Entries Tagged 'Blues' ↓

The Black Keys played on NPR’s World Cafe¹ about their career path thus far. One exciting thing on the horizon—a collaboration with recent Grammy winning Bluesman Ike Turner² on their forthcoming album which is being produced by Danger Mouse.

[audio:http://www.notesofadefeatist.com/wp-content/uploads/audio/blackkeys.mp3]

tags technorati : The Black Keys, Blues, music, Ike Turner, Danger Mouse, NPR

1. we’ve provided the audio because while NPR does many things well, consistently embracing the world of podcasting isn’t one of them[back]
2. yes, that Ike Turner, who has done other things than beat women[back]

The Chicago Reader speaks with On the Street Doing Life author Anne Keegan about her new book, her column with the Chicago Tribune, and how she’s not “a Gen Xer boring everybody with what I think.”

“I never wrote about myself,” she says. “They [her Tribune editors] may have decided I didn’t write enough silly stuff about my kids’ diapers. Or about my twins. Or my psychiatrist. Or how I found a coyote in my yard. I may have led a very interesting life, but there are people whose stories are far more fascinating than mine. When I went to Thailand and wrote about the Cambodian refugees did I write, ‘I stood there and watched them crawl across the border’? Oh, please! I wrote about the nurses who picked them up. You don’t say, ‘Oh, I stood there.’ You write about Lisa the nurse from Skokie holding a little boy laden with malaria.

Link from Bookslut.com

The Black Snake Moan soundtrack hits stores tomorrow, featuring a very nice selection of great blues from R.L. Burnside, Son House, Bobby Rush, The Black Keys, to yes, Sam “I guess I was wrong about that other Snakes movie” Jackson. Just like director Craig Brewer steeped Hustle and Flow with hip-hop flavor, Black Snake Moan looks saturated in the blues.

Ira Glass talks about bringing This American Life to Showtime. It premieres sometime next month.

On a TAL related note: Jessie Thorn, host of the very awesome Sound of Young America has a fantastic interview with Senior Producer Julie Snyder. Their conversation gives a great behind the scenes look at what goes into producing a show of TAL’s caliber, as well as what we can look forward with the television show.

Don’t hate the player: Forbes names the San Antonio Spurs, led by owner Peter Holt the model francise. Senator Kohl? You listening? How many more years is it going to take for you to get it?

The Ski Mask Way—HARD LIFE. HARD LUCK. HARD DRUGS. HARD DEALS. HARD TIME.

From G-Unit publishing a novel co-written by…50 Cent.

Let’s hope they have a choose your own adventure series in the works too.

tags technorati : Blues, Black Snake Moan, 50 cent, books, Peter Holt, This American Life, Julie Snyder, Jessie Thorn, Anne Keegan

• Can’t keep a dead man down—The First annual(?) GoodisCon this weekend in Philadelphia


• While I was no fan of Bust, The Hit List interviews crime writer Jason Starr, author of Lights Out and other great novels.

• Steve Martin mourns the loss of Iraq’s wild and crazy former dictator. (Huffington Post.com)

• If you’re already suffering from post holiday blues, please, please do your self a favor listen to Jordan, Jesse Go !’s holiday episode.
  
  A fantastic hour of holiday anxiety and hilarity as our two hosts dread family time, be it spending it at an AA meeting or navigating the awkward reappearance of an absentee parent. Not to mention Jordan and Jesse take listeners calls about their worst Christmas that is now nostalgically funny. A great, great hour of fun.

tags technorati : david goodis, goodiscon, crime, noir, jason starr, saddam, steve martin, funny, jordan jessie go!, holidays

The tracks available are: Your Touch – from the upcoming album Magic Potion
Strange Desire – from the upcoming album Magic Potion
Thickfreakness – Live in Darwin, Australia

The full length album will be released on Sept. 12 so mark your calendars!

Who the hell are The Black Keys you ask?

They are bluesmen of the first order who’s music grabbed me from the first few tracks I heard still show no signs of letting go. And, really with the state of music today who can you say that about ever, let alone continue to after four albums? Exactly.
Getting to see them when they swing in to Wisconsin will be a highlight of the year without a doubt.

From their bios:

Two young men, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, Akron natives and college dropouts the both of them, are working for a local property owner, the type of guy who owns a variety of low-rent apartment buildings around town in various states of semi-repair and full-blown disrepair. In short, the boys mow lawns for a slumlord. Between them, they’ve got a truck, two lawnmowers and a weed-whacker and, like everybody else, a hustle and a dream: in addition to working together, the guys play in a duo called The Black Keys (named in honor of a schizophrenic Akron artist, who called the boys “black keys”, his phrase for people who weren’t quite right). Though they’ve known each other since they were kids, they’ve only been playing together as a unit for a year. They’d drifted apart in high school (“Most of Dan’s friends wanted to beat me up and I wanted to provoke most of his friends to want to beat me up,” Patrick says), but each was deeply involved in music: Patrick’s tastes leaned toward Devo, noise rock, and hip-hop, while Dan, who had grown up playing old folk songs at family reunions, gravitated towards electric Mississippi blues.

From Pitchfork: Black Keys Talk Signing to Nonesuch, New LP

“When we initially signed to Fat Possum, they were affiliated with Epitaph. Since then it’s just completely changed. We wanted… a label that had better distribution but wouldn’t fuck us up. Nonesuch… I’d say other than Fat Possum, they’re like the most incredible label. They’re a little bit bigger, but they’re the same type of thing—they’ll just put out music that they like… We were getting dicked around talking to labels. I feel bad because in the past couple of years, so many bands have signed to true major labels. Even Sub Pop—they’re looking to sell records. Most indies now are trying to be majors.”

Their new album Magic Potion will be released September 12.

Here’s the tracklist:

01 Just Got to Be
02 Your Touch
03 You’re the One
04 Just a Little Heat
05 Give Your Heart Away
06 Strange Desire
07 Modern Times
08 The Flame
09 Goodbye Babylon
10 Black Door
11 Elevator

Pop Matters has an excellent review of the incredible new Black Keys album, Chulahoma a love letter to Junior Kimbrough.

“Kimbrough, whose idea was simple enough, was a master practitioner of “trance blues”—the art of playing the same chordal progression over and over until it gets into the listener’s pores and oozes out of his/her skin and into his/her soul.  Easy, right?  Not unless you can play a detuned guitar like Kimbrough did.  He started with what local (Mississippi) musicians called “Spanish” tuning, and then from there, downtuned to his own liking.  Kimbrough, like most blues musicians at the time, didn’t use a pick—he used his fingers to pluck both the bottom end and either a chordal rhythm or solo at the same time.  He also sang in a tough-to-decipher pleading wail, but a clue as to what he wanted would be evidenced by the fact he fathered 36 (yes, that’s correct—thirty-six) kids.  Okay, so Junior was horny—does that make him a bad person?

Point is, it’s damn near impossible to imitate Kimbrough—his guitar playing was nothing if not unique.”

Forget the Grammys.

Forget St. Bono and all of U2, their five phonograph shaped statues, rewarded for their most mediocre and undeserving album of their iconic career.

Forget Gwen Stefani, nothing but eye candy without her bandmates, even if someone told her she could be a “solo artist”.

Forget Kelly Clarkson and her mass produced pile of shit that beat out an album Fiona Apple put more time into crafting each individual song than all of Clarkson’s entire album combinded.

That’s the Grammys for you and that’s why nobody much remembers who wins anyways.

The best album I bought last year finally managed to get released to more than the handfulls of people who obsess over the dying art of the delta blues.

Deadboy and the Elephantman get tossed into the same camp as the White Stripes. Garage Rock-meets-Delta Blues by way of boy-girl duo who rock. That was the gist Rolling Stone’s Four Star review of their debut album We Are Night Sky.

Their album had been all over the Fat Possum site, and the good folk there haven’t steered me wrong yet with their artists. I bought the album and enjoyed it. Seeing them play at Club Tavern in Madison, with the Heartless Bastards really put me over the top.

Pretty much any gift giving occassion, finds a least a few new books for me to consume. When I was about eleven or twelve, armloads of wrapped Stephen King paperbacks through off the balance of having read everything on my bookshelf. Fifteen years later, any chances of catching up on my reading would involve mandatory bedrest for at least a year and a half.

Thankfully, this holiday season only two books made it under the tree:

Book One by Chip Kidd

As it turns out, I’m not alone in this battle. Also,wrestling with this conundrum—the great Joe Queenan.

I do not avoid books like “Accordion Man” or “Elwood’s Blues” merely because I believe that life is too short. Even if life were not too short, it would still be too short to read anything by Dan Aykroyd. And I am sure I am not alone when I state that cavalierly foisting unsolicited reading material upon book lovers is like buying underwear for people you hardly know.

One of my favorite blues musicians, R.L. Burnside died Thursday.

Born in Mississippi in 1926, R.L. spent much of his young adulthood sharcropping. A guitarist, singer, and songwriter, he began playing in the 1950’s. Burnside, learned the guitar from his neighbor Fred McDowell and developed a heavily rhythmic orientated style played with a slide. Up until the mid ‘80s Burnside was primarily a farmer and fisherman playing blues mostly at night and on the weekends. Gaining some attention from folklorists David Evans and George Mitchell it lead to smaller tours. In the late ‘80s Burnside was invited to perform at some blues festivals in Europe along side Junior Kimbrough and they became a part of a documentary film, Deep Blues.

R.L. Burnside didn’t get much recognition until he began recording forFat Possum Records in the 1990s. Where he put out the albums Too Bad Jim, A Ass Pocket of Whiskey, Burnside on Burnside, Come On In, and Mr. Wizard among others.