I meant to link to the third installment of the Groovemine music blog interview earlier, but recent events got in the way.
When you hear a song line for line, straight off the airwaves with no connotations or foresight into the music, it’s one thing and you might pay it no mind, but with the added history, when you know that say, for example, Jimi Hendrix played that song in front of 300,000 people in the midst of a tragic war and Vietnam vets still weep at the sounds of the guitar, when you look at a picture of the Ramones and know about disco and the 80s, you can’t help but understand and feel the music more.
And that is where blogs can really make something happen: not just tell the story of the music, but to add a flavor to it—to make it bigger than just a song off the radio, the Pandoras included. Like Rolling Stone in the 1960s and MTV in the 1980’s and 1990s, the independent music blogs today are informing, entertaining, and taste-making. They have the ability to shape a decade, so to speak. The blogosphere of influence seems to have exceeded most people’s expectations, including that of its producers—inversely related to the logistical size of their operation.
The second installment of the Groovemine interview with myself and several other music bloggers is now available for your reading pleasure.
In part two, below, we dive deeper and get an experiential take on what it’s like to be a bona fide opinion leader in the realm of today’s independent music.
I’ve never considered myself to be a “bona fide opinion leader”, especially with regards to independent music, but it’s awfully flattering nevertheless.
Brandon Stosuy interviews Sufjan Stevens on BQE project, the joy of making comic books, the Internet, the need for privacy, and other topics:
STOSUY: You mentioned “context.” I wrote you once and asked for a quote about a project you were doing. I posted the quote an hour later and you wrote me joking about how there’s no synthesis anymore—there’s just this quick block-quote turnaround. It must be a little bit nerve wracking to know if you say something publicly, it’ll end up in a place where someone is going to comment on what you just said, even if it’s out of context.
STEVENS: That’s the nature of gossip, really, and the Internet is just one big gossip chamber - that’s why it’s so fascinating and entertaining. It’s a fabulous platform for superficial communication. I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It’s kind of beautiful—it’s all the product of imagination; it’s not reality at all.
Someone was telling me there was a video of Steve Gadd, or some benevolent drummer, playing on YouTube. It was the most inconsequential upload, but within two or three comments two men were arguing about who was the best drummer in the world and they were planning a place to meet and fight. And it was full of expletives. It seemed strange how quickly you get from this to this. That’s what the Internet cultivates. It’s manic. It’s very strange. I don’t think it’s healthy. They should outlaw posting comments! It’s a bummer to go somewhere to get information or buy tickets and you encounter profanity everywhere you go. I guess it’s like graffiti in a bathroom stall: You just want to take a piss and you’re stuck looking at profanity on the wall or crude explicit drawings.
The Guardian interviews Elizabeth Fraser about the Cocteau Twins’ break-up and aborted reunion, her relationships with Robin Guthrie and Jeff Buckley, and her new single “Moses”.
For the last 12 years, she has barely engaged with music. She sang on Massive Attack’s 1998 album Mezzanine and exquisite hit Teardrop (and toured with them in 2006), but that’s it. She’s been offered sums “beyond your wildest dreams” to collaborate with other artists—“the weirdest one was Linkin Park”—but all have been turned down.
Fraser sees making music as inseparable from her emotions. She has always struggled to write lyrics, she says, but suddenly something will click and she “goes with the sound and the joy”—that’s why she sings sounds and words that have no meaning, of which she can only make sense later. As she puts it, “I can’t act. I can’t lie.”
The inability to pretend is evident even now. She is so nervous before the interview begins, she’s actually shaking,
“I live in here,” she explains, exasperatedly, pointing at her head. “And it’s difficult. I drift with every sensation. At times I’m OK, and at other times I’m such a rubout. My mind just whirrs or stops. There’s no middle ground.” When she was still performing, she would suffer stagefright. Now she talks of her anxiety spreading to the studio. Her single was recorded some time ago with Damon Reece—Massive Attack’s drummer, and her partner of more than a decade—and a close friend, Jake Drake-Brockman. It wouldn’t be coming out at all were it not for a tragedy: Drake-Brockman died in September, and Moses is being released as a tribute.
More info on “Moses” can be found on Rough Trade’s website.
TotalFilm interviews Guillermo del Toro about his upcoming adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit:
Presumably it will also be a bit more magical? Have a stronger fairytale vibe?
It is in many ways just what you enjoy in the book. You enjoy an almost chamber piece, like when the stone trolls talk about cooking the dwarves.
It’s such a small piece but at the same time it’s magical and it’s almost a comedy, that you have these enormous creatures talking about cooking these dwarves!
It wouldn’t be a Guillermo del Toro movie unless it possessed a poetic quality, surely?
There is a lot of magic in the film. Peter has the eye of a strong historian, in the sense that the trilogy is incredibly accurate to a world that was created. He’s like an archaeologist who’s digging something that existed. I think that The Hobbit has a little bit more poetic licence.
It has… How can I say it? It has a little bit more flamboyance.
There are directors that I trust so completely as Guillermo del Toro, and this interview does nothing to change that opinion.
The Hobbit will be released as two movies in December 2011 and December 2012.
Sufjan Stevens interviews his former Marzuki bandmate Shannon Stephens on returning to music after a ten year absence, balancing family and art, and the value of music today:
It’s true that computer cheapness has allowed anyone and everyone to release their own music, which in a way is fabulous—so many people are able to bring their ideas to completion that may have previously only dreamed of it! But in a way it’s really awful, because the playing field is completely saturated. You feel like you’re shoulder-to-shoulder with other players, and you have to shout louder and make a bigger buffoon of yourself in order to be heard; and even then, people are so tired and desensitized by all the shouting and buffoonery that they may not listen carefully enough to understand the value of your work. And yet, when a work is substantive, it can literally jump out of the white noise, like color against black and white. Some of your songs are magical in that way. A song like “Casimir Pulaski Day”, which still brings me to tears, is a sanctuary, a quiet place in which to rest from such things as the bombastic schemes of the music industry. I don’t expect my new album to have a very wide reach simply because there is so much competition. But maybe it will reach people like you and me, who are worn-out from all the white noise and looking for sanctuary. That’s what I hope for. Even if that doesn’t happen, if nobody takes the time to listen, I still needed to release this album as an act of faith that my creative expression is worth bringing to fruition.
From an excerpt of Vish Khanna’s interview with Sufjan:
...I definitely feel like “What is the point? What’s the point of making music anymore?” I feel that the album no longer has a stronghold or has any real bearing anymore. The physical format itself is obsolete; the CD is obsolete and the LP is kinda nostalgic. So, I think the album is suffering and that’s how I’ve always created—I work with these conceptual albums in the long-form. And I’m wondering, what’s the value of my work once these forms are obsolete and everyone’s just downloading music? And I’m starting to get sick of my conceptual ideas. I’m tired of these grand, epic endeavours. and wanting to just make music for the joy of making music and having it be immediate and nothing to do with the industry itself, which, y’know is suffering right now of course. And I think it has to do with a creative crisis too. I’m wondering what am I doing? What is a song even? I’m questioning, what’s the point of a song? Is a song antiquated? Does it have any power any more? The format itself—a narrative song with accompaniment—is really beyond me now.
Godbit interviews 31Three’s Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain about his beginnings as a designer, thoughts on freelancing (love the “one project at a time” approach), and his faith.
And on a related note, be sure to check out 31Three’s recent redesign of Campaign Monitor—it’s just gorgeous (and powered by ExpressionEngine, to boot).
Twitch has a pretty extensive interview with Doug Jones, the man behind many of the monsters in Guillermo del Toro’s flicks, including Abe Sapiens in the Hellboy movies. The interview covers a wide range of topics, from Jones’ start in Hollywood and his work with del Toro to his role as the Silver Surfer and his religious background:
I’ve been a lot of denominations over the years but I call myself a generic Christian, yes, and am attending a church now that would remind you of Catholicism. It’s more orthodox. On the first Hellboy, when I was given the script the first day and was told to go home and read it that day and get back to him that night, I’m reading the script called Hellboy and he’s a demon from Hell. I’m thinking, “Okay, I have to respectfully find a way to tell Guillermo I can’t do this movie.” That was my first thought before I cracked open the script. Then I started reading it and realized, “Oh my goodness, I am so not offended by this. In fact, I’m enlivened by it. I’m finding my faith being nurtured and challenged by this story. This is good.”
On a side-note, it was nice to see that interviewer Michael Guillén—whom I met in Toronto a few years ago, and who is a real gentleman—is a Silver Surfer fan, as well.
Opus is a website masquerading as a blog masquerading as a webzine. It’s where I (Jason Morehead) write about music, movies, art, web design, religion and whatever else interests me at the time (Read More).
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