“It turns out Matt Groening was not considered a great asset by many in The Simpsons writers room; he was not a sitcom writer and didn’t really didn’t know how to tell those kinds of stories, and Sam Simon let him know it. Once while discussing a script where Marge finally lets her hair down, [...]

(via)
JULY 1934 “I have an old sketch of a cover for the Fortune Italian issue of July 1934. The design was rejected in favor of my other submission, which was used.” This design is a typical Petruccelli, with cross hatch and stipple. In Mount Tabor Tony told me that the satirical depiction of Mussolini in [...]

“NPR’s taste in these matters may be best represented by something called the DORF Matrix. DORF is an acronym for Dead Old Retro Foreign. With a few rule-proving exceptions, the black music heard on NPR falls into one or more DORF Matrix categories:
Dead: artists who have shuffled off this mortal coil. There was a significant [...]

Things like this are why I love Facebook (and am still coming around to Twitter) (yes, that’s my profile pic). I got curious after yesterday’s post, wondered the below question aloud, and was hit with a barrage of great responses from a welter of smart music pals (I was half-drunk at a bar watching [...]

“The new compact synths resembled an orchestra in a box; you didn’t need to have a whole band of instrumentalists. Suddenly pop was packed with duos who divided labour neatly between the composer-operator, and the singer-lyricist: Eurythmics, Yazoo, Tears For Fears, Blancmange, Pet Shop Boys. The shape of a synth-pop outfit was subversive, or at [...]

Feel free to do whatever it is people do to others here, at this address.

One of the most common questions I get about this site (okay, “got”) was “what’s the deal with the name?” Well, I was doing some reorganizing and disposal-izing this morning, and what did I stumble upon in an old mix-spindle, but the above. Fun fact: when I make (okay, “made”) CD mixes for [...]

This summer I realized that there are two kinds of people battling each other on this Earth: Van Morrison believers and Van Morrison haters. There’re plenty of folks nattering about who don’t care much either way, but there’s definitely a battle on. “Who Was That Masked Man” is a weapon I use when at battle [...]

A few things about this
1) Not to get all punny on the SoCal vibe they’re reaching for here, but “Horchata” really jumps with both feet into The Ocean That Is Everything Haters Hated About Vampire Weekend the first time around. And for that, good for them. The “horchata”/”balaklava” rhyme scheme in particular seems [...]

Kevin: Around the time of Sacred Songs, I saw that you were very interested in the writing of the mystic Aleister Crowley?
Daryl: Yeah, I was sort of in that period of time in my life where I was looking around. I grew up in a very, I don’t know—I think I have a metaphysical attitude [...]