There haven’t been many bands over the last few years that have consistently hit the road as hard and as often as the Dave Matthews Band. The perennial road warriors
Longtime Phish fan David Paul Kleinman lives in Hampton and has put together a kickass list of restaurants, bars, liquor stores and points of interest for those attending the shows
Last week, we presented DaveO’s series of articles about what the members of Phish have been up to for the past five years called Coventry To Hampton. Within each column
We’re celebrating Fat Tuesday with the video debut of New Orleans funksters Bonerama. This video for Big Fine Woman comes from PartyGras2009.com – a site anchored by PBS and Bonerama
I’ve been writing for a Hidden Track for a little over a year now, but it wasn’t until just last week that I finally had my William Miller moment. I had the opportunity to flex my journalism degree by interviewing ATO recording artist and former Better Than Noodling subject Ben Kweller.
The unbelievably likable and laid back singer-songwriter took some time last week to chat with Hidden Track from Omaha, NE – where he was kicking off his 17 city tour – about his new indie-twang-pop album Changing Horses…
Jeffrey Greenblatt: The title of the album is Changing Horses, it seems like it’s a nod to the new sound. Did you set out to make a country-inspired record?
Ben Kweller: I did. I came up with the album back in 2004, I came up with the album title and stuff and I wrote the song Hurtin’ You and that’s the one I was like “oh, I should make an album of songs like this called Changing Horses.” I’ve been working on the songs ever since and I just decided to record ’em.
JG: Did you grow up listening to a lot of country music?
BK: Oh yeah
JG: Who did you grow up listening to?
BK: Well you know in the beginning it was like everything that was on the radio like Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson and stuff like that. [I listened to] country, pop-country in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s and then I got into the older stuff when I got older, learned more about the roots of things, got into Johnny Cash and Hank. So sort of the same way with rock n’ roll you know like when Nirvana came out, and all those bands, all the grunge bands I was really into that stuff. And then you start to learn about the Velvet Underground and punk rock and the roots of it all.
READ ON for more of ATO recording artist Ben Kweller’s thoughts on producing albums, summer festivals and his son’s love of Guns N’ Roses…
After an incredibly successful election season that saw the non-partisan group register 105,697 voter registration, you couldn’t blame the folks at HeadCount for taking a break before gearing up for
Willfully walking into a wild and wacky situation is one thing. To do so in the pursuit of some sort of lofty man-made goal, and hope to pull through with all of one’s senses intact is quite another thing entirely. What is it one is really looking for? How to get it done? Does it really matter in the end? When has one truly gone over the edge? A case by case basis, to be sure, and The Edge, as Hunter S. Thompson would have said, is in the mind of the beholder as we commence on our little journey down the rabbit hole of madness.
A murder has been committed, and there are three witnesses. Unfortunately, the crime occurred in an insane asylum, and the witnesses aren’t speaking, so the main character, a journalist in a gravely misguided pursuit of a Pulitzer Prize for solving the mystery, decides to have himself committed into the institution in this week’s Hidden Flick, a sharp, haunting, and sometimes completely bonkers film, Samuel Fuller’s 1963 cautionary tale of moral destiny and mental destitution, Shock Corridor.
Peter Breck plays Johnny Barrett, the ambitious scribe, who is so confident in his own intellect and talent that he concocts a weird back-story to get himself inside the mental hospital as a patient with a lecherous edge. His girlfriend, Cathy, a stripper with the proverbial heart of gold, played by Constance Towers, would pretend to be his sister, and complain to the authorities that her brother was molesting her, and should be committed because of his pending mental breakdown and dangerous threat to society. Barrett would simply pose as a patient, investigate the other patients and guards, eventually interview the three witnesses to the murder, solve the case, identify the murderer, write his glorious story, and win the Pulitzer Prize. Such a brilliant and easy enough idea, right?
READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick – Shock Corridor…
The People Speak” was a special music and spoken word program at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Performers included Sundance founder Robert Redford, Woody Harrelson, Josh Brolin, Benjamin Bratt, and Marissa Tomei.
Probably the biggest trap into which a live album can fall is that of sounding too much like a studio album. After all, if it sounds pretty much like the studio cuts with crowd noise in between, what's the point? A live album should inject different energies or arrangements into the songs we already love, not just rehash them. It's an all too common disaster and any band on the verge of it would be wise to use Still Dangerous as a guide toward righteousness (just as much as Lizzy's established classic Live and Dangerous).
The debut, self-titled album by Tinted Windows will be released April 21st on S-Curve Records. Tinted Windows are: Taylor Hanson (lead vocals), James Iha (guitar), Adam Schlesinger (bass), and Bun
