rick moody
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Swinging Modern Sounds #64: Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack!
Many of you will not want to believe that “Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack!” by the Californian punk band the Urinals, is the greatest song ever written, but that is simply because there is some kind of vise or blood-occluding mechanism…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #63: It’s Supposed to Be Bad
Rick Moody emails with Scott Timberg, author of the new book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, about Bob Dylan’s new Sinatra covers album, the need for cultural gatekeepers, and the “slippery sub genre” of bad-on-purpose art.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #62: Stillness as Metaphor
I am after a music that renders life as it is, and which invites in the intermittent pulsations of life.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #61: Songs for the Alliterative at Heart
Michael Hearst has come a long way from the guy who played plastic wind instruments on Seventh Avenue, to an admirably creative and original adulthood.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #60: On Mentorship
In an empirically-preoccupied world, mentorship appears to be unscientific, impossible to quantify, and perhaps even sentimental.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #59: Not a Folk Singer
There is a lot to learn from Vashti Bunyan, therefore, about how to live a self-designed life, and how to be unapologetic and decisive about the habit of songwriting.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #58: Crowdsourcing
Music-obsessive activity, in general, appears to be about music. You could, on the surface, mistake it for being about music. But in fact what it is about is memory and love.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #57: Going Long, in Four Parts
…if you want more, the music can meet you where you are. It can instruct on the meaning of music itself, on its history, on its cross-cultural possibilities.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #56: On Song-Sharking
The human relationship to music is a passionate relationship, or at least it is in the kind of music I like.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #55: Meredith Monk, Composer
Rick Moody talks with composer Meredith Monk about her new album Monk: Piano Songs, the physical movement integral to music-making, and what the future holds after 50 years of performing.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #54: Jam Band Apotheosis
Back in the seventies, in circles I travelled in, you could not escape the Grateful Dead, even if you wanted to—and I was someone who wanted to.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #53: The Distribution Problem, Part Three
I thought, in my ongoing attempt to describe how digital music is changing the way we consume music, that it would be good to speak to a representative young person about her music listening habits.