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Dave Grohl Chats With the Guardian

Dave Grohl
Jason Tate

Dave Grohl talked with The Guardian:

He’s more forthcoming about the brilliant hardcore punk rager Of All People, which begins: “Of all people, you survived / When no one else could stay alive / You know you should be dead / But you’re alive instead.” He wrote it “after bumping into a drug dealer from the 90s that was getting everyone fucked up on heroin. I hadn’t seen them in 30 years, and they’re alive, healthy and sober. I was so happy that this person survived, while at the same time, I was devastated, because of all of the people I know that we’ve lost to exactly that drug” – Cobain was a heroin user. “I was so fucking angry, but at the same time so grateful to see them alive and well. Again, a conversation within myself, feeling so conflicted and divided. When I read the lyrics back, I mentioned them to my therapist: is this survivor’s guilt?”

Olivia Rodrigo Talks New Album

Olivia Rodrigo
Jason Tate

Olivia Rodrigo talked with Vogue about her new album:

The fan theories were right: these are all love songs, but specifically about the obsession and anxiety of it – or the depression when your lover is gone. They’re “sad love songs”, she’ll later write over email. “I realised all my favourite romantic love songs were beautiful because they had a tinge of fear or yearning in them.”

The first is smooth, trippy soft rock about the spirituality of finding the man of your dreams. Her voice sounds so different – laid-back and mature. Once or twice, she tells me, she’s had premonitions of her relationships. It’s part feminine intuition, part manifestation, but also maybe the high achiever in her. “I’m very stubborn and if I like someone, I’m like, ‘Yo, this is going to happen. This is rare! Let’s do it.’” The kismet feeling is embodied in the chorus. “The person that the song is about is great,” she says, grinning.

Apple Photo’s (Lack Of) Concert Identification

Apple
Jason Tate

Chris Devers, writing about how Apple Photo’s “concert tagging feature” often fails:

This would be a lot less annoying if Apple provided some basic tools to help out here.

If we could edit the concert event tags, we could fix the problem ourselves. Alas, the tags are added (or not) automatically, and we have no way to control them. Better still, if we could edit the tags to note which artist was performing, that would also help, particularly for events where two or more names were on the lineup. If the software gave greater weight to geotags, that might help. Few events span miles, nevermind dozens of miles, so if the photos are of different places, they shouldn’t be grouped together as the same event.

Dave Grohl Talks with Mojo

Foo Fighters
Jason Tate

Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters talked with Mojo in a new interview:

“There was no plan to make an album,” Grohl tells MOJO’s David Fricke. However, he reports that after a year of writing and listening back to the “40 or 50 instrumentals” he had amassed, he found one stretch of eight recordings that were “punchy, fast, energetic” which felt like the seeds of a new Foos’ album. “I said, ‘That’s what we need…’” recalls Grohl.

Lorde Leaves Universal Music Group

Lorde
Jason Tate

Lorde has decided to leave Universal Music.

“I adore them, they’re incredible people, and I have had an amazing experience with them,” she said about her time with UMG. “But the truth is that a 12-year-old girl pre-signed and pre-sold her creative output before she knew what it would be like and before she knew what she was signing away.”

Geoff Rickly Talks Perfume and Thursday

Thursday
Jason Tate

Geoff Rickly of Thursday talked with Human Pursuits:

We’ve settled into a comfortable spot now—highly influential and beloved by cerebral elements of the fandom—but not the leading band by any populist metric.

That’s probably where we always belonged, but because we were doing something different before everyone else, there was a moment where we were the band to watch—sort of like Turnstile is now. We were selling out 5,000 capacity theatres, right at that point of being as big as you can get without being a household name. It happened a year into Full Collapse being out. That record sold 700 copies the week it was released; it was not a hit. Then all of a sudden, boom, it was. None of us knew how deal with it; there was no PR training.

Part two can be found here:

I’m really proud of Thursday that we waited until the hype died down. When you get back together, you’re playing your biggest shows ever, selling 3,000 tickets in huge rooms. You can do that once or twice on a reunion, but if you become a band again, you have to re-normalise. We waited until we had normalized and until we knew each other a little bit. We wrote a lot of songs that we didn’t release that were, quite frankly, bad.

Spotify to Let Your Edit Your Algorithm

Jason Tate

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

This Taste Profile is key to Spotify’s recommendations, including personalized playlists like Discover Weekly, Made For You recommendations, and the year-end review known as Spotify Wrapped, among other things. 

Starting with Premium listeners initially in New Zealand, Spotify will allow users to see all their listening data in one place in the app, including music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Users will then be able to edit this profile and even fine-tune future recommendations by asking for more or less of a certain vibe. After doing so, the app’s home page will reflect a different set of suggestions.

I Am the Avalanche Talk New Album

I Am the Avalanche
Jason Tate

I Am the Avalanche talked with Rock Sound about their upcoming album:

Whether I was procrastinating or not, I wrote the lyrics when it was the exact right time for me to write them. It came after I experienced the most insane amount of loss. At the time, part of me was like, ‘Most of the lyrics aren’t written yet, so I guess the record’s never going to get done.’ It was a sunny day though, so I went to the park by my apartment, and I wrote the first lyrics. It killed me for the next three days. I got it off my chest, and it took so much out of me physically and mentally, but I saw the result. I went into the studio around three days after I wrote that first song. I sang it in the vocal booth, and when I heard it back, I became empowered. I knew that I needed to see it through.

Zach Bryan Buys ‘On the Road’ Scroll

Zach Bryan
Jason Tate

Zach Bryan purchased Jack Kerouac’s original On the Road manuscript for $12.1 million.

Previously owned by Jim Irsay, the iconic 120-foot typed scroll was offered as part of a major Christie’s auction that also included David Gilmour’s “Black Strat” and Jerry Garcia’s “Tiger” guitar. Irsay, the late owner of the Indianapolis Colts, originally purchased the On the Road manuscript in 2001 for $2.43 million, which at the time set a record for a literary work sold at auction.

Make Do and Mend Announce New Album

Headphones
Jason Tate

Make Do and Mend have announced they’ll release their new album On Going later this year.

Over the past year or so, we started to bat around what being creative together again might look like. We began sharing ideas, which led to a collection of new songs that will make up the fourth Make Do and Mend album. We humbly regard it as our best.

We’ll have more to share soon about when and how this new album will find its way to you. For now, we’ll let you know, the album is called On Going.

Live Nation Executives Brag About “Robbing” Ticket Buyers

Video
Jason Tate

Walden Green, writing for Pitchfork:

The conversations are between Ben Baker, now head of ticketing for Venue Nation, and Jeff Weinhold, currently a senior director in the ticketing department. Baker and Weinhold joke about overcharging and price-gouging fans—“Robbing them blind, baby,” Baker brags in one exchange pertaining to a Kid Rock show in Tampa Bay—as well as being able to raise prices on ancillary services such as parking seemingly at will. “These people are so stupid,” Baker writes. “I almost feel bad taking advantage of them BAHAHAHAHAHA.”