Frank Ocean recently interviewed Timothée Chalamet for V Man:
Absolutely. I’m a total “nostalgist” and Call Me By Your Name’s director, Luca, grew up in that time period. In fact, the book is set in ’88 and he changed it to ’83 because he said that was the year in your life you can hear music from. In the movie, there’s Talking Heads, The Psychedelic Furs, or just the Bach or Beethoven—those are all songs from Luca’s youth, what it was like for him in Italy in the ’80s.
The Pink Spiders have launched a Kickstarter to help fund their first album in almost ten years:
This pre-order campaign allows you to grab limited edition merch and experiences that have never been available before including shirts and other collectibles, hand-written lyric sheets, studio visits, house parties and much more! Take a look around this page at the many unique ways you can participate in the process.
Miranda Katz, writing for Wired:
Podcasters and advertisers alike have long suspected that their listeners might just be a holy grail of engagement. The medium is inherently intimate, and easily creates a one-sided feeling of closeness between listener and host—the sense that the person talking into your ear on your commute is someone you know, whose product recommendations you trust, and whose work you want to support.
I really need to find the time to get Encore rolling again on a more consistent basis. I miss doing the show every week.
Lindy West, writing for The New York Times:
When you work in media, Twitter becomes part of your job. It’s where you orient yourself in “the discourse” — figure out what’s going on, what people are saying about it and, more important, what no one has said yet. In a lucky coup for Twitter’s marketing team, prevailing wisdom among media types has long held that quitting the platform could be a career killer. The illusion that Twitter visibility and professional relevance are indisputably inextricable always felt too risky to puncture. Who could afford to call that bluff and be wrong? So, we stayed, while Twitter’s endemic racist, sexist and transphobic harassment problems grew increasingly more sophisticated and organized.
I think about this all the time. There are times when I find Twitter indispensable (while watching a sporting event and following experts, or when huge news breaks), but at what cost?
Migos have the number one album in the country this week:
Rap trio Migos scores its second No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart as Culture II opens atop the tally. The set — which was released on Jan. 26 through Quality Control/Motown/Capitol Records — earned 199,000 equivalent album units in the week ending Feb. 1, according to Nielsen Music.
Buddy Nielsen sat down with Substream Magazine to talk about the new Senses Fail album:
Nielsen goes on to explain, “I wanted to write a career-defining record for the band, using my songwriting.” As someone who has been following Senses Fail for a long time, this was news to me. I was unaware that Nielsen was primarily just the lyricist for the band, up until the past few records. For 2013’s Renacer, he wrote one song completely on his own, and for 2015’s Pull the Thorns From Your Heart, he wrote six songs completely. For their upcoming album, If There is a Light, It Will Find You, Nielsen wrote all of them.
Apple Inc.’s streaming-music service, introduced in June 2015, has been adding subscribers in the U.S. more rapidly than its older Swedish rival—a monthly growth rate of 5% versus 2%—according to people in the music business familiar with figures reported by the two services. Assuming that pace continues, Apple will overtake Spotify in the world’s biggest music market this summer.
Interesting.
Brian Fallon sat down with Track 7 to talk about his upcoming album, The Gaslight Anthem, and his past, present, and future:
“Whenever someone mentions a record, that’s when I step away. And the reason for that is because right now, I can’t see what a new Gaslight record would sound like. When you take the records that we’ve done that I’m very proud of – and I’m proud of all of them, even the later ones – I don’t know what I would add to that right now.”
Weezer confirmed on Double J that they will release The Black Album on May 25th:
“This other album just kind of materialised,” he said. “I had two folders on my Dropbox: one was ‘The Black Album’, and it didn’t get filled as quickly as this other folder, which I temporarily titled ‘New Folder’. That one filled up with ten songs that were definitely different, but not quite as different as The Black Album. So, we put a name on it – Pacific Daydream – and put that out first.”
Ed Christman, writing for Billboard:
Best Buy has just told music suppliers that it will pull CDs from its stores come July 1. At one point, Best Buy was the most powerful music merchandiser in the U.S., but nowadays it’s a shadow of its former self, with a reduced and shoddy offering of CDs. Sources suggest that the company’s CD business is nowadays only generating about $40 million annually. While it says it’s planning to pull out CDs, Best Buy will continue to carry vinyl for the next two years, keeping a commitment it made to vendors. The vinyl will now be merchandised with the turntables, sources suggest.
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Sufjan Stevens recently talked with Stereogum about writing a song about Tonya Harding and other topics:
The song is in no way affiliated with the movie, but I certainly rushed to release it in tandem. I sent them a copy while they were still editing: “Hey, y’all, I know that you’re working on the movie. I’ve been working on this song for about 10 years.” That’s true. I’ve been trying to write a Tonya Harding song for a long time. The musical director got back to us and said, “Um, we’re kind of going in a different direction.”
Jon Caramanica, writing for The New York Times:
Yes, and it wasn’t. If you were to have been my accountant at that time, you would say there might never be a better time than right this minute to release a record, but it just doesn’t work for me that way. So the waiting game began. We did our tour and a year passed. I wrote, like, snippets and then I would stop. I’d physically stop. I put the pencil and the paper down and said, “Stop it. You’re just eager, you’re eager to deliver.”
Then one day off tour I woke up one morning and I walked downstairs and I wrote a song, and it was evident from the first melodic idea that this was a Dashboard song. And the next morning I woke up and I bolted for my guitar. I realized, “I’m there.” After all that time I’d begun to wonder if they’d ever come back, and when they came back they came back in rapid succession. The whole thing was a cavalcade and I just surrendered to it.
This is a really well done and informative interview. I’ve been spinning the new album for a few weeks now, and there’s some really good classic Dashboard Confessional songs on it (and a few I’m not sold on), but man, I will go do my grave thinking Alter the Ending was criminally underrated.
Letterboxd, an app for tracking movies that I’ve talked a bit about before, has launched version 2.0:
In the 22 months since the launch of our iPhone app, we’ve consistently received the same feedback: please make this work on my iPad! We’re pleased to announce that today we’ve shipped Letterboxd 2.0 for iOS, a universal app with native iPad support that brings the richness of our community to the larger form factor.
You can follow me here if you’re interested.