NONALIGNMENT PACT

How many people in a band is too many? To me, it is simply a question of how well you can pull it off live. Use as many instruments as you want within the recording process, but when you bring 10 people on the road, please make it rock.

So the music works better for Lambchop [...]

I’m just abjectly horrified today, for reasons many others have given lots of space to and that I could do no better in explaining. I will say that I feel completely helpless to stop the sale of what is one of the few remaining gems on the Rice University campus where I spent my four years. [...]

Well, there is, but I don’t have it in me. So I will be providing you with my blast of nostalgia from this week, and I don’t care who hates it:

I’d like someone to explain to me how the piano ends up making guitar sounds in After the Fire’s version. Also, please send your compare-contrast essays [...]

I’m going to say three rather bland things tonight and regroup for a longer post next week:

1. I just moved and have taken this opportunity to rediscover nooks and crannies of my music collection that have to do with slow builds. That’s for next week.

2. I also like the new Arcade Fire a lot. But I [...]

My big brother is a concert pianist. Though my parents are the ones who kind of introduced me to music through a variety of records and enforced lesson schedules, there are few people who influenced the music I liked as much as my big brother until I was about 12, when I turned to the evil [...]

I am moving in less than a week. I am moving 20 minutes away, so it’s hard to take the actual moving process seriously. Of course, that’s partly because I hate moving so very much. I hope no one actually likes it. Because it’s the worst. If we don’t all have individual pods within 100 years [...]

Yeah, so I did kinda blow this week’s post off – in order to hang out with a great bunch of folks with whom I was once in a band. We are getting together for a completely unrequested reunion show. I didn’t know you could do that, but we are. And here’s what we talked about [...]

I have a very quick post this week extolling in exceeding brevity the virtues of the Roots’ How I Got Over – why? It is the express line straight through, no unnecessary pauses, no pauses period, densely packed, no ridiculous flights of fancy – it’s just delicious and delectable from cover to cover. Ridiculous that a [...]

My band, by virtue of playing an early far-off stage at 11:15 a.m., got the privilege of free passes to the first Nateva Festival. Of course, because some sort of holiday was occurring this weekend (and apparently still is or something), most of my bandmates were unable to stay past our admittedly last-minute invitational show. Me? [...]

I’ve been to Lollapalooza. At least twice that I remember. I remember it being hot, muddy, aggro-hippie commerce central. I wasn’t wise enough to heap full helpings of disdain on the spectacle like I could now, and I will say that until this weekend, the thought of throwing sunscreen on and standing on concrete and sludge [...]