Legends cast large shadows, but such observations bare little weight when speaking of Sarah Lee Guthrie, daughter of Arlo and granddaughter of Woody. With the help of songwriter and husband Johnny Irion, Guthrie has released Exploration, the duo’s debut studio recording; an acoustic, rock-and-hum album enlivened by honey-sweet harmonies and modest hooks.
Saddle Creek fans are in for a treat this spring: Two of the label’s star acts are sharing the bill on a six-week North American tour.
Bright Eyes and The Faint will hit the road April 28 in Lawrence, Kan., and will gig relentlessly through the June 10 finale in San Diego. So fervent are the bands’ fans that two-night stands have been booked in Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Tempe, Ariz. In New York City, they’ll play a whopping five nights in a row at Webster Hall.
Both bands will appear at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., May 1.
Before heading out with their labelmates, Bright Eyes will open for R.E.M. on a two-week tour of Australia and New Zealand. Ever the workaholics, Conor Oberst et al will play extra shows on their own in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth on the tour’s off-days.
Bright Eyes is currently riding high on its two January releases, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The Faint is supporting Wet From Birth.
Source pollstar.com.
Jim Morrison may have died nearly thirty-five years ago, but now you can stay at his place any time you like.
The owner of the Los Angeles apartment where the Doors singer lived with longtime girlfriend Pamela Courson before moving to Paris in 1971 (where he would be found dead later that year) is allowing fans to relive a piece of rock history for $200 a night, or $1000 for a week.
To read more, visit rollingstone.com.
Paul Hester, the drummer from popular 1980s Australian rock band Crowded House, hanged himself in a park in southern Australia, an emergency services spokeswoman said Monday.
Hester, 46, had failed to return home after taking his two dogs for a walk on Friday night. The drummer’s body was later found in a park near his home in the southern city of Melbourne.
Ambulance officers arrived on the scene shortly after midday Saturday and tried to resuscitate him, but “he was dead when they arrived,” Metropolitan Ambulance Service spokeswoman Liraje Memishi said.
Source CNN.com.
Scotland’s Snow Patrol is one of those bands that’s been known in the U.K. a lot longer than they’ve been known in the U.S. The gushing reviews for the first album released in the U.S., Final Straw, is actually their third album if you live across the Pond.
But their first U.S. tour last year did great and after a hard-earned rest, they’ll be back in April, kicking things off at Stubb’s in Austin, Texas on the 24th. Traveling through Dallas, Sacramento, San Francisco, Seattle, Calgary, Winnipeg and other cities before winding things down in Minneapolis May 11th.
The band just changed its founding bass player, and this time they’re bringing a band called Embrace, a Leeds-based unit that has built a following overseas. They’ve only done a few showcase dates here and SxSW, but the response has been overwhelming. According to Embrace’s label, Lava Records, fans lined up for hours to get into their L.A. show.
Source pollstar.com.
In an effort to let all fans be a part of the shows, Widespread Panic have announced the launch of a new website, www.LiveWidespreadPanic.com, in association with nugs net enterprises, where fans will have the opportunity to download concerts in their entirety from select dates. The site will kick off with free MP3 downloads of the first three shows on March 24, 25 & 26 at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta (available only for a limited time).
Powered by nugs.net and its content delivery platform, LiveWidespreadPanic.com will provide high quality soundboard recordings in both MP3 and CD-quality FLAC files. The full-length concerts will be available for $10.95 as MP3 or $15.95 for the higher quality FLAC format. All files are compatible with Windows, Mac and Unix and may be played on the iPod or other portable MP3 players, played in any music jukebox software, or burned to CD. Additionally, each show comes with custom printable booklets, tray inlays, and CD labels. The legions of fans collecting live tapes of the band for 20 years will now be able to tap directly into the band’s soundboard via LiveWidespreadPanic.com and download professionally recorded concerts within days of the performance.
The band has recently released a live album titled Live at Myrtle Beach on Widespread/Sanctuary Records. Despite their time off from touring, Widespread Panic continued to release live CD’s throughout 2004, much to the delight of their fans, including Night of Joy, the acoustic leaning
Like Frank Zappa before him, Green posses an uncanny ability to sing about taboo subjects while masking their identity in short songs. His instrumentation might not approach Zappa
On the surface, DJ Spooky’s new collaboration with Slayer’s Dave Lombardo is just the latest example of his try-anything aesthetic, which has produced avant-garde turntable symphonies alongside dancefloor-fillers.
But “Drums of Death,” due April 26 on Thirsty Ear, is more than Spooky cutting up rhythms from one of metal’s greatest drummers. With its cameos from Chuck D and covers of vintage Public Enemy material, the album also functions as a sort of homage to Def Jam’s pioneering rock-rap fusions of the ’80s.
“Basically Def Jam is kind of like the Motown of our current moment,” Spooky tells Billboard.com. “They are the empire. But I look at when Rick Rubin was producing bands like Slayer, Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys as a kind of template for a lot of the things I’m into now.”
Thus, “Drums of Death” offers new versions of Public Enemy’s “B-Side Wins Again” (featuring guitar from Living Colour’s Vernon Reid), “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” and “Public Enemy No.1,” alongside equally hard-hitting originals like “Quantum Cyborg Drum Machine.”
To read more visit billboard.com.
Recording industry executive Andy Gershon sees opportunity in the online file-sharing networks that most of his rivals decry as havens for music pirates. As president of V2 Records, home to such established acts as The White Stripes and Moby, Gershon mines such Internet distribution channels for new fans and revenues.
“The cat is so far out of the bag and so far gone that it’s pointless to keep fighting it,” Gershon said. “I might as well make as many people fans of our music, whether they illegally download it or not.”
A number of mostly independent recording artists and labels have experimented with and embraced the freewheeling digital distribution that the Internet affords. And many worry that a victory by major recording companies in a landmark file-sharing case now before the U.S. Supreme Court (news – web sites) could short-circuit the very technologies that they believe are making a more level playing field of the music business.
The nation’s high court is to hear arguments next Tuesday on whether the entertainment industry can hold file-sharing software firms Grokster Inc. and StreamCast Networks, which distributes Morpheus, liable for what computer users do with the technology.
Lower courts have sided with the software makers, which assert their so-called peer-to-peer technology is as legitimate as a videocassette recorder or a copy machine.
To read more, visit yahoo.com.
Kings of Leon, DJ Krush and RJD2 are the latest additions to the 2005 Bonnaroo festival. This will be the second appearances for Kings of Leon and RJD2 who played in the festival in both 2004 and 2003 respectively. For a full list of the performers, visit the festival
