: It seems right, because that community that he's slotted in with here is a group of people who seem very well-suited to what he does. it just seems like a great match with Marty and Jeremy and theRedstart people and Fog. It seems like it a really good fit.

BD: And Andrew plays on one of Fog's tunes on their next thing and I think that he used a loop of one of [Andrew] Broder's things for one of the dance--he just recorded some stuff for a dance performance thing--and I guess he used a couple of Broder's loops for that. So he's become pretty intertwined with that group of people, which totally makes sense. He's just kind of a sponge--he definitely picks up, musically and personally, on the feel of people, so I can totally see why those three [Bird, Dosh and Ylvisaker] fit together so well.

SEN: And for you recording is that the best way for you to work? To just react to what's needed? I know that some engineers have processes and ways to go about things; how do you approach it?

BD: I don't really know how to answer that other than to say that I'm not someone who has a process. Other than that, I couldn't really tell you, but I'm definitely not that.

SEN: What's your background like for recording? Did you study it as a discipline?

BD: No, no. Very much came at it from being a frustrated recording musician, probably like you. The few times I got to record it was 6-8 hours jamming everything in and then you'd move on and you aren't very happy with it. So for me, it was four-tracking to try and record things I was working on and then getting a little Mackie mixer and kind of never really intending to anything all that serious with it and then just gradually, you buy more crap and do more things and you end up somewhere else.

But no, I never studied or anything like that and don't really care to. I'm not all that interested in the technical side of things. It's definitely more coming at it from the musician side of things, and I'm more interested in that. I think, again, that's one of the reasons that we got along, because everybody's had the engineers that are like, "We have to redo this because this moved." That's just not my thing at all. We like the same sort of sounds, and a lot of times I'd play things and dick around with stuff when people are gone. If they like it great, if they don't, fine. So that was part of it, too. Throwing stuff at it and seeing what worked.

SEN: Well, I've done some home recording stuff and I always liked getting the chance to just mess with stuff. I've read some books and things and got a couple tips on starterEQ things, but the exploration of it is nice. A lot of times, you get people who come out of learning to be an engineer and think they're an expert. Well, yeah, you can turn out the same thing that somebody else who went to that school can, but can you do something interesting with it?

BD: Yeah, I'm very averse to that kind of thinking. Most stuff I just don't like the way it sounds; it sounds boring. Or it sounds--I remember when we were getting the mastering done on this CD, which, the first time through we ended up sending it back because we didn't think it quite was right, but I remember telling the person that we wanted it to sound good on the radio, but to not sound radio-y, you know what I mean? There's just this certain kind of radio-y sound that I personally hate. And other people, that's the deal. But that's not my cup of tea.

SEN: Yeah--the album's got such a nice, warm--warm is the kind of thing that when I listen to stuff, that's a lot of what I like to get out of things: a sense of place about it, a character, and that warmth, which is sort of antithetical to what you hear on radio-ready stuff. It's crisp and clean, cold. Here's the guitar, here's the kick drum.

BD: I remember afterwards listening to [Armchair Apocrypha] and thinking that it didn't jump at you in the same way that Eggs does. Both the songs and the way that it was done. I remember sitting down and listening to it all the way through and thinking that it doesn't say, "Pay attention to me," in the same way that that one does. And that was all right. At least for my way of thinking, that it rewards sitting down and listening to in its entirety. Ideally a couple of times and that then you really start to get the layering of things. And I think it's really sort of comforting if you can do that. But if you're wanting it to bonk, it just doesn't. Some of the songs are that way, but I think even in the way it's mixed, it's maybe not as glossy and that's me, I guess.

SEN: It seems like a good match for his stuff, because I know that I had at least one Bowl of Fire CD and I'd heard stuff on and off, and it never really totally grabbed me. I saw him at the Pitchfork Music Festival two years ago and that was the first time where I realized--he's an amazing singer and I got more of an appreciation for the looping thing, but then it takes time. Despite the fact that his stuff is really pretty--you know, it's not difficult--he's got a great voice, his stuff is a little elusive. It's not the type of music that's gonna jump up and grab you and say, "This is what I am," and I think matching those things is a good thing for his stuff.

BD: Exactly, because he's a little elusive, too. It just makes sense that his music would be also. I think that's the same reason why he changes stuff live so much, because he gets bored with it. He wants to keep it interesting for him because I think if he's not interested--and this was true for recording, too--he's got to be in the right mind frame to give it up. And seeing him live, too, you can tell--at least I can--when he's in the groove or not.

SEN: Is it strange for you to have done an album where it's getting so much attention? Where you can read reviews of it all over the web and in major publications? Have you done anything that was like that before?

BD: No. It's really strange. I wouldn't have at all been surprised if it didn't get very good reviews. I think I personally was prepared for that and I think he was, too. Just because it is pretty different--there's guitars and it's in some ways kind of more indie and in other ways is a little more accessible. Whatever, it's hard to describe. But I was prepared for a lot of people being like, "What's with the guitar? Why isn't there more violins or whatever?" I hadn't listened to it in six months; I think that was part of it, too. When we got done, I was like, "It's done; I don't want to obsess about it." Didn't want to think about it, and how it would end up getting reviewed. It is what it is. It just represents this period of six months and, at least for me, a lot of work. So yeah, it's been wild, but it doesn't affect me day-to-day. It's been interesting ... and my mom is excited.

SEN: Going back to working with Dosh and Ylvisaker, it's great to hear that he's so able to be influenced by what happens around him. I think that's a great quality--it can be a difficult quality, like you said, but it's really good to be able to have so that you can constantly change what you're doing and he's already been like that through his career.

BD: That was definitely the most fun thing about it: He's totally not afraid to just scrap things. There's different versions of most of that stuff, some of which started out a lot more like the older stuff. Whether it's from different environments or Marty or me--you know, I like distorted guitars--most of the stuff on there is him playing my old Jag[uar]. It just kind of lends itself to a certain thing and next thing you know, "Dark Matter" is more that kind of song. There's another version that was more like the old one, and it's fun with people like that that are not afraid of trying things different ways, whether it's new instruments or new sounds. Speed, slowing down, all that stuff is fun, because most people are so ...

SEN: Well, I think with most people you get attached to a certain sound you have an idea for and you get so tenacious with it, you don't want to let it go. It's tough, it's one of those upper level things about making creative stuff that you can't just teach somebody to be able to give up stuff like that. You either need to be like that or just sort of acquire through experience that that's the best way to work. You're never going to go study music and have them tell you to just give up on an arrangement and do something else. It's such a meta way to think about this--how do you think about thinking about this stuff? To have somebody with that ability is great.

BD: Yeah, the idea of not being that precious about things and to just do it this whole different way was pretty neat. But then there were things that got scrapped that I still don't think should have gotten scrapped and there was this one song ("Sycophants") that was totally one of my favorites, that got scratched and sort of replaced with another one, "Cataracts." When I saw him in New York I told him, "Taking that off there was a bad idea, that was a mistake," and he said, "Yeah, in hindsight we would have cut that one and kept the other one on there." Then there was another one--and I still bug him about this, too--another version of "Sparrows" that's completely different and super-sparse and that's still my favorite of all the stuff and it didn't end up on there because they wanted something a little more upbeat. Not that I don't like the one that's on there; I like that one a lot.

Dear Music Industry: Your days are numbered ...

Yesterday evening, as I was ripping a stack of CDs to iTunes, I decided to hunt down some music by Ames, Iowa's The Envy Corps. I'd heard their stuff in the van on the way back from SxSW because I believe Jesse Stensby knows them, and they sounded good. Then I heard "Story Problem" on the Current. Damn, thought I, that's a catchy goddamn song that sounds great. Plus they're from Ames! Ridiculous.

So I hit the iTunes store and searched for "envy corps." Nothing. I went to their website, which wasn't very helpful, so I went to their record label's website. Their label, Vertigo, is in the UK. So I clicked on The Envy Corps' EP link and got a bunch of options for buying the EP, including a link to the iTunes store. I clicked through, at which time the iTunes store told me that the product I was looking for was only available in the UK store, and would I like to switch to the UK store. Sure, as long as I can switch back. And then I arrived at the iTunes page for The Envy Corps EP, which cost something like £1.50, and I clicked on Buy Album, at which point the iTunes store told me that I could only buy products from the US version of the iTunes store.

At this point, I switched over to Acquisition, my rarely-used P2P program, typed in "envy corps" in the search box, and downloaded the songs for free.

I tried. I really wanted to give someone my money to get this disc AND THEY WOULDN'T LET ME. I don't know what the answer is here, but if they can't figure out some way to make this work better, nobody's making money off records anymore--and they don't deserve to.

A beyond obscene list of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Definitive 200 Albums

Basically, a pile of trash

So the R'n'R HOF issued this piece of garbage with the command to complete your collection. If Kenny G's Breathless (#107) sells even ONE more copy because of this list, every single person involved with its creation needs to be lined up against a wall and be shot. It doesn't stop there, though.

Coming in at nos. 99, 117, 134, 173? The soundtracks to "Dirty Dancing," "Top Gun," "Footloose," and "Forrest Gump." I'm sorry, but soundtracks are not albums, unless they're the work of some singular person, and even then, I don't know. Why don't they just put all the "NOW! That's What I Call Music" comps on there and be done with it? I mean, fuck it: why not just put the "Best Ofs" of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, etc. and forget about it? Which, let me not forget to mention, they didn't include Hendrix's Electric Ladyland. Criminal.

At #91? Matchbox Twenty's Yourself or Someone Like You. At #95? Creed's Human Clay. At #162? Avril Lavigne. This is now cred for these people. They can put it in their press kits. Look! My album was on this prestigious list which is really just a pile of absolute crap!

Incidentally, Outkast's Aquemini is below every single one of the album's already mentioned, as is Aja by Steely Dan, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust by Bowie and Led Zeppelin's first record. That last one comes in one spot behind Avril Lavigne's debut album and that's a goddamn crime. How you can even have those two albums next to each other than if your collection's alphabetical is unbelievable. And even then, they're in the wrong order!

This is just inexcusable. Pardon me while I go projectile vomit.