NONALIGNMENT PACT

It’s been a good month for the Los Angeles company, which also just won an Invention Award from Popular Science. Evertune says it’s finalizing testing on a guitar bridge that keeps the instrument in tune regardless of the temperature, humidity, or how a string is pulled. Normally, a guitar goes out of tune when the tension [...]

Conference season has taken over my life recently: SXSW followed by the numerous parties, mixers and other miscellaneous brand-sponsored drinking experiences associated with ad:tech, the Twitter conference, the Facebook conference, Grammy Soundtables and so forth. In the midst of all of this, I have regrettably been remiss in updating and contributing to this blog, which is [...]

A well-known horror film director goes on a fishing expedition at a record store, and while digging through a box of vinyl from the 50′s and 60′s, discovers an outlandish, bizarre song recorded by what can only be described as a choir of ghoulish, zombie children. He cuts the tune into his film and eventually submits [...]

Here is a quick list of the bands I saw at SXSW (and links to videos where I mannaged to take video). I really didn’t get to see as many bands as I would have seen if I had not been there for work, but I was as always more than thrilled to have the opportunity to spend the entire week in Austin chasing down clients, drinking with said clients, watching bands and then calling it a day’s (week’s) work. Thank goodness for Twitter; I don’t think I would have otherwise remembered all these names.

• Ishii
• Grand Hallway
• The Non
• The Boxing Lesson
• The Gary
• The Great Nostalgic
• Temper Trap
• Octopus Project
• Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
• Electric Valentine
• The Watson Twins
• Wall With One Eye
• Free Energy
• Zoe Keating
• Ellen Fullman & The Long String Instrument

I spoke on a well-attended, feisty panel about music licensing for emerging media. More on this later.

Unrelated/related note: I wrote and performed a song about SXSW to open the conference at the introductory panel How To Rawk SXSW. It ended up on the PepsiCo blog. [...]

Last week, I watched the 1997 film Joy Luck Club again for the first time in years. This time I sat through the music credits and noticed that two of the most famous Chinese songs in the picture came from the EMI Music Publishing catalog.

An enterprising music publisher at MIDEM once told me that EMI made [...]

In Brooklyn, I once dated a guy who actually loved digging through dusty bins of used records even more than I do. He was an old hand at finding stores where you could ferret out records on the cheap, like the junk store in Greenpoint so crammed with old records that you could barely stand up [...]

On our kitchen table, I have had a big canvas bag full of handwritten mixtape playlists for the past week because it was the only way we thought of documenting the mixtapes assembled for the San Francisco Mixtape Society event and because we needed to put town the song names for the judges.

I spent the better [...]

One of the sponsors of the San Francisco Mixtape Society, with which I am involved, is Matador Records. We were thrilled to have them on board, not only because of the amazing catalog that people think of when they hear the Matador name, but because we thought it would be important to have a record [...]

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I headed to the Fillmore for two back-to-back shows in the course of one weekend. On Saturday night, I made some jokes about pitching a tent in the middle of the floor since we knew we would be coming back the next night. Sunday night’s show was a blistering [...]

The sequined red, white and blue outfit screams AMERICA IN THE EARLY 90S and takes me back to days of bad cafeteria lunches and awkward school dances, where the boys would try to breakdance to this song. Was this re-mastered re-recorded release of “Ice, Ice Baby” really necessary?

That was the first question that came to [...]