"Just his voice and his drumming were so incredibly personal… It comes out of a certain place in the past, and you can't replicate it." —Nevertheless, Bruce Springsteen sang The Band's "The Weight" last night in honor of Levon Helm at the Prudential Center in Newark. [Via]
Animator Ned Wenlock directed this excellent video for Wesleyan synth rockers MGMT, to go with the song they recorded for the installment of the Late Night Tales compilation series they recently curated. It's a cover of a song from Bauhaus's 1982 album, The Sky's Gone Out.
Three lists can be made of awesome groups of things that appear in this video.
So the new Peter Gabriel album, Scratch My Back, is sounding more and more intriguing. It's all cover songs, all orchestral arrangements, and two leaks, versions of Arcade Fire's "My Body is a Cage" and Bon Iver's "Flume," are both excellent.
The wonderful depressive Bill Callahan has recorded a terrific version of Mickey Newbury's 1973 nugget "Heaven Help the Child." In a cool move, Callahan's label, Drag City Records, has released it as a split 7-inch single with the original. The video looks like the cover to Brian Eno's Before and After Science album.
Whoa! It's supposed to be 85 degrees in New York on Sunday, which will be October 9th. Lots of people will be all, "This is the result of global warming!" But it's not. And not just because global warming is a fiction being espoused by just about every scientist in the world for their own personal profit. The blast of heat we'll be getting this weekend is regularly occurring autumnal phenomenon. It's called Indian Summer and you probably already know all this. There have been many songs written about it.
As much as I love LCD Soundsystem, as sure I am that their final live performance, just announced to take place on April 2nd, will be totally awesome, I'm not sure I can get myself to attend a concert with a dress code. (I know I'm being curmudgeonly here—and a Madison Garden full of everyone wearing only black and white will make for great video and photographs. But still. I'm old!) Nevertheless, the event is even more exciting in that the recently reformed art-disco-rock band Liquid Liquid will be opening the show. It's perfect.
Wow wow wow! The title track to Gil Scott-Heron's latest album, I'm New Here, is incredible! The album came out a few months ago to rave reviews, and I'd heard some stuff that proved the once-great groove poet was back in strong form after years of horrible addiction and jail. (This was warm relief. I saw him in the mid-'90s, and he looked like a person who might not be living very much longer.) But I hadn't heard this one til the video came out yesterday. It's a cover of a Bill Callahan song. And while Callahan (a.k.a. Smog) is an old favorite of [...]
Here is a video of golfer John Daly wearing white pants and an American flag sports coat and performing Bob Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" in Thailand. [Via]
Here is a nice black-and-white video for the song "Wichita" by the young rapper XV, who is from Wichita, Kansas. The song is good, though I wish XV had done a little more with the chorus. The star producer Just Blaze, who is most famous for his work with Jay-Z, constructed the beat for XV's song using samples of the classic pop standard "Wichita Lineman" as recorded by Johnny Harris and the Dells.
Philly's Free Energy and Jersey's Titus Andronicus just finished a tour together. At one of the last shows, last week in Atlanta, the Titus guys joined Free Energy for a beery, raucous rendition of "I'm Goin' Down," a song from Bruce Springsteen's 1984 album, Born in the U.S.A. It's pretty great.
Coincidentally, this is the same Springsteen song NYC's Vampire Weekend has been playing lately.
Huh. A month ago, we offered a list of suggestions as to which Peter Gabriel song each artist he covered on his song-swap project Scratch My Back should cover in return. Today we learn that the dutiful Canadians in Arcade Fire have indeed gone with our pick, and are currently working on a version of Gabriel's 1980 hit "Games Without Frontiers." The Magnetic Fields' Stephen Merritt had apparently already recorded "Not One of Us" before hearing he was assigned "Don't Give Up." And it seems Paul Simon simply DISOBEYED US (?!) choosing to try his hand at "Biko" instead of "Solsbury Hill" as we'd recommended. (Jeez, "Biko." [...]
