Continuing the advance promotion of Spoon’s upcoming album, They Want My Soul, Britt Daniel performed acoustic versions of two of the songs, “Rent I Pay” and “Rainy Taxi,” on BBC Radio 6.
Talking about being a musician Daniels said:
“There was a long time where there was a lot of not-fun stuff we would do and a lot of scrounging, but I knew this was the only thing I wanted to do and I just kept pushing forward. Now there’s a little more success and it really does make things easier when you get to spend a few more bucks to record a record. You can stay in a hotel instead of a friend’s floor.”
Spoon’s Britt Daniel Plays Acoustic ‘Rent I Pay,’ ‘Rainy Taxi’ On BBC Radio.
[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.
And if you’re interested the book is now available at Amazon.
–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Music for Robots is a new EP that Squarepusher made with robots. “The Z-Machines are three robots created by Japanese roboticists with the purpose of performing music that’s too advanced for the most skilled human musicians,” Pitchfork reports. “There’s a guitarist robot with 78 fingers and a drummer with 22 arms.” About working with the Z-Machines, Squarepusher said in a statement: “In this project the main question I’ve tried to answer is ‘can these robots play music that is emotionally engaging?’ I have long admired the player piano works of Conlon Nancarrow and Gyorgy Ligeti. Part of the appeal of that music has to do with hearing a familiar instrument being ‘played’ in an unfamiliar fashion. For me there has always been something fascinating about the encounter of the unfamiliar with the familiar. I have long been an advocate of taking fresh approaches to existing instrumentation as much as I am an advocate of trying to develop new instruments, and being able to rethink the way in which, for example, an electric guitar can be used is very exciting. Each of the robotic devices involved in the performance of this music has its own specification which permits certain possibilities and excludes others – the robot guitar player for example can play much faster than a human ever could, but there is no amplitude control. In the same way that you do when you write music for a human performer, these attributes have to be borne in mind – and a particular range of musical possibilities corresponds to those attributes. Consequently, in this project familiar instruments are used in ways which till now have been impossible.” — Pitchfork
AC/DC Heading Into the Studio: AC/DC singer Brian Johnson told a Florida radio station that the band will be going into the studio in Vancouver this May. The band is also planning a 40th anniversary tour for later this year. — Rolling Stone
Tom Waits Pens Song For Bluesman John Hammond: John Hammond’s new album is called Timeless and includes a song Tom Waits wrote specifically for Hammond called “No One Can Forgive Me But My Baby.” “He came to a recording date I was doing in San Francisco in 1992,” Hammond said. “John Lee Hooker had sat in to do a duet with me, and Tom Waits appeared out of nowhere and said, ‘I have a song for you, man.’ It was about 20 minutes long, with everybody in the Bible coming down to the river. I said, ‘Gee, you know, it’s a great song, but I don’t think I could do anything like that.’ He said, ‘Oh, you don’t like that one?’ So he goes into the control room.” About ten minutes later, according to Hammond, Waits returns with a new song he’d just written. “So I did it,” Hammond said. “He had left by the time we completed it, and so I sent him a cassette of it. And I hadn’t heard from him for a while, so I called — and he had it on his answering machine. I guess he liked it.” — NPR
Spoon’s Britt Daniel Has A Second Side Project: Britt Daniel isn’t content to Lead Spoon and play guitar in Divine Fits. Now he’s got a third band, Split Single that includes Daniel on bass and backing vocals, frontman Jason Narducy (ex-Verbow, also of Bob Mould’s band) and Superchunk/Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster. The group’s debut album, Fragmented World, will be out April 1, 2014. Check out a trailor for the album below. — Pitchfork
Lost album from Johnny Cash: As I previously reported, Johnny Cash recorded an album with producer Billy Sherrill in the early ’80s but the album was shelved when Cash left Columbia Records in 1986. That will change on March 25, 2014 when the album, Out Among the Stars, will finally be released. Here’s another track off it. “I’m Moving On” Bincludes vocals from Waylon Jennings:
The Notwist Return With New Album: Close To The Glass is the new album from the German electro-pop band, The Notwist. Read more about it and listen to the whole thing at NPR’s First Listen. — NPR
Hip-Hop Collaboration: New song, “97.92,” from Sacramento’s Trash Talk and Brooklyn rappers Flatbush Zombies. — Stereogum
Plus a mini-documentary on Trash Talk from Pitchfork:
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Today the teen site Rookie posted this recording of “Love Letters” by Spoon’s Britt Daniel and wrote:
For this month’s theme song, I sent Britt, who’s a big fan of girl-group pop, half a dozen songs that female teen idols had made popular in the ’50s or ’60s as suggestions/thought-provokers, and he elected to do a take on Shelley Fabares version of “Love Letters” (from her 1962 album, Shelly!).
Fabares’s public image was the very ideal of purity and sweetness, and her songs were all about the rapture of young love—a perfect choice for this month’s theme, Forever.
Daniel himself explained to Rookie: “I knew the Ketty Lester version from ‘Blue Velvet.’ When Divine Fits were touring we would actually play that [over the PA] before we came onstage. Before you sent me the Shelley Fabares version, I never thought [the song] could be made uncreepy.”
Check out all three versions.
Britt Daniels:
Here’s Shelley Fabares 1962 recording:
And here’s Ketty Lester’s version, also from 1962, which was used in “Blue Velvet” and it the best of the three:
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Spoon’s Britt Daniel photographed by Michael Goldberg, March 2001.
Drummer/producer Jim Eno is halfway through mixing a new Spoon album in Buffalo, NY, with Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips), according to Consequence of Sound.
The album will be the group’s eighth studio album and the followup to 2010’s Transference.
Recording began this past spring at Eno’s Public Hi-Fi Studios in Austin, TX, Consequence of Sound reports, and so far the group has recorded at least ten songs: “The Rent I Pay,” “Naff Bag,” “Millionaires,” “Let Me Be Mine,” “Modern Girls,” “I Ain’t the One,” “Fresh From Your Pages,” “Give Me It,” “They Want My Soul”, and an untitled song.
