David Byrne is one of the most prolific, creative people around. He’s been doing interesting work continuously since the ’70s (though much of it has been a bit under the popular radar). He recently rigged up a whole building as a musical instrument for his Playing the Building project. A whole building that you can play from a keyboard — how cool is that?
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is his latest effort — a collaboration with fellow prolific creative guy Brian Eno. This effort is mellow and airy, without the bouncy world beats with which Byrne has been known to spice his music. This work reminds me more of True Stories without the shopping mall and John Goodman and all the cowboy hats.
The player will stream the whole album, and it’s available in a wide variety of DRM-free digital formats for your listening and sharing pleasure.
On St. Elsewhere, Gnarls Barkley did a great cover of the Violent Femmes’ tune “Gone Daddy Gone.” The Femmes are repaying the cover love, with their take on the Gnarls Barkley hit, “Crazy.” It’s crazy smooth is what it is, with sounds of surf rock guitar, mandolin, flute, and of course the Femmes’ trademark bass. They even rock the theremin on the chorus.
Hello, party people! Keith here once again to drop some soft rock knowledge on your Heavy Duty minds. Today’s topic: Mike Doughty (or “Dode” as he was known at Simon’s Rock). He was the frontman for the slacker jazz outfit Soul Coughing. He’s a talented lyricist who turns funny phrases like:
They say you snooze, you lose,
Well I have snost and lost
Since the dissolution of Soul Coughing several years ago, Dode has continued making soulful, quirky “alternative” music without quite as much electronic sampling and such. He’s released a bunch of albums and EPs (see ). I haven’t listened to all of them, but I do rather enjoy Haughty Melodic (a palindrome of “Michael Doughty”), which was probably the best-received, critically and commercially. The standout tracks for me on that album are “Sunken-Eyed Girl,” “Your Misfortune,” and “I Hear The Bells,” but “Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well” is the single, so to speak. It’s been featured on some tv soundtracks lately, so it’s experiencing a bit of a renaissance and you may have heard it on the radio, if you’re into that sort of thing. Personally, I’m more into this sort of thing:
Now Mike has a new album out entitled Golden Delicious. I haven’t listened to it as much as Haughty Melodic but I’ve been playing it for the past couple weeks and I’m really diggin’ it. My favorite track is “I Wrote a Song About Your Car,” and I also really like “More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle” and the single “27 Jennifers” which was previously released on his 2003 EP “Rockity Roll.” Here’s the video for “27 Jennifers”:
Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Mike Doughty’s Band live at The Fillmore in San Francisco. He played a good mix of songs from his solo work and the Soul Coughing catalog. There wasn’t anything resembling a mosh pit, but we did get more bacon than the pan can handle. He actually played that track on a Roland SP-606 Sampling Workstation, like in this video. It was quite similar to the way that Jonathan Coulton plays “Mr. Fancy Pants” on the Zendrum in his live act. But I digress.
The non-musical highlight of last night’s show was when Dode set expectations with us for the end of the show. Four songs before the end, he explained that the next song would be “the song before the fake last song,” to be followed by “the fake last song” with an accompanying big rock ending and the re-introduction (including hometowns) of all the members of the band plus the soundguy. The explanation continued something like this, “Following the fake last song, we will turn around, and you will applaud, or not, and then we’ll turn around and act surprised to see you and then we’ll play two additional songs, including the song that’s been getting a lot of radio airplay, and then we’ll leave and you’ll leave.” I had never before heard a performer set such explicit expectations for the end of the show, and particularly liked that he called the fake last song by name.
UK-based Russell Porter chronicles alt music culture in the Porter Report with aggressive wit and offbeat charm. Today, the “professional chancer and well known layabout” joins us on Boing Boing TV for a live session by alt-blues-punk band the Guillotines (Sounds Like: “we suffer for our music and now it’s your turn.”) Next, some wasted chick with a double mohawk tries to hit our host up for spare change.
I actually like the song, but my favorite part of the video is at the end when Porter says:
We’ve got a carte blanche to go crazy. It could be the future of broadcasting. It could be a waste of everybody’s time. There’s only one way to find out. That’s to get on with it.
Tracy has asked me to share some heavy duty business from time to time. This is one of those times. When first writing for a bastion of heaviness such as this, it’s tempting to turn it up to 11. Instead, I am going to soft-rock your socks off. Ladies, I give you Jonathan Coulton performing A Talk with George:
Don’t live another day unless you make it count
There’s someone else that you’re supposed to be
There’s something deep inside of you that still wants out
Shame on you if you don’t set it free.
You can run. You can hide. But you can’t escape Deep Purple’s “Smoke on The Water.” When I was a youngster it was the first rock song every kid learned on guitar. Even kids who otherwise didn’t play could pick out the power chords. Thanks to the song’s simple, plodding and catchy riff kids are still doing it. My son Mars learned it from a kid who has never even had a guitar. And now this…
That sounds like a teenager talking. And it is! Me. My mother has started spring cleaning ops early this year and she found this article from my high school paper, scanned it, and emailed it to me. I wrote this sometime between 1982-84, back when we did publishing the hard way. Each issue came together with a lot hands-on work, and nary a computer in sight. “Press type” for headlines was burnished on by hand, everything was laid out using contact rubber cement, and the copy, which was hand-written, had to be counted character by character so the typist (that’s right, using a typewriter) would know where to put the line breaks so we could have justified columns. I’m not sure why there is big space before the word “Think” in the headline, but it’s probably just a result of working by hand in the fast-paced, high-pressure world of high school news.
I’m not sure now where I got the pics of Henry Rollins, Bad Brains, Fear or The Circle Jerks. I can’t bring myself to read the whole article, but I did catch this funny bit near the end:
“As with any movement these imbeciles can only ruin hardcore for it’s [sic] sincere fans. They shouldn’t be confused with punk, they’re simply trendies with their checkers, camouflage, bandannas and vans.” (I meant the sneakers.)
Yeah! So, beat it! Posers!
Our high school mascot was the Phantom. We were the Phoebus Phantoms and our paper was the Phantasm. Alliteration gone wild. I’d like to thank our sponsors Sailmasters, Ames and Anna’s Italian “Restraunt.”
If you’re looking for some fresh music check out FADER Magazine. I check their blog regularly, and it’s always full stuff I would never hear about otherwise. You can download the magazine for free, and each issue comes with an audio mix of new stuff.
“Walk It Out” was a big hit last year from DJ Unk. In addition to the original video there are a good number of “alternate” videos. Here are a few of the most popular, along with the original.
The newest, and probably my favorite, is Gwen Verdon as choreographed by her husband Bob Fosse. The music in this version is a remix. “The official remix has been lengthened to include four verses, featuring Andre 3000, Unk himself, Jim Jones, and finally Big Boi.” — Wikipedia
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