Oh man, does this excite me.  And it’s so overdue!  Overdue?  Maybe it’s perfectly timed.  He’s also featured in this film.  And in a “to be posted” episode of the amazing “Soul” series.  Those quotes!  “On your way to wonderful, you’re gonna have to pass through all right.”  “I would like to know how it [...]

Portia Sabin: I think labels are caught in a cultural bind: No one really wants to know what a label does; it’s like the sausage factory. Even long-established bands have a hard time talking about what labels do.
…
Mac McCaughan: I don’t know. I think that bands are into labels because bands — at least most [...]

“Just the other day, I was working out at the gym and the song “One” by U2 came on the sound system. I am not a diehard U2 fan, and yet the song in that context triggered a deep, ineffable pleasure. Hearing a good song that everyone knows in a public setting recharges the spirit [...]

1.  “‘The Underdog’ has a million chords,” says Daniel. “A lot of songs on this record are just one or two chords. There’s a lot more droning.”
Britt Daniel, on the rawer new Spoon record, to Spinner (also).
2. “’Virgin mishandled an earlier remaster series,’ says Partridge, ‘and there were all sorts of bad color separations and [...]

“The most striking thing to me about this isn’t: Downloading possibly leads to sales. But: Over the course of the past decade, a lot of people just stopped giving a shit about music altogether. Yet the survey, its results (from what I’ve seen) and the discussions of it don’t seem to consider this at all.”
This [...]

If a band wants to conjure up a satisfying series of earthy hippie brews, it seems like they’ll eventually have to mix in a bit of patriarchy. In an earlier period of my life, I might say about “My Girls” something like “Hey Noah, it’s all well and good that your intent isn’t [...]

Nancy Baym, a professor at the University of Kansas, the author of these books, this blog and one of the leading scholars thinking about the relationships between music and fans, (not to mention an old-school R.E.M. fan) attended two recent-ish conferences that approached that issue in very different ways. The “Futures of Entertainment” conference, hosted [...]