Summer festivals have grown exponentially in importance and in scale over the last decade. Many of us are fortunate enough to attend Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, Coachella, Bonnaroo, Rothbury, or SXSW.
The biggest festival in the world, however, isn’t staged in the U.S. Glastonbury takes Somerset, England by storm each summer. This year’s festival took place this past weekend; headliners were Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, and a reunited Blur.
Here are some amazing photos from the event, including some incredible aerial views and live shots of the aforementioned artists, as well as Fleet Foxes, Bat for Lashes, and others.
Monday April 13th 2009, 6:34 pm
Filed under: Tomfoolery
Posted by: Sean
Congrats to our Melanie Shrawder and her husband, Matt Ittigson, on the birth of their first child, Henry Austin Ittigson. He was born at 8:14pm on April 10th in Pittsburgh. Hank weighed in at 8.05oz. and stretched out at 20.5 inches. All are doing well!
Wednesday April 08th 2009, 9:06 am
Filed under: Tomfoolery
Posted by: Melanie
Amazon has published a truly bizarre list of “The 100 Greatest Singer-Songwriter Albums of All Time.” It starts off fairly predictably, with Blonde on Blonde, Astral Weeks, Pink Moon and Nebraska all in the top 10, but takes detours past some real head-scratchers on its way down to 100 — Bill Callahan’s Woke on a Whaleheart and Secrets of the Beehive by David Sylvian both make the list, for example. (How many people have even heard these? Or heard OF them?)
The order is puzzling, too. For starters, how does Suzanne Vega’s mid-career release Nine Objects of Desire beat out Tori Amos’s groundbreaking debut?
Other oddities: do an overwhelming number of Tracy Chapman fans really prefer New Beginning to her self-titled album? And why would Sea Change be the only Beck album to make the list? Is it because, of all his records, that’s the only one Amazon’s editors would qualify as “a singer-songwriter album”?
What do you think? What makes a record a singer-songwriter record? What’s missing from this list? Leave a comment below.
In this modern world, when it’s so common for songs to become inspiration and fodder for future art, is one potential indicator of a song’s greatness its malleability? Personally, I’ve always loved when songs take on new forms — surprising covers, samples, remixes, mash-ups. Though there are always more bad revisions than good, sometimes this kind of work yields sheer brilliance, and opens up older works — or entire genres — to younger or less-savvy music fans.
Thursday March 05th 2009, 4:52 pm
Filed under: Americana
Posted by: Melanie
Economic woes got you down? Too many tasks dropped on your plate at the station? Here’s a well-deserved thank-you from Willie Nelson and Ray Benson to help you get through the day!
Friday February 27th 2009, 1:00 pm
Filed under: Give It Away
Posted by: Julia
Here’s one that goes down like a Las Vegas Cocktail. England’s Starsailor return with All the Plans in March after a break considered lengthy in the digital/expanded edition era – four years since their last effort On the Outside. Not to worry though, they’ve caught up with the times now, by re-recording the lead single “Tell Me It’s Not Over” with none other than The Killers‘ Brandon Flowers on vocals, and circulating the song before the album’s release. That’s the expanded edition taken care of!
Sean and Julia got to see Ben Harper perform with his new band, Relentless7, at the Highline Ballroom in New York last week. It was an intimate show for WRXP listeners, and for the most part, the set list was all new. The performance did include this unusual cover, though:
Neko Case returns triumphantly with her sixth album, Middle Cyclone, which hits stores next week. A bit of a nomad, Case has lived in Vancouver, Chicago, the Seattle area, Tucson, and Vermont, and the players she’s assembled here are a testimony to the ease with which she’s befriended like-minded individuals in those locations. Her regular band features vocalist Kelly Hogan, multi-instrumentalist Jon Rauhouse, guitarist Paul Rigby, bassist Tom V. Ray, and drummer Barry Mirochnick; M. Ward, Garth Hudson, Sarah Harmer, members of The New Pornographers, Los Lobos, Calexico, The Sadies, Visqueen, The Lilys, and Giant Sand also guest here. Julia Clarke will bring you up to speed on the album’s sonic landscape in this Songlines podcast.
