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Tuesday, Jun 19 2018, 6AM
Lead singer Matthew Houck started writing Song For Zula on a beach in Mexico, and says the lyrics came out so quickly he didn't even realize he had dropped in a reference to "Ring of Fire" (or the Bette Midler song that shares a few words, and a vaguely similar tune, with the opening). Phosphorescent will be at Pickathon Friday, August 3rd. pickathon.com
The War On Drugs will be at the Paramount on September 6th. In the meantime, check out their KEXP in-studio recorded August 1st, 2017: bit.ly
"Then She Did" chronicles Perry Farrell's mother's suicide when he was four years old. "It's probably one of the reasons we were brought together…" remarked guitarist Dave Navarro, whose mother was murdered when he was a teenager. "I have memories of us being onstage together and, before we played 'Then She Did', Perry would grab me and say, 'Let's do this for our moms.' I still get chills when I think about it." "When you have something like that happen…" noted Farrell, "the better thing to do is to try to make some flowers grow out of it."
For this album, PJ Harvey was the first female solo artist to receive the Mercury Prize in the award's history.
Since 1990, Spiritualized has acted as an outlet for J. Spaceman's grand vision, increasingly incorporating choirs and horn sections for something of a psych-soul revue. But for the new Spiritualized album, out Sept. 7, J. Spaceman made "And Nothing Hurt" entirely on his own in his east London home.
"Making this record on my own sent me more mad than anything I've done before. We'd been playing these big shows and I really wanted to capture that sound we were making, but without having the funds to do so, I had to find a way to work within the constraints of what money I had. So I bought a laptop and made it all in a little room in my house. With a bit of trial and lot of error, I found ways of doing something that's quite simple if you've got the resources. I spent two weeks listening to classical records and strumming the chord that I wanted on my guitar. When I found something to match what I wanted, I'd sample that bit and go for the next chord and try to match that. It took weeks, trying to put together and layer convincing string sounds. But, if I'm honest, all I wanted was for someone to come and play the part and bring their own thing to the record."
Valerie June stopped by the Midday Show last June for an in-studio: bit.ly
Wooden Shjips were working on a “summer record”, but external events impinged on the creative process. There was America’s climate of socio-political upheaval; then forest fires raged near where the band recorded, in singer-guitarist Ripley Johnson’s Portland home studio. “I sat watching ash fall like snow,” he remembers. “It felt apocalyptic.” Thus, V, their fifth album, which is rich in summer beauty but has an indefinable undercurrent of fear and menace. The “peace” sign on the cover reflects the band’s desire for a statement of dignified resistance and calm amid the storm.
Urban Hymns saw the band win two Brit Awards in 1998, including Best British Group, and appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in March 1999.
"Two decades into his career, these songs are among the most incisive but somehow most complex ones Jurado has ever written, lined up from end to end without a wasted note, layer, line, or word." - Pitchfork Here is the full review: bit.ly
Tom Petty was one of MTV's biggest stars, but they wouldn't play the video as delivered because of the drug reference (sex and violence were generally OK on the network, but they were very sensitive about drugs). When the video aired, the word "joint" was reversed so it came out sounding like "noojh." Apparently, MTV made this edit themselves. Petty said on Storytellers:
"The strangest thing happened. I wrote this song not thinking that it was controversial in any way and I nearly left this song off the album 'til the very end, and we put it on. Imagine my surprise when this song comes on television and they say, 'Let's roll another noojh,' which sounded worse to me than joint. Because, I don't know if you've ever had a noojh, but it sounds really wicked."
Death Cab are playing the sold out Paramount 90th Anniversary Celebration in a few days - June 23rd but you can find tickets to their September 25th show in Portland here: bit.ly With Charly Bliss!
Naked Eyes are playing the Washington State Fair in Puyallup on September 3rd.
When announcing her new album, Hunter, Anna Calvi made a statement that sets out the message of her new music in the clearest terms.
“I want to go beyond gender. I don’t want to have to choose between the male and female in me. I’m fighting against feeling an outsider and trying to find a place that feels like home,” she wrote online as part of a longer essay, going on to describe her new music as “primal and beautiful, vulnerable and strong”.
The song was inspired in part by an old black and white movie which was sort of a cult classic in Kate's family titled Night Of The Demon. The movie was about demons who hid waiting in trees - the song's opening line (in a male voice) "It's coming! It's in the trees!" is taken directly from the movie.
Soft Science are playing at Kirkland Summerfest presented by KEXP August 10th -12th! kirklandsummerfest.com
Belly will be LIVE on KEXP Monday, August 13th at 9:00am! "It's been 23 years since Tanya Donelly's band last released an album (1995's King), and it's eschewed reunion tours until recently. Donelly herself seemed to have long since moved on, releasing a string of solo records and contributing to a reunited Throwing Muses, the band she and Kristin Hersh founded together in the early '80s. (Donelly also co-founded The Breeders, but hasn't been back in that particular fold since '92.)
In other words, Donelly's not one to reunite for a paycheck — and it shows in Dove, which doesn't so much pick up where Belly left off as refine the band's sound to reflect half a lifetime's worth of change." Read more here: n.pr
Cooke wrote this as a protest song to support the civil rights movement. Up to this point, most of his songs were either touching ballads ("You Send Me") or lighthearted uptempo tunes ("Twistin' The Night Away"). When Cooke heard Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind," he became determined to write something similar - he couldn't believe Dylan's song wasn't written by a black man.
Watch Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires performing 'Changes' live in the KEXP Gathering Space on May 23rd, 2016: bit.ly
This appeared on the soundtrack to The Falcon and the Snowman. There's a video with film clips! bit.ly
Childish Gambino's This Is America tour will be next door at Key Arena on September 29th! www.keyarena.com
On Thursday KEXP breaks down Public Enemy's record It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. www.kexp.org
Brownout will be at Dante's in Portland on the 26th and The Tractor in Seattle on the 27th!
You can see Bill Callahan on September 25th at the Vogue Theater in Vancouver... Canada
Johnny Cash wrote, “I love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. And Mother And God."
During a show in San Luis Obispo, California, fans walked out en masse during this song. Despite that, the band says the reaction nationwide to their political explicitness has been overwhelmingly positive.
You can watch Neko Case's KEXP in-studio recorded May 31st here: www.youtube.com She's back in Seattle at the Paramount on September 29th! Tickets & info: bit.ly
Billy Bragg's latest, a mini-LP, is called "Bridges Not Walls" Billy says of ‘Bridges Not Walls’: “Life comes at you real fast these days. What’s a singer-songwriter to do when events keep challenging the way that we see the world? Before we’ve had a chance to digest one startling development, along comes another to throw us off balance again. I’ve been grubbing up songs for the past 12 months, but without the time to get an album together due to other projects, so in an effort to keep pace with these chaotic times I decided to start dropping tracks as they became ready across the summer culminating in a mini album. As always, they’re my way of trying to make some sense of what’s going on. And there's been a lot going on.”
Elbow frontman Guy Garvey was one of the few musicians to oppose the American invasion of Iraq before it started. However after speaking openly about his own feelings, he felt other musicians were concerned about appearing anti-American as it might affect them when they came to tour the US. Garvey told Q magazine April 2009, that this was the background to this song. He explained: "I decided that outrage hadn't worked. The idea behind 'Leaders' was: I'm not terrified of you, I'm not angered by you, I'm going to ridicule you. I'm not sure if it worked. It felt very guttural and spontaneous at the time. The five of us write every song together but it all needed careful discussion. It was an odd one."
Father John Misty is playing the Capitol Hill Block Party on July 22nd! Earlier this morning he released the video to the album's title track, God's Favorite Custromer: pitchfork.com
This was the first #1 hit for any Beatle after the band broke up.
Phantogram dropped two new tracks to help raise money for suicide prevention. The first is an original song called "Someday," a heartbreaking, but ultimately celebratory remembrance of Phantogram singer Sarah Barthel's sister, Becky, who took her own life two years ago. "I'm always going to miss you," Barthel laments. "I'm always going to feel you in everything that I do. I love you so."
The B-side to the new digital single is a shimmering cover of the Sparklehorse song "Saturday," from the 1995 album Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot.
After recording a 12" of "Sunshine Smile" that was pressed up to be released on record producer Pat Collier's 'Money To Burn' record label, the band received a positive review in the NME. However, the single was never released. They signed to Creation Records in 1992, and after a UK tour supporting Curve, they released their first single, a re-recording of "Sunshine Smile", in April of that year.
Testify quotes the party slogan for the Oceania government in the book 1984: "Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past."
Jimi Hendrix: "All those people who don't like Bob Dylan's songs should read his lyrics. They are filled with the joys and sadness of life. I am as Dylan, none of us can sing normally. Sometimes, I play Dylan's songs and they are so much like me that it seems to me that I wrote them. I have the feeling that Watchtower is a song I could have come up with, but I'm sure I would never have finished it. Thinking about Dylan, I often consider that I'd never be able to write the words he manages to come up with, but I'd like him to help me, because I have loads of songs I can't finish. I just lay a few words on the paper, and I just can't go forward. But now things are getting better, I'm a bit more self-confident."
John Lennon was apparently so captivated by this song, he worried he would never be able to write anything that could compete with it.
Sub Pop #834 In lieu of bonus tracks and demos like a typical deluxe edition affair, Sub Pop opted to include a second disc featuring a full Nirvana performance at Portland’s Pine Street Theatre on Feb. 9, 1990. It’s a rare snapshot of the band before they’d become a cultural force, but you can feel what the band would become in this freewheeling, walloping performance.
Happy birthday to Ann Wilson! This was Heart's first single. They were based in Vancouver at the time. According to the liner notes for one of their greatest hits albums, they moved to Vancouver when some of the male members of the band would have been subject to the draft in the Vietnam War. They returned to Seattle when there was no longer a threat of them being called up in the draft.
Guitarist Whitney Petty said the name Thunderpussy has taken the Seattle-based band all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The Supreme Court doesn’t think that we should be able to trademark Thunderpussy because. . . [it’s] scandalous [and] immoral," she said. "We were riding the coattails of The Slants in Portland. . . It’s an all-Asian-American band that got a letter saying that they were disparaging and scandalous. They actually fought for many years, and they won their case. So we thought we were going to win our case. But that one word difference — they are disparaging, we’re immoral. We are back in the pile. So now we are waiting.”
Hip Like Junk on Beavis & Butthead. You're welcome. www.youtube.com
Get Big Bite's self-titled debut on multiple colors of vinyl: popwig.limitedrun.com
dEUS performing 'Fell Off The Floor, Man' at the 2008 Rock Werchter festival: bit.ly
"Do the Trash Can," is the first offering off Jon Spencer's debut solo album, Spencer Sings the Hits!, set to arrive early this fall via In the Red Records. "Nothing like digging the gas tank from an old Chevy out of a Michigan junkyard snow bank in January," Spencer recalled. "Junkyard owner kept asking me if the metal was for a school project, but as a bluegrass player he could understand the possible use for a recording session."
