Swinging Modern Sounds #45: The Distribution Problem, Part One
Rick Moody talks with Frank Zappa’s widow, Gail, about her new idea to license distribution rights of an unreleased project to Zappa fans.
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Rick Moody
Swinging Modern Sounds #44: And Another Day
David Bowie, who isn’t doing press for his new album The Next Day, provides Rick Moody with a workflow diagram for the album. A Rumpus exclusive.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #43: Formative Experiences
Often, I find, the musical experiences that have had the most lasting impact on me were not immediately apparent to me at the time.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead
They Might Be Giants had that quality, the glorious-about-human-life quality on December 30th
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Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
Bands, those funny little plans, that never go quite right, is a line from a really great song by Mercury Rev (“Holes,” from Deserter’s Songs), a song that rightly probes the mixed feelings that you might have about bands had you ever tried to imagine a band into being.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #40: A Miscellany of Musical Thoughts that Will Not Otherwise Appear
From June through December of 2012, I kept a diary of musical impressions that didn’t develop into longer pieces.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #39: Interview Within an Interview
In this piece, we are not at any time meant to use the word greatness to refer to a band from Boston, Big Dipper, best known during the late eighties
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SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #38: Dinner at Martha’s House
If you did not come of age as a listener to the popular song between 1975 and 1979, you cannot entirely understand the revolution that took place among women.
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Dispatch From the Future by Leigh Stein
I don’t think I ever laughed with a poem. Sometimes I chuckle at a clever turn of phrase, or at a shared sentiment, or a little idiosyncrasy that I thought all my own, and though I laughed at that dirty limerick my friend wrote in fifth grade, I can still say Leigh Stein’s poetry actually elicited the kind of laughter that hurt my belly and made me want to say, “Leigh, stop, I can’t take anymore, but don’t really because, WOW!”
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Swinging Modern Sounds #37: The Age of Fine Arrangements
Cuddle Magic, in my opinion, is the band most likely to succeed, these days, if by succeed you mean getting a leg up, surpassing the modest touring-all-the-time-not-making-very-much-money-hustling-constantly model of the thing.
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A History of Identity
In March 2012, I published a letter as part of a subscription program begun at The Rumpus. The following poem is fashioned from language contained in the responses to that letter.
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SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #36: This Is Bob Dylan To Me
The Rumpus has made it possible for me to talk to a lot of musicians I might not otherwise have met, but meeting Mike Watt, founding member of The Minutmen, fIREHOSE, Dos, etc., has to be the most memorable encounter that has come to pass since I began writing this column three years ago.
...moreSWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #35: The Location of the Soul
Since 2005, Larkin Grimm has made four albums, the first of which are unvarnished howls from the world of psychedelic folk.
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The early, formative period of rock and roll criticism produced three great and indelible voices, three voices that have gone on to influence every writer who has written about popular music in the years since. Those three voices belong to Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus.
SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #33: The Sweet Spot
For an entire decade, between 1975 and 1985, Brian Eno could do no wrong. In fact, even for the four or five years before 1975 he could do no wrong.
SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #32: An Interview with Mike Doughty
Mike Doughty is a singer-songwriter of a particularly urban sort, whose compositions, though guitar-based and often not terribly far from the ideal of the busker, are, nonetheless, cross-pollinated by just about everything audible in New York City
Growing Up in Greenland: The Rumpus Interview with Jeanne Tost
Aarhus, Denmark, is the second largest city in that nation after Copenhagen, and a center of the arts and education. I was recently there for a literary festival,
SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #31: Reunion Fever
Like other people who once had a childhood, I sometimes give in to fits of longing for the music I cared most about when young. In particular, I give in to reunion fever.
SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #30: What Is and Is Not Masculine
Tad Friend’s profile of John Lurie in the 8/16-8/23 issue of The New Yorker from last year starts thus: “From 1984-1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face.” A curious and disheartening opening.
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SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #28: Can You Hear Me Crying?
It’s hard not to think a lot about Tucson lately, a place where I have spent a lot of time in the last five years, and which I have written about multiply on this site already. (See, e.g., my columns of January 29 and August 28, 2009.) Not long ago I was visiting there and met up briefly with Vicki Brown, a violinist of whom I have written above.
Reading Habits of the Service Industries, Part One
Nick Delany turned up at a reading I gave at the Brooklyn Museum in November of 2010. He remarked, during the question and answer portion of the event, that he had mostly been reading just one book for the last ten years.
SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #27: All Things Must Pass
On 11/29, a band in Brooklyn called The Universal Thump staged a fortieth anniversary rehabilitation of George Harrison’s monumental All Things Must Pass album.
A Shoe-Seller Speaks
I met Lauren (whose last name we are suppressing here) at a writing workshop in Provincetown almost fifteen years ago. She was shy, funny, brilliant, and very, very talented, and she dressed like one of those kids who had been to every show that Mission of Burma ever played.
SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #26: The Cessation of Miracles
The city of brotherly love is always reinventing itself, coming up with varieties of eccentricity meant to distract from its diet of horrors, for example, a good baseball team.
The Rumpus Interview with Quest For Kindness
In April of this year, two writers, Matthew Quick (author of The Silver Linings Playbook and Sorta Like a Rock Star) and Alicia Bessette (Simply From Scratch), decided to make a blog to help promote their efforts, and, in the process, they began offering space to fellow writers of their acquaintance in which to compose stories of kindness.
Swinging Modern Sounds #25: 100% Nepotism
It’s the Internet, where I am plying my trade here, and it’s meant to be the Wild West—unregulated, unruly, unpredictable.
SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #24: A Magician of the Highest Degree
The millennium is not very old, it’s true, and yet today is the day on which I feel obliged to anoint a best song of the millennium, and to risk open debate on the subject, even though I recognize that these kinds of assertions are rash, and, in the main, unwarranted.
SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #23: The Tragedy of Consciousness
Recently, I’ve been digging again through the wilds of the CD Baby site, where no print run is too small and no approach to music is too individual, and in this regard I have found a lot of great work recently, some of which I will deal with here soon, but none of it more interesting than an Italian exponent of extended vocal technique named Romina Daniele.
