Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive. ~Maria Popova
09 Apr 2012 Leave a comment
in General Posts Tags: mike campbell
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-campbell/the-guitars_b_1406937.html?ref=entertainment
Watch the first video in a new series presented by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ guitarist Mike Campbell. Mike tells the stories behind the guitars he’s collected over the years.
06 Apr 2012 3 Comments
06 Apr 2012 Leave a comment
A Beatles reunion might be impossible, but music fans may yet get to see Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey on stage together, because the Beatles’ sons have mooted the idea of starting a band.
At first, it seemed like a joke. “What would you say to forming the Beatles – the Next Generation,” BBC News’ Ian Youngs asked James McCartney. But the young McCartney gave a surprisingly genuine response, revealing he had already discussed the concept “a little bit” with some of his fellow Fab Four heirs.
“I’d be up for it,” the 34-year-old said. “Sean [Lennon] seemed to be into it, Dhani [Harrison] seemed to be into it … I don’t think it’s something that Zak [Starkey] wants to do. Maybe Jason [Starkey, another drummer] would want to do it … I don’t know, you’d have to wait and see.”
Asked again if the collaboration could really happen, McCartney replied: “Yeah, hopefully … I’d be happy to do it.”
Since 2010, McCartney has released two EPs, co-produced by his father and recorded in part at Abbey Road studios. Sir Paul is “very encouraging”, James said, admitting his surname has been “a help” to his music career. “It can be difficult standing on your own two feet,” James said, “but more than anything it’s a help.”
Although many of the Beatles’ progeny are musical, their commercial fortunes have been uneven. Only Julian Lennon has scored a hit, and that was almost two decades ago. Dhani Harrison currently performs with the band thenewno2, Sean Lennon with the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, and Zak Starkey plays drums with the Who.
(Article reprinted from The Guardian)
04 Apr 2012 Leave a comment
in General Posts, Toward Better Sounding Music
It’s just a shame that this kind of thing falls to Neil Young, and no one at Sony or Apple has bothered doing it years ago. Here’s hoping Neil succeeds in helping us reclaim the other 95% of our music!
03 Apr 2012 Leave a comment
in General Posts, Toward Better Sounding Music
Any music consumer who cares about the audio quality of what he listens to ought to give half an hour’s time to the interview Neil Young did at The Wall Street Journal’s Dive Into Media conference.
We’re losing the battle for great-sounding music because of the assumption that we must choose between audio quality and convenience of use. In the 21st century there’s no reason we should have to choose between the two. And no reason to settle for digital sound that’s nowhere near that of 1970’s analog. Most of us haven’t heard music the way it’s supposed to sound for decades now. Some of our children never have. Why have we demanded ever larger, higher-resolution TVs but settled for the backward trend in audio reproduction? Because we think we must sacrifice great sound for the portability we want. The truth is: what we demand will be what is produced and sold, even made affordable. We just have to stop settling for a false compromise–we can have both convenience and high-resolution audio.
Neil discusses that issue and touches on a few others too, such as audio piracy, the presumed demise of the album, and how 5.1 Surround failed because women wanted furniture–not five boxes–in their living rooms.
The point Young makes in the very last minute of the interview is key: the larger and higher-quality the sound system, the better it will reveal the difference between a high-quality music file and the skimpy 5% of the music that an mp3 actually contains. And that’s why a DJ should never rely on mp3 audio to entertain wedding guests, unless his goal is to make an early night of it.
An informative and provocative 30 minutes.
02 Apr 2012 Leave a comment
The great bluegrass banjo player Earl Scruggs died (last week) at the age of 88. Shortly afterward, Steve Martin sent out a tweet calling Scruggs the most important banjo player who ever lived. “Few players have changed the way we hear an instrument the way Earl has,” wrote Martin earlier this year in The New Yorker, “putting him in a category with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Chet Atkins, and Jimi Hendrix.”
Martin writes of Scruggs:
Some nights he had the stars of North Carolina shooting from his fingertips. Before him, no one had ever played the banjo like he did. After him, everyone played the banjo like he did, or at least tried. In 1945, when he first stood on the stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and played banjo the way no one had heard before, the audience responded with shouts, whoops, and ovations. He performed tunes he wrote as well as songs they knew, with clarity and speed like no one could imagine, except him. When the singer came to the end of a phrase, he filled the theatre with sparkling runs of notes that became a signature for all bluegrass music since. He wore a suit and a Stetson hat, and when he played he smiled at the audience like what he was doing was effortless. There aren’t many earthquakes in Tennessee, but that night there was.
In November of 2001 Martin had the opportunity to play the banjo alongside his hero on the David Letterman show. They played Scruggs’s classic, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” with Scruggs’s sons Randy on acoustic guitar and Gary on Harmonica, and a stellar group that included Vince Gill and Albert Lee on electric guitar, Marty Stewart on mandolin, Glen Duncan on fiddle, Jerry Douglas on Dobro, Glenn Wolf on bass, Harry Stinson on drums, Leon Russell on organ and Paul Shaffer on piano.
(Reprinted from Open Culture)
Every Moment Has A Song 