Swinging Modern Sounds #75: The Petra Haden Story
At every turn, Haden’s decisions, while labor-intensive and rigorous, feel fresh, passionate, funny, and new.
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Posts Tagged: swinging modern sounds
Swinging Modern Sounds #74: A Social Practice
Everywhere there is sterling musicianship, of the original, unexpected sort.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #73: Prince Rogers Nelson, Guitar Player: A Symposium
I started thinking about additional, more slantwise ways we might talk about his legacy. What if I organized a bunch of guitar players?
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Swinging Modern Sounds #72: Urban Pastoral
It’s like a landscape that you can’t know until you’ve seen it through four seasons, until you’ve seen it on days gray and bright.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #71: A Michael Bay Film Eating Itself
“Love,” then is not to be taken lightly here. It is being engaged at full force, megaphonically.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #70: Alien Now!
Maybe, in terms of idiom, The Dabbers are like a thrash rock and roll version of the Cocteau Twins, or what the This Mortal Coil would sound like if the Dead Boys tried to cover one of their albums.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #69: Meaning Yes
When in need of comfort, it’s always worth trying close reading.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #68: A Way of Life
The thing about Scott Tuma is: the immense pathos of the recordings… Almost no one, frankly, is allowed to sound this sad and continue to have a musical career.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #67: The Franchise Restaurants of Song
Musician Owen Ashworth on his new album, Nephew in the Wild, literary influences, self-expression in songwriting, and how becoming a father has changed his work.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #66: The Library of Babel
I want to propose a fine recent example of the gesamtkuntsler, the total artist, in Paul de Jong, the cellist, composer, collagist, archivist, and former member of the band The Books.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #65: Tragedy Plus Time
Jesse Malin is a lifer in a business that rarely features lifers anymore.
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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 attached to the thinking and feeling part of your limbic region.
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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 #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.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #52: Chris Abrahams Riffs
There are not so many great bands anymore, not like there once were. But there’s still Australian experimental jazz trio the Necks.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #51: Free For One and All
Dean Wareham is a great writer, and possessed of a strikingly astringent and dry-eyed view of things without pity or self-pity or undue kindness, and what follows, I trust, will give abundant evidence of this.
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Rick Moody interviews Belle & Sebastian’s Stevie Jackson about his solo album, misinterpreting songs, and the band’s rough early days.
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Rick Moody talks to novelist and musician Wesley Stace about his career-defining, game-changing new album Self-Titled.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #47: A Further Miscellany
This column collects a bunch of albums (and, in one case, a book by a writer/musician) that I have loved a great deal in the last six months, as well as exactly one album that I think is not worth the hype.
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Dave Allen is a formidable commentator these days on all things Internet, a sort of web 2.0 version of Marshall McLuhan: less New Age than Jaron Lanier, less Palo-Alto-Research-Center than Bill Joyce, less corporate than Mark Zuckerberg.
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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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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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