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Plexamp v3

Jason Tate

Plex have updated their music player app:

Applications should have a raison d’être. For Plexamp v3, it came down to: play music fast, don’t stop.

I’m all in on Apple Music, but still use Plex for my video library; however, I am always interested in what else is going on in the music player space.

Various Artists to Cover “Times Like These” for Charity

Foo Fighters
Jason Tate

Over 20 artists are coming together this Thursday, April 23rd, to cover the Foo Fighters’ “Times Like These.”

The cover of Foo Fighters’ Times Like These, using “phones, pots, pans and acoustic guitars”, according to producer Fraser T Smith, features artists spanning pop, rock, rap, soul, dancehall and R&B, including Dua Lipa, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Rita Ora and Ellie Goulding.

It will be released as a single, with profits from UK streams and downloads going to Children in Need and Comic Relief to help British people affected by the coronavirus crisis. Profits from international listeners will go to the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund.

Read More “Various Artists to Cover “Times Like These” for Charity”

Manchester Orchestra Launch Patreon

Jason Tate

Manchester Orchestra have launched a Patreon:

I feel like artistically, our subscription service should also have a concept, a time frame where there is a theme revolving around what we are releasing each month. This first theme is called “Simple Math/Sinful Math.” Next year marks the ten year anniversary of our third album, Simple Math. While writing that album we always had plans to go back and release a much more raw and exposed version of this album with new songs and no strings. we are already planning a really cool expansive LP including the songs from Sinful Math, acoustic demos, and full band demos to be released next year. I’ve thought about this a lot for many years and my biggest concern was making sure that what we ended up releasing and providing is actually worth your money. I hope this is a way where we can lift the curtain on this album and really pull it apart while also releasing extra goodies and all sorts of content from us. Thank you, as always, for supporting our band and if this is something that you aren’t interested in or can’t afford at the moment I can assure you that we will continue putting all of our best interests and passion into creating the best music that we possibly can. We really love you all.

Fiona Apple Talks With Vulture

Fiona Apple
Jason Tate

Fiona Apple talked with Vulture:

Making my first album, [I would go to the studio] from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. every day. While everybody else put together the arrangements, [I was] just sitting there being like, “When do I sing? When do I sing?” The difference between [then and now], me being like, “Oh, I think I’d like to play that thing on this. Okay, I can go do that right now.” It makes me feel like I wasn’t ever given a chance to be a musician before. Because you’d have to do everything in the studio, and I’m not good at doing things in front of people under pressure.

Phoebe Bridgers Reflects on Elliot Smith

Phoebe Bridgers
Jason Tate

Phoebe Bridgers talked with NPR about Elliot Smith and his influence on her music:

Though she represents a generation that did not get into Smith’s music until after his death in October 2003, she’s dug deep into the archives to become, in her words, an Elliott Smith nerd. Her music — with its evocative lyrics, melodious murmurs and stark, surprising bursts of bleak humor — certainly echoes with his spectral influence. (She’ll release her second album, Punisher, on June 19.) “I have experienced the thing where people are like, ‘Oh, really, you like Elliott Smith? Shocker,’ ” she says with a laugh, phoning one day from her LA home. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but really. It’s not just a look. It’s my favorite music.’

The Weeknd Top the Charts

The Weeknd
Jason Tate

The Weeknd once again tops the Billboard charts:

The Weeknd’s After Hours scores a third straight week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, becoming the first album to lead for three consecutive weeks since Post Malone’s Hollywood’s Bleeding also spent its first three weeks atop the tally last year (Sept. 21-Oct. 5, 2019-dated charts), of a total of five non-consecutive frames at No. 1.

Jason Isbell Shares Essay on John Prine

Jason Isbell
Jason Tate

Jason Isbell penned an essay for The New York Times on John Prine:

Of all the things I love about John’s songwriting, my favorite is the way he could step so completely into someone else’s life. John had the gift and the curse of great empathy. In songs like “Hello in There” and “Angel From Montgomery,” he wrote from a perspective clearly very different from his own — an old man and a middle-aged woman — but he kept the first-person point of view. He wrote those songs and the rest of his incredible debut album while a young man working as a letter carrier in Chicago. “Angel From Montgomery” opens with the line “I am an old woman/named after my mother.”

Gerard Way Explains Solo Songs

Gerard Way
Jason Tate

Gerard Way has updated the song descriptions of a bunch of the songs he put on SoundCloud earlier this week detailing the songs and where they started and came from. For example, he writes about how “Success!” was originally written for a new band that never came to be:

Back before Hesitant Alien was a thing, and before I wanted to pursue a solo career, I wanted to start a band and just sing and play guitar, after my chem broke up. The name of the band was going to be Baby Animal Hospital (the record label hated the name, especially since it included both the words ‘baby’ and ‘hospital’ in the same phrase), and I did a bunch of rough graphic design for it, but in the end, it really felt like a solo thing, so that’s what it became. But when it was Baby Animal Hospital (I wanted something that sounded warm and fuzzy and loud, like the tones) I recorded this track with Doug for the opening of the record. The lyrics/sounds are just the word BAH over and over again, which where the first letters of each word of the band name, but that wasn’t intentional, I just liked the sound. And this was us really messing with auto-tune to try and make it sound like an instrument. It was supposed to be this track as track one and go right into Action Cat. Later on, I figured I would just make a zine with the name Baby Animal Hospital, but I didn’t get very far with it. Still like the name, and may do something with it in the future. Maybe one day I’ll share all the graphic design I did for it when it was a band, a lot of which was cut and paste by hand.