I do like their self-titled album and the "Tales from an Acoustic Planet" duo.

Obviously, track 12 of Tales From an Acoustic Planet is a must have.

Huh. So the Cure are releasing a new studio album in October. And going on tour. I have no idea if the album will be good, but you'd better believe I'm going to go see them.

Sweet!

I emailed the photographer who did the original Swordfishtrombones cover and he just sent me the contact sheets for the original shoot! So cool.

I'm trying to talk my editor into using one previously unpublished pic for each chapter (14 in all).

We'll see if the money's there. At the very least I'll get one shot for the interior.

So at the last minute, the evil capitalist bad-people decided to be nice to us:

The basic gist is that web radio is saved. SoundExchange promised in front of Congress Thursday that they will NOT collect the disastrous new royalty rates from webcasters, and the two parties will negotiate new rates going forward, without webcasters being driven offline on Monday, when the royalties were due. Yay!

[link]

more info: [link]

Another Tom Waits video: [link]

For "Starving in the Belly of a Whale." It was an graduation project animation. Bonus points for musically-inclined monkey.

eta: No music, but the classic scene with Tom Waits in Fishing With John. [link] I'd describe it, but I don't want to spoil folks who haven't seen it.

Something I snagged from the Zoilus blog which will interest Buffistas:

Michael Barthel, known to Zoilus readers for his Clap Clap Blog, one of my favourite music blogs, gave a great paper about how Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah has gradually been reduced by successive cover versions (beginning with John Cale and then multiplying exponentially with Jeff Buckley's cover of John Cale's cover, which was then itself used as the source of uncountable covers), and their use in film and TV soundtracks. It's gone, he said, from a drily sceptical, wry, multifaceted work into a one-dimensional "sad" song to use whenever you need to show a montage of various characters in various places being sad. "It's become the auditory equivalent of a silent-film actress pressing the back of her hand to her head." The effect, he said, was like "making a Matisse into a washcloth" - but, he added, a song isn't a Matisse: "Wring it out and it's ready again." Then he demonstrated this by playing his own recording of Hallelujah, using verses Cale and Buckley cut from the original (which no one ever sings) and a panoply of wild, cheerful musical styles. Now there's a critical manoeuvre you wouldn't get from an academic. It was great finally to meet Mike, who's as bright-eyed and wry himself as any reader would expect. His paper is up on his site now.

Despite being a huge Velvet Underground fan, I've never heard this recording before:

One of the secret weapons of the Velvet Underground was Lou Reed's Ostrich Guitar Tuning, where all the strings were tuned to D. It got its name from the 1964 novelty single "The Ostrich" by The Primitives, a pre-Velvet Underground band fronted by Lou Reed. Originally only a studio project, the song about a fake novelty dance generated enough interest to put together a band for a few live gigs. And amazingly enough, that touring version of The Primitives featured John Cale, Tony Conrad, and Walter DeMaria. While I am not aware of any surviving live recordings of these guys, here are both sides of the studio recording in MP3 format: The Ostrich | Sneaky Pete

Only one year later Lou Reed and John Cale would form the Velvet Underground and never record a novelty dance number again.

[link]

eta: I have a bootleg recording of The Falling Spikes called Screen Test: Falling in Love With the Falling Spikes. (The Falling Spikes were a precursor to the Velvet Underground, with all the original VU members except Mo Tucker.) Even though the sound is awful, I just love the version of "Oh Sweet Nuthin'" on that record.

Thanks, David! Mike Barthel is a great guy. His analysis of the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat led me to write my own for the Hat.

Tommy, I have an mp3 of the Primitives' "(Do The) Ostrich," but it's probably not worth your time. The guitarist in my old band American Cosmic (who's now the guitarist for the excellent Dexateens) had an old Danolectro that he kept in Ostrich tuning just for the hell of it.

This just in:

JOE PERNICE SIGNS DEAL WITH RIVERHEAD BOOKS, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN BOOKS USA, TO WRITE FICTION

Joe Pernice has signed a book deal with Megan Lynch of Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Books USA, for world rights. Joe will write a novel for them, which is about one-third done, but if you ask him when he'll finish his face turns all red, and he yells, "When I finish!" If we were betting people though, we'd bet that that the next U.S. President will be celebrating his or her first 100 days in office around the time it "streets," as they say in the music business. If you ask Joe what the book is about, he sticks his fingers in his ears and sings "la la la la la, etc."

Primarily known as a recording artist, Joe wrote the novella Meat is Murder for Continuum Books' 33 1/3 series in 2003. That book remains one of the bestselling pieces in that series, and Joe is working with Neal Huff, an actor who appears regularly on HBO's The Wire, on the Meat is Murder screenplay. Again, he is not forthcoming on when that project might see the light of day. He also previously published a volume of poetry called Two Blind Pigeons, on his own Ashmont Books imprint. That remains the bestselling (only) piece on Ashmont Books.

Said Joe, "I am really excited to join the Penguin family, where I get to be label mates with writers like Homer."

Speaking of lost recordings, for those who didn't get their RDA of NPR over the weekend, it turns out that some Stephen Stills demo tapes that were lost to the ages have been found, and are being released:

[link]

With his days in the band Buffalo Springfield coming to an end, singer Stephen Stills found himself at a crossroads on April 26, 1968. Stills paid a recording engineer to "just roll tape" on a few new songs Stills had been working on. Many of those songs would go on to define his career — both with Crosby, Stills & Nash and in his solo work.

Those early recording sessions were lost until someone stumbled upon the poorly-marked tapes when the studio went out of business. Stills talks about those sessions, which were recently released for the first time, with Debbie Elliott.

They played some of the demos during the story, and the sound quality is pretty amazing for old demo tapes that were sitting in a box for thirty years or so.