Category: Music

I was running in my neighborhood last night and was passing a building on the corner when suddenly the door opened and The Whigs walked out. I almost yelled “hey, The Whigs!” but thought I might startle them.

Fun useless fact: When Luigi played with The Whigs last year the drummer and I were freaking out because both of us are left-handed and we play the exact same vintage drum set.

My sister is photographing Madonna today. Life is weird.

Good luck, sis!

Let me start this paragraph with a completely unoriginal question. What happened to music videos? Surely this is not the first time you’ve heard this complaint, but seriously. I remember in the 80’s when I lived for the world premiere of my favorite artist’s new video. It was a major event and after I watched it, I couldn’t wait to talk about the video the next day with my friends at school.

At this point I can’t remember the last time I saw a video on MTV. I can’t imagine I’ve seen one on the network since 2000 or later. Videos have been replaced by reality shows filled with whiny, spoiled rich kids primping for the camera and dumping/hookingupwith/dumping/repeat their myriad of love interests in a whirlwind of jump cuts as the latest flavor of the month punk/emo band plays on the stereo in the background of their multi-million dollar crash pad. It’s truly ironic that the target demographic for MTV now makes up the majority of the network’s programming and the music that the network once championed is the Muzak® on the set.

These days the best you can hope for is that your video “statement” becomes a viral video and is spread far and wide on the Myspace’s and YouTube’s of the web. YouTube is actually a pretty awesome web site and thank god that bandwidth has improved to a point that you can actually watch music videos again. Maybe YouTube will do for musicians what MTV used to do back in the 80’s, make videos popular as shit and a viable way to promote your band. A guy can dream.

So, for what it’s worth, my band has made a music video. Why? I don’t know, but it was fun to do and didn’t cost us anything. We have some friends who work at Cartoon Network and they offered to shoot us a video for free as a way to pad their “reel”. So, we assembled the day after our album release show last October and shot some digital video. Fast forward a few months and, voila!, the video is done.

So, here’s our video. I think it looks awesome even if it will never be played on MTV. If you like the song, consider buying the album, won’t you? Oh yeah, and before you watch it, imagine that MTV antenna thing with the beep beep beep noise in the background, indicating a world premiere video.

I dug up this video of me and some friends playing a Pixies song. The video was shot and edited by my sister who is also the one playing bass in the video. The song is “Tame” from the Doolittle album. Enjoy!

Holy shit, this sounds like it was a great show. The Sadies recorded a live album Feb. 3 and 4th in Toronto, and here are some of the people who joined them: Neko Case, Kelly Hogan, Gary Louris, Rick White, Blue Rodeo, Jon Langford, The Good Brothers, The Deadly Snakes, Heavy Trash, and Garth Hudson(!). Steve Albini recorded everything with a mobile studio.

I would have loved to see that show. Read more about it here.

Red magazine has come up with a damn good list of 100 albums overlooked by Rolling Stone in that magazine’s recent 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.

The editors of Red magazine came up with some really good selections here. I might just make it a goal to get every album on this list that I don’t already own.

There’s also some well-written analysis regarding the importance of selected albums. Case in point:

Wowee Zowie – Pavement
The greatest band of the ’90s made their greatest album with Wowee Zowie. Sure, Slanted and Enchanted was groundbreaking as hell, and deserves to get every accolade it can muster, but there is something about this record in particular that just breaks the hell out of my heart. Maybe it was the fact that I heard it for the first time when I was just beginning to comprehend what music was and what it can be capable of doing, when I was just learning how to be a teenager, when I was trying to make bands that sounded like this record, but only ending up with something that sounded like Sum 41 led by four sophomore Johnny Rottens. I hated this album for being so damn good.—JS

Nice work, Red magazine. Not too shabby for a magazine from Utah.

(via LHB)

Sorry for the lack of real writing recently on themuy. This month has been c-r-a-z-y (in a good way). So much has happened recently and the wife and I are slammed busy. I don’t have much time to write today, so I’ll just let you in on something I’ve been planning for the past few months.

Jeff Holt (Silent Kids, Georgia Fireflies) and I are putting together a charity event at the EARL this Saturday, Dec. 17th. It’s called The Happenstance. We’re inviting 30 musicians down to the EARL where they will be randomly distributed into 6 different bands and then sent off to a practice space for the day where they will write a 20 minute set of music. All of the bands will then converge on the EARL that night to perform. All proceeds are going to The New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund.

We have people signed up from the following Atlanta bands: Luigi, The Roy Owens Jr., Day Mars Ray, Hot Young Priest, Brain Box, Jupiter Watts, Tag Team, Charm School, Long Knives, Jetty, The Licentious 5, The Liverhearts, Sudden Rays, Sunday Drive Bye, The Forty Fives, Parade, The Yum Yum Tree, Soft Collision, Silent Kids, Legend of the Giant Squid and more.

Jeff and I did this last year and it was a huge success. Both the audience and musicians involved had a blast. If you’re in town this weekend, I urge you to come by and cheer the bands on. It’s going to be a good time.

Every fall in Georgia, it gets cold for about a week and then the weather turns unusually warm for one to two more weeks.

And then it gets really cold again and stays that way for the rest of the winter.

Well, I’m glad to report that we’re still in that warm phase and it’s really nice. This past weekend was especially beautiful. All of the trees varying shades of yellow, orange and red, the sky a crystal clear blue and the temperature hovering in the mid 70’s. When you add a cold beer to the mix, your enjoyment factor goes through the roof.

I spent Saturday afternoon hanging out at the Chomp N Stomp festival in Cabbagetown and I’m here to report that it was a fine ol’ time. I was there to lend a percussive hand to my friends in the Georgia Fireflies, a group made up of Jeff and Leanna from Silent Kids. The Fireflies play old timey bluegrass and I joined them up on the stage for a few tunes. My weapon of choice was the spoons. Here are a few pictures.

Playing with the Georgia Fireflies was a lot of fun. My only regret was that even though I brought my own spoons, I didn’t sample any of the chili. I guess that makes me more of a stomper than a chomper. Oh well, maybe next year.