Search Results for: the wonder years

Jasun Martz, a producer and musician who has recorded for Michael Jackson, toured with Frank Zappa and helped arrange Starship’s classic hit We Built this City, recently found an old, dusty suitcase in the corner of his attic. Inside was a small canvas painting and unmarked audio tape. An unreleased Michael Jackson or Zappa outtake, he thought? The tape, missing for 30 years, turned out to be the only known recording by unknown Los Angeles singer, songwriter, pianist Sue Reed. In the late ’70s Ms. Reed was pioneering the sound now made popular by Tori Amos, Regina Spektor, Fiona Apple,… Read more »

If it seems like you are listening to music more but enjoying it less, some people in the recording industry say they know why. They blame that iPod that you can’t live without, along with all the compressed MP3 music files you’ve loaded on it. Those who work behind-the-mic in the music industry — producers, engineers, mixers and the like — say they increasingly assume their recordings will be heard as MP3s on an iPod music player. That combination is thus becoming the “reference platform” used as a test of how a track should sound. (Movie makers make much the… Read more »

For four years, AFI isn’t the only fire Davey Havok and Jade Puget have had inside – they’ve also been trying to flesh out the debut album by their long-pending side project, Blaqk Audio. Now, finally, the LP is good to go.”It’s very different from AFI,” Havok warned us at last weekend’s Live Earth concert in East Rutherford, New Jersey . The album, CexCells, has been in the works since 2003 – around the time Havok and Puget told Rolling Stone that they were hoping to release the project in early 2004. When AFI broke into the mainstream with 2003’s… Read more »

Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady who championed conservation and worked tenaciously for the political career of her husband, Lyndon B. Johnson, died Wednesday, a family spokeswoman said. She was 94. Johnson, who suffered a stroke in 2002 that affected her ability to speak, returned home late last month after a week at Seton Medical Center, where she’d been admitted for a low-grade fever. She died at her Austin home of natural causes about 5:18 p.m. EDT. Elizabeth Christian, the spokeswoman, said she was surrounded by family and friends. Even after the stroke, Johnson still managed to make occasional… Read more »

Some of the world’s biggest names in music were all about Saving Our Selves this weekend. SOS, of course, referring to the campaign being touted Saturday across the globe at the seven-continent, 24-hour Live Earth concert extravaganza, a worldwide shout-out to individuals, political leaders, corporations and every other entity capable of helping put a stop to the environmental scourge that is global warming. In a partnership with Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection and other U.S.-based and international organizations, Live 8 executive producer Kevin Wall put together a bill that included the Police, Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica,… Read more »

Recently, Maureen Callahan wrote a piece for the New York Post about Crush Management, the NYC cadre that shepherds the careers of Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, the Academy Is … , Boys Like Girls and Armor for Sleep (or, as Callahan puts it, “basically any band that a 13-year-old girl with a blog and a Hot Topic habit obsesses over”). Aside from providing readers with some genuinely bananas quotes from songwriter/ rock-and-roll vampire Butch Walker about credibility (especially considering this is on his résumé), the article is excellent primarily because it floats the hypothesis that the artists… Read more »

Imagine a “dream machine” on wheels. It’s easy if you try. But the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus is no dream. A state-of-the-art multimedia studio packed in a bus, it’s a vehicle for opening the minds of aspiring young musicians. “Swing open the door, step inside, take three short steps into the main cabin and look around,” writes Mark Garvey in “Come Together: The Official John Lennon Educational Tour Bus Guide to Music and Video,” a recently published history of the bus by Garvey and Yoko Ono Lennon. “You’ve entered a different world. And whether you’re young or old, if… Read more »

For all the talk about Linkin Park killing off nü metal on the upcoming Minutes to Midnight, it’s rather puzzling that the first sound you hear on the album is the crackle of a needle hitting a record. After all, one of the, uh, tenets of the genre was the head-bopping DJ – think guys like LP’s Joe Hahn or Limp Bizkit’s Lethal – the dude responsible for, literally, putting the needle on the record (and for appearing out of place in all the press photos). So was co-frontman Chester Bennington kidding when he told MTV News back in September… Read more »

The one thing fans will immediately notice about Ozzy Osbourne’s forthcoming LP Black Rain is that it’s drenched in some of the heaviest riffage to grace one of the Prince of Darkness’ solo outings – thanks, in large part, to Ozzy’s longtime guitarist, the Jack Daniel’s-chugging Zakk Wylde. According to Osbourne, there were times during the tracking of the album when he wondered whether the songs were too abrasive. But you see, Ozzy’s got this personal rule about making music. “If you’re heavy, don’t try to be f—ing light,” he explained. Wise words from a man whose stamp on the… Read more »

Young indie rockers Arctic Monkeys, who made history with Britain’s fastest-selling debut album in 2006, are out to prove they are no one-hit wonders with their second record released on Monday. Critics wonder if the weight of expectation will be too much for the musicians from the northern city of Sheffield, among the first to make it big by harnessing the power of the Internet. Alexis Petridis, music critic for the Guardian newspaper, called “Favourite Worst Nightmare” arguably the most anticipated second album in a decade. Judging by early reviews and the reaction of fans at gigs across the country,… Read more »