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Building Chorus.fm 3.0 – The Design Process

design
Jason Tate

It’s been a little over a week since I launched the new version of Chorus.fm and I’ve been pretty blown away by the positive response. I think it may be the best reaction to a redesign of any website I’ve ever built. For fun, I pulled out a bunch of the initial sketches I made during the process, as well as some of the various other designs I played around with before actually building the website. I thought some might find the entire process interesting.

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Interview: The Ghost Inside

The Ghost Inside
Drew Beringer

On June 5th, The Ghost Inside will triumphantly return with their self-titled fifth album – an eleven track journey featuring the heaviest and most poignant work of the band’s illustrious career. It’s the Los Angeles band’s first release in nearly six years and it’s a record that almost never existed as the path towards The Ghost Inside was littered with tragedy, pain, and self-doubt. On the morning of November 19, 2015, the band’s tour bus collided head on with a tractor trailer while headed west to Mesa, Arizona on U.S. Highway 180. The drivers of both vehicles, Greg Hoke and Steven Cunningham, lost their lives in the accident, while vocalist Jonathan Vigil, bassist Jim Riley, guitarists Zach Johnson and Chris Davis, and drummer Andrew Tkaczyk suffered life-changing injuries (Tkaczyk lost one of his legs following an initial ten-day coma). After facing a lengthy recovery period, the band took time to get into the right head space to figure out if they wanted to continue as The Ghost Inside. Realizing that this tragedy is the precise moment to put their inspirational lyrics to the test, the quintet returned to a sold-out performance last summer at Los Angeles’ The Shrine, promising new music soon. That moment is now and I was fortunate enough to speak with Andrew about the record, the moving visual for their first single “Aftermath,” and creating the record the band was always meant to make.

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MusicSmart Puts the Spotlight on Music Credits

Apps
Jason Tate

Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories, about the new app MusicSmart:

Here’s the amazing part – the “aha” moment that brought back the same feelings I had as a kid when reading through liner notes: in the Tracks section, you can tap any of the listed songs to view detailed credits for the selected song. These go beyond the standard “written by” credits you see in Apple Music: MusicSmart lists engineers (including mixing, mastering, and assistant engineers), producers, and even the name of the label and studio where the song was mastered. But there’s more: MusicSmart can show you the names of all the artists credited for the creation of a song even if they’re not core members of a band, including backing vocalists, percussionists, keyboard players, saxophonists – you name it.

I’ve been playing around with this app for the last couple of weeks and it’s a really nice addition for those that want to dive deeper into the credits of a song. In past I’d be listening to something and often wonder who was playing one of the backing instruments, or trying to figure out if the strings were real or fake, and end up Googling around and hoping I could find the information or a photo of the album credits. This is much nicer.

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Dave Grohl Talks With Entertainment Weekly

Foo Fighters
Jason Tate

Dave Grohl was interviewed over at Entertainment Weekly:

You know years ago I was at a barbecue and I met a book agent, and he said, “Have you ever considered writing a book?” and I said, “Well, of course, someday.” And he said, “It’s really easy — you’ll do four or five hours of interviews and someone else will write it in your voice and it will be great.” And I thought, “F— that!”

I come from a family of writers, and granted I’m a black sheep but I’m not that bad, my God. So I figured you know if I were to ever write a book, it would be in my hand. I’ve considered it for f—in’ years but A, I never had the time, and B, I never felt like I was ready because every day something happens that I’d love to write about, and I’d hate to write sort of a typical autobiography. So years ago I thought, “Well maybe it will just a collection of anecdotes — maybe instead of it just being my life in 300 pages it could be just funny stories.”

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