Girls Shredding on Guitars

never gets old to me …

… especially in the event that they’re also able to sing.

Lack of Guitar Occupying Middle Frequency

The new LP by Dirty Projectors, Swing Lo Magellan, is finally streaming in full over at NYT. There’s also this lengthy write up and a trailer for their half-related movie Hi Custodian on the band’s website. If you read the same music sources as me, you already knew all of this. But I felt like I should share, since thoughtful song arrangements and peculiar harmonies hit me pretty hard.

Message From the Country

Me and Julio

Impressions of the Past

California

via Jonathan Larroquette

A Friend of Mine

Somehow I missed this a few years back:

Which reminded me I’ll probably need this DVD on my shelf, too.

My Hip-hop Style is So Low-key, it Could Better be Described as Folk Music

Back in March, I was all set to interview GZA from The Wu-Tang Clan. He was playing at Zydeco, and my friend Joshua Shoemaker was taking some photographs of him. Unfortunately, some scheduling conflicts kept the interview from ever happening, though Joshua did nab some sweet images of GZA immediately before he went onstage. (Above image comes courtesy of Joshua.)

My buddy Chris Staples of lesser-known Twothirtyeight and Discover America superstardom also happened to be playing in Birmingham that night. He was on tour with Andy Shauf, another awesome singer-songwriter, and as the night progressed they both ended up crashing in my less-than-comfortable living room. Since I already had a list of questions printed out for GZA, at some point Chris suggested we do the interview with him instead. We didn’t deviate from the questions, and the results were pretty hilarious.

You can read the whole interview at Chris’s blog.

Everybody’s Gotta Live

Juliet, Naked

This one was about a recluse musician finding his way into the lives of two characters. I enjoyed Juliet, Naked a good deal, though not nearly as much as Slam.

I read somewhere that Nick Hornby wrote this one because so much about the music industry has changed since the nineties, when High Fidelity was published. So I guess I’d been expecting more of a romp through British music nerddom than a story of romance amongst forty-somethings.

Either way, #49 was a good time. We’re almost at the finish line.