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The Untold Story of Elliott Smith’s Teenage Band

Elliott Smith
Jason Tate

Pitchfork:

Back in 1985, Elliott Smith was just Steven Paul Smith, a shy new kid entering his sophomore year at Portland’s Lincoln High School. He soon befriended a small group of fellow music obsessives, and over the next four years, this tight-knit crew recorded six albums of original material. The songs on these records have a lot of… everything: sections, lyrics, time signatures, guitar solos, era-appropriate keyboard sounds. One track, 1986’s “Laughter,” crams more of all those things into its bulging nine minutes than most Rush albums do in their entire runtimes. These homemade epics were released on cassette and distributed locally—which meant that for a brief period in the mid-1980s, if you went to one of the band’s shows or frequented the right record store, you could buy one of these tapes and listen to it on your stereo. 

Decades later, when Smith was an acclaimed solo star giving interviews to major music publications, this idea seemingly kept him up at night. Whenever these recordings were mentioned, he dismissed them relentlessly. “I really promised myself a long time ago I would keep [them] from ever seeing the light of day,” he laughed when asked about his high school albums in 2003. He didn’t even want to share a band name with the interviewer for fear someone might “dredge it up.”

Well, someone has—or rather, the combined forces of fanbase curiosity and passing time have forced the recordings into light. Now, Elliott Smith diehards who know what to search for on YouTube can hear these records for themselves. Although judging by the videos’ current view counts, this music, made by a teenaged Smith with his friends, is still very much hiding in plain sight.

Fascinating.

Spotify HiFi Was Announced Two Years Ago — Where Is It?

Jason Tate

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

At this point, it’s fair to assume that something went wrong with Spotify HiFi. Two years ago today, during the company’s Stream On event, Spotify announced a new streaming tier that would let customers enjoy lossless, CD-quality audio from the leading subscription music service. 

Spotify felt the news was worthy of some star power and filmed a promotional video for HiFi with Billie Eilish and Finneas. It remains on the company’s YouTube page, and you can still read the blog post saying upgraded sound would arrive “later this year” — meaning by the end of 2021.

Inside Twitter’s Dumpster Fire

Twitter
Jason Tate

The Verge with a behind-the-scenes look at Twitter’s collapse:

It’s an open secret that many employees who remain at Musk’s “hardcore” Twitter are actively looking for other jobs. Even the most publicly cheerful Twitter workers can’t fully mask the despair. On December 29, one tweeted a selfie, smiling in front of an empty office, with the hashtags #solowork, #productivity, and #findingperspective.

Musk himself is starting to appear defeated. Tesla shares started 2022 trading at nearly $400. By September, Tesla’s stock price had dropped by 25 percent. It plummeted again after Musk bought Twitter and ended the year at $123. Investors are begging Musk to step away; Tesla employees are too. 

A real shame.

Taylor Swift Has “Shake It Off” Lawsuit Dismissed

Taylor Swift
Jason Tate

The “Shake It Off” copyright infringement lawsuit has been dismissed.

A copyright infringement lawsuit against Taylor Swift has been dismissed with prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs cannot refile the same complaint in the same court. The suit had been filed in a California federal court in 2017 by songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, who claimed that Swift who took lyrics from 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play” for her 1989 single “Shake It Off.”

Libraries Are Launching Their Own Local Music Streaming Platforms

Jason Tate

Claire Woodcock, writing at VICE:

Over a dozen public libraries in the U.S. and Canada have begun offering their own music streaming services to patrons, with the goal of boosting artists and local music scenes. The services are region-specific, and offer local artists non-exclusive licenses to make their albums available to the community.

The concept originated in 2014 when Preston Austin and Kelly Hiser helped the Madison Public Library build the Yahara Music Library, an online library hosting music from local artists. By the time they completed their work on Yahara, they were confident they had a software prototype that other interested libraries could customize and deploy.

“That became kind of the inspiration for building MUSICat,” Austin told Motherboard, referring to the software platform he and Hiser created under a startup called Rabble.

Amazon Music Comes to Prime for Free

amazon
Jason Tate

The Verge:

Steve Boom is the VP of Amazon Music, and he has a great name for the music business. He’s on the show because Amazon just announced that it is upgrading the music service that Prime members get as part of their subscription. Starting today, one of the benefits for Amazon Prime members is that you now get access to the entire Amazon Music catalog, about 100 million songs, to play in shuffle mode. That service used to only contain 2 million songs.

The Future of AI Music Generation

Technology
Jason Tate

TechCrunch looks at Dance Diffusion, an AI music generator:

The emergence of Dance Diffusion comes several years after OpenAI, the San Francisco-based lab behind DALL-E 2, detailed its grand experiment with music generation, dubbed Jukebox. Given a genre, artist and a snippet of lyrics, Jukebox could generate relatively coherent music complete with vocals. But the songs Jukebox produced lacked larger musical structures like choruses that repeat and often contained nonsense lyrics.

Google’s AudioLM, detailed for the first time earlier this week, shows more promise, with an uncanny ability to generate piano music given a short snippet of playing. But it hasn’t been open sourced.

Dance Diffusion aims to overcome the limitations of previous open source tools by borrowing technology from image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The system is what’s known as a diffusion model, which generates new data (e.g., songs) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As it’s fed the existing samples — say, the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography — the model gets better at recovering all the data it had previously destroyed to create new works.

Forty Years Of The CD

CD, Record Store
Jason Tate

Daryl Worthington, writing for the Quietus:

“The thing I find most interesting about the whole thing regarding format and materiality is that even though a large proportion of people may listen almost exclusively digitally to music, there is still a sense that if something doesn’t have a physical release it is a less substantial album. Even people who would never listen to CD, tape or vinyl I think still assign value to an album existing in a physical format. That physicality kind of haunts the release, giving it a substance even in its digitality. For me, given this, CD offers a really easy and practical way of providing this physical option.”

Paramore Talk With Guardian

Jason Tate

Paramore sat down with The Guardian:

Much of the new album draws from the trio’s conversations from that period to look back at the environments they came from. They discussed growing up in the Bible belt. Williams moved from Mississippi to Tennessee when her mum fled her second husband. She met Farro through a homeschool programme, and he knew York. Early on, Paramore talked openly about being a Christian band, but now they are all at different stages of unravelling their relationship to faith, says Williams. “You’re brought up being told something is ultimate, you unpack that and then find out that it’s tangled up with some other random shit over here.” She sighs: “Zac and Taylor are the most gentle and kind about it, whereas I feel like my teeth are knives and I’m spewing fire, trying to throw all of it over the side of a cliff. It’s good to be challenged – like Taylor reminds me all the time, you can’t generalise. I can be very dualistic when it comes to good people and bad people, and a lot of the record talks about what it means that people aren’t just that.”

Matty Healy Interviewed in the New York Times

Jason Tate

Matty Healy of The 1975 sat down with the New York Times:

It’s difficult to be big and say — genuinely — that I have zero commercial ambition. There’s definitely a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of thing, which is where, listen, we’ve never known what to do and we’ve never tried to do anything. So the second we stop doing that, we’ll probably [expletive] up. I tend to say no to stuff for money.

I don’t know how you can write this up without it being rude or inappropriate, but I just got offered a four-month tour next year of stadiums with the biggest singer-songwriter in the world that would’ve made me money that I’ve never even seen or heard of in my life.

Ed Sheeran?

Yeah. And I got offered to be main support and do whatever I want. Think about the money you think I’m getting offered — it’s not just offered, it’s what he can afford because of what he makes for shows — and then just triple it. It’s insane. The thing that’s stopped me just doing that is because — I don’t care. It’s not worth it. Not because I don’t like Ed Sheeran. I think he’s, in a lot of ways, a genius. And he does what he does better than anybody else. But opening up for somebody and not just being real, that’s the kind of stuff I think about.

Capitol Drops ‘Virtual Rapper’ FN Meka After Backlash

Capitol Records
Jason Tate

The New York Times:

Capitol Music Group, the company that houses major record labels including Capitol and Blue Note, said on Tuesday that it was severing ties with its latest controversial artist: FN Meka, a virtual “robot rapper” powered partly by artificial intelligence, who boasts more than 10 million followers on TikTok.

The company had previously teased the project — the first augmented reality artist to sign to a major label, it said — as “just a preview of what’s to come.” Yet after growing backlash to what skeptical observers said amounted to digital blackface — including content that seemed to trivialize incarceration and police brutality — Capitol said it had “severed ties with the FN Meka project, effective immediately.”

Butch Walker Talks Green Day, Taylor Swift, and More

Butch Walker
Jason Tate

Butch Walker talked with COS in a new wide ranging interview:

Keep in mind, as a producer, this is the ugly side, where longtime fans of a band hear that they want to “broaden their horizons” and do something different, and the first thing they do is shoot the producer. They hate the producer because the formula for their Coca-Cola got changed and they are very mad because of a band wanting to do something different.

To Green Day’s credit, this vision was Billie’s. This was his vision. It wasn’t like I came in and said “let’s change it all up, let’s make a ’70s glam throwback record.” But at the same time, this was the kind of shit that he was into at the time, and it’s my wheelhouse. I love making records like that and those are huge influences for me too, I grew up on glam and power pop and metal and rock. So we had a great time making it and it was absolutely a collaborative effort. We spent a lot of time sending files back and forth — COVID was looming but it hadn’t hit yet. They have a very over-qualified massive studio in Oakland and of course, I have my sandbox, and I was like, “Hey, I work best in my sandbox,” and Billie would be like, “Okay, cool, I usually work best in mine.” So I was like, “Great, let’s send stuff back and forth and then we’ll get into the studio.”

Mark Hoppus Talks with People.com

Mark Hoppus
Jason Tate

Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 sat down with People.com:

”Today I’m doing good. The recovery is taking a lot longer than I had hoped, but I am in a much better place,” says Hoppus. “I feel like I have a second shot at life.”

Adds Skye, also 50: “He’s a rock. He rose above and got through it…The last couple years threw a lot of wrenches in our system, but we’re on the other side of it even stronger.”

Since doctors gave him the all-clear, Hoppus has been getting back to work. He’s writing a book, launched the record company Verswire and is hosting his radio show on Apple Music.