Wheels In Motion

Lana Del Rey

2011-12-07T15:57:00.000-08:00

Time Out NY
Preview

Can the “Video Games” singer prove her chops live?

What’s funny about the bare-all, everything-on-display Internet is how much it relishes a mystery: hence the appeal of Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games,” a song that has racked up more than 7 million YouTube views (and about as many remixes) since its release in July. It’s an unbelievably sad, spare song that sets the singer’s burnished voice to harp plucks and piano chords; the video flickers with Super-8 footage of old Hollywood, drunken starlets and holiday scenes (wherein most of the subjects are probably dead by now). The mystery being, how did this perfect song arrive, fully formed? Where is it from? Do we believe that the owner of this lived-in, Stevie Nicks–style voice is really a skinny chick with an implausible pout and a sense of self that’s been constructed (by the looks of it) by YouPorn?

The truth, of course, didn’t take long to uncover. Yes, that girl—Lizzy Grant, born in Lake Placid, New York, now living in London—really does sing it. The rest of her songs are about 20 percent as good, mining a breathy “Look! I’m drinking!” retro vibe with a blue-by-numbers atmosphere. It’s disappointing in a way, but it doesn’t make “Video Games” any less spectacular—one thinks also of the untoppable majesty of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.”

In any case, one could go supermeta with Del Rey (it is the Internet age, after all), and point out that her trashy, cartoony femme fatale vibe is a piece of art in itself, drawing attention to what passes for glamour and sexiness these days. In which case: bravo! Still, one looks at—or rather listens to—singers like Jessica Lea Mayfield (whom we recently interviewed), an artist who also makes dark music, but doesn’t need an American Apparel–style image to support her. There, the mystery is built into the music. In any case, all really will be revealed when Del Rey plays live.

Jessica Lea Mayfield

2011-12-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

Time Out NY

The twangy singer doesn’t want to be famous. Too bad.

Jessica Lea Mayfield is such a music-biz veteran that she’s already past the lying-to-journalists phase of her career—and she’s only just released her sophomore album, Tell Me. The myth that pops up in today’s conversation? That the young singer met Black Keys man Dan Auerbach’s dad at a hot-dog shop where she worked, which led to the musicians working together (he produced Tell Me). “Well…,” she says coyly of the encounter, “I used to make up stories, but I don’t do it anymore. Now I just tell the truth.” She pauses. “Are you wanting a made-up story?” No! I say. Unless you want to make one up?

The funny thing is that Mayfield’s music is so good, her sound so unique, that it doesn’t need a further selling point. Her voice is at once clear, twangy and young (she’s only 22) and at the same time lived-in and often a little weary; she writes dark, febrile songs likely to appeal to fans of Patsy Cline songs and David Lynch films, and anyone who’s had their heart broken, broken someone else’s or just thought about it.

Mayfield’s real story, if you’re curious, is absorbing and charming, and highly unusual. She grew up in Nashville, singing with her parents’ bluegrass band: “My parents are still really cool now,” Mayfield says brightly, “but they were definitely then smokin’-hot young bluegrass pickers.” The family lived and toured in a vintage bus that once belonged to country legend Bill Monroe (her parents had a bedroom in the back, the kids slept in bunks), playing seven nights a week. After shows she’d sell cassettes and homemade beaded bracelets, and the family would split the money from the gig.

“I’ve been touring my whole life, pretty much,” she says, laughing. “It’s like I was bred for it like a horse or something.” For someone who writes such moody, disarming songs, she’s buoyant and sunny in conversation. It’s also worth noting that Mayfield’s involvement in her folks’ band was her decision, something she begged for. “When I was seven years old, I saw the music video to ‘My Hero’ [by the Foo Fighters], and I just remember being entranced and thinking, That’s what I wanna do! I wanna play music!”

Mayfield taught herself guitar and started writing songs at 11, and the family moved to Ohio. She made a record with her musician brother, David, which found its way via a boyfriend to Dan Auerbach’s dad, who passed it on to his son, who sent Mayfield a rather modest MySpace message: “I play in a local band called the Black Keys.” Too young to drive herself, she got a ride with David to Auerbach’s studio. “We recorded eight songs the day that we met,” Mayfield says. “We had this immediate ease with working together.”

She wasn’t at all flustered, then? Oh no, she says. “I look at everyone like they’re the same. I feel like that’s because I didn’t grow up in cliques at school—like in movies, there’s ‘the popular girl!’ or ‘the nerdy girl.’ For me, people are people and no one is more important than anyone else.”

Mayfield grew up fast by her own admission, and says that the consequences of taking on responsibility so young means that she now acts like a little kid; she may own her own house back in Ohio, but it looks “like a little girl’s bedroom,” and when she gets off the road she jumps on the bed with the stereo cranked up. The melancholy in her music is a natural release: “I get overwhelmed by all of my emotions. If I’m feeling a certain way it’s always intense, and songwriting is a good way to do something creative with [it]. It’s like, okay, I’ve written about that situation and I have some sort of peace of mind. And now I’m gonna go and shoot guns, or watch a local stock-car race [Laughs] and just have fun.”

Having toured with Ray LaMontagne and the Avett Brothers (and soon, Ryan Adams), Mayfield’s star is clearly rising. What’s lovely (and typically atypical) is that she’s not really interested in the big time. “I just want to be comfortable,” she says. “I definitely don’t wanna get really famous [Laughs], you know? I definitely don’t want my face on a billboard or something.” She’s shy, she says: a musician rather than a performer. “It would be amazing to me if my brother could get a hit and become a superstar with one of my songs. Because then he would be in the spotlight, and I would go to the mailbox and collect money and hang out with my dog. And then I would be happy because it would be someone that I loved reaping something. That’s my personal dream, it’s a daydream of mine."

Mayer Hawthorne

2011-12-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

Time Out NY

The fast-rising young Detroit soul man is dressed for the big time.

It’s tempting to imagine that Mayer Hawthorne was born not in his birthday suit, but wearing some kind of natty three-piece number—and maybe singing doo-wop—such is his sense of personal style and disarmingly smooth croon. Though he was in fact born Andrew Mayer Cohen in Michigan (and presumably naked), the singer cheerfully admits he’s always been a snappy dresser, even through an endless series of odd jobs: “Even in school I made sure that we kept it classy.”

Accordingly, when Hawthorne and his band stroll into the green room before playing The Late Show with David Letterman, the singer is wearing a red suit, black-and-red sneaks, cream Wayfarer shades and a black tie. His band is decked out in matching red sweaters with black elbow patches. “TV smiles, everyone!” yells the bassist; the whole group laughs, but it’s a fair bet that they know they’ve got something special going on.

With a shiny new album, How Do You Do?, on a shiny major label (Universal), Hawthorne is in the enviable position of doing something unique right now. It’s not that his music is especially weird or avant-garde; far from it, he plies an elegant mix of vintage soul stylings with killer grooves. But that mix is all his own. “I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s listening to Public Enemy and Mobb Deep and the Smashing Pumpkins,” he says, calling from a pre-Letterman tour stop in St Louis. “I don’t even know what it was like in the ’60s—I wasn’t alive then—so the Mayer Hawthorne sound is taking what I can learn from the classics, and blending it with my hip-hop DJ and producer background and punk-rock bands that I played in as a kid.”

As an indicator of how broad the singer’s appeal is, check out the YouTube teaser video released before the album dropped, which features famous fans pretending to be Hawthorne: Bruno Mars, Erykah Badu, Snoop Dogg, Deepak Chopra… Wait, Deepak Chopra? “Deepak has been a Mayer Hawthorne fan since the beginning—from jump street!” Hawthorne grins. “What a good guy.” He cites a Chopra quote about hanging out with “people who don’t think inside the box or outside the box, but people who believe there is no box. What a way to sum it up there.”

TONY first spoke to Hawthorne a couple of years back, when the singer was touring his debut album, A Strange Arrangement, which essentially started life as a bunch of demos on which he played all the instruments, attracting the attention of Stones Throw Records boss Peanut Butter Wolf. A lot has happened since he released his first seven-inch single on red, heart-shaped vinyl, not least visiting Brazil last year with Amy Winehouse. “We were actually the last band to tour with Amy Winehouse,” Hawthorne says. “She was fabulous, and it was a situation where I really thought she was back on the right track and getting her act together. She was just captivating.”

Hawthorne, one senses, is a hardy performer. He’s a Detroiter, for starters (“I think that Detroiters are some of the most resilient people in the world”) and strongly focused on having a good time. He mentions a Brazilian culinary highlight, wherein he and the band feasted on skewers of chickens’ hearts (“It still sounds gross to me, but it was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my life”). It’s also apparent that Hawthorne’s charm isn’t lost on the ladies. The new album’s opening track, “Get to Know You,” is a saucy “why don’t we” invitation addressed to a shy date. “It’s the male perspective, without a doubt,” says Hawthorne. “I wrote that song somewhere in Europe, like Brussels Airport, waiting for a plane, and probably met some beautiful thing the night before. That’s the sort of thing you run into constantly as a touring musician who’s always on the move.”

Is he a bit of a heartbreaker, then? “I’ve been really lucky to have had my fair share of relationships over the years and experiences to draw from,” says Hawthorne. “But I would say that I generally am not the one doing the heartbreaking [Laughs]. Maybe when I’m writing these songs, that’s my way of getting back, being the heartbreaker in my own little fantasy world.”

Lately, Hawthorne’s dream world has found him writing a Mr. and Mrs. Smith–style music video for new single “The Walk,” in which he and a model have a domestic shoot-’em-up. For a man who got shot in the head with a blank bullet on set, Hawthorne is remarkably chipper about the experience: “I got to be Bruce Willis for a day, that’s every guy’s fantasy.”

Simon Le Bon

2011-12-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

The Hot Seat
Time Out NY

Duran Duran’s lead singer avoids gossip mags.

Duran Duran played TONY’s SXSW showcase this year. It was amazing.
It was good, wasn’t it?

Even the old songs sounded crisp, not like you were plodding through them.
I was asked recently [if I] think people are kind of enslaved by their hits. And we’ve never felt that. Not boasting, but it’s because we have a lot of them. We don’t have to play “Rio” every night, or “Reflex” or “Ordinary World.” We can rotate them! As long as you play a few of [the hits], you’re gonna make people happy.

What was your first experience of visiting New York like?
It was the Times Square mobbing. We made an appearance at the Video Shack, and there were police on horseback to control the crowd. The road got blocked off because there were so many people.

Duran Duran was known for its wild behavior—drinking, partying with female fans—in the ’80s. That seems like a good thing for young men to get out of their system before settling down.
Before you get married? Basically. I think it’s also good for women to have a bit of fun and see life.

I was thinking of you describing your first Australian tour as a “shagfest.”
Oh, it was unbelievable. But you’re right, it’s really good to do this when you’re unattached.

When you and [your wife] Yasmin met, we didn’t have the gossip rag culture that exists now.
People weren’t peering into your wardrobe or your back garden or your kitchen. Yasmin and I did one story for [the British tabloid] Hello! and realized very quickly that it was the kiss of death. It takes away all the mystique. I was trying to be a rock idol, and when people see you frying up an omelette in the morning, you lose all of that.

Was your wedding a fancy affair?
We got married in Oxford registry office the day after Boxing Day. We wanted it to be personal and meaningful. It had to be in the registry office because we are both atheists.

I thought you were an agnostic?
You’re probably right. I was trying to be an atheist for a while, but I realized it’s just as arrogant as being a hard-boiled fundamentalist. It’s closed-minded and I like to be open-minded.

Have you or any other members of the band gone through a spiritual phase?
You mean like the Beatles in India? No, none of that bollocks. John [Taylor] was brought up in a Catholic school, given the full dose of fire and brimstone. And Nick [Rhodes] is very cynical about anything he sees as an institution trying to control people. So we went the other way.

Did you always know you’d be famous?
I knew I had something to offer. When I was in school everyone was trying to be “normal,” whereas all I wanted was be different from everyone else. I wanted to do things that were extraordinary, like perform. I trained as an actor for 15 years.

Do you ever get shy when meeting fellow famous people?
Oh yeah, with everybody. But I’m quite brave though, I’m always the guy who goes up and introduces myself. I never wait. If you do it straight away it’s always much better. I met Joan Collins. I was in rapture when she spoke to me. She’s wonderful.

Do you still act?
I get to go onstage every night and play at being Simon le Bon, which is a lot of fun. I wouldn’t make a good actor—I’m much better as a lead singer. I get to write my own script.

Chevy Chase

2011-10-21T13:49:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY
Hot Seat

America’s first father returns for a new season of Community.

The Vacation movies made you a national hero. When you appear on talk shows, the applause is still deafening. How does that feel?
[Chuckles] I don’t know. Oh well, they do that to anybody; could you imagine them booing? Have you ever seen a talk show where somebody boos? [In announcer voice] “Frank D’Angelo, ladies and gentlemen!”

Your Community character, Pierce Hawthorne, represents a turnaround for you.
[Laughs] If nothing else, it’s made me a better actor. All I was before was just a personality who played Clark, who played Fletch. With this one, I’m playing against who I really am. Fletch is really like me. This Pierce Hawthorne, you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen with him. He’s just a little bit nuts.

Is it a relief to not have to play someone handsome and lovable?
Oh yeah, and it makes it easier to put weight on. Now [my wife] Jayni’s gonna go nuts if I put any more on. We’re starting a program of taking it off now. Plus, I have one third of the hair I had before, if that much, and it’s all grey. And I’m older.

I like how his wealth allows him to indulge his fantasies.
Not only that, but he’s a bigot. He’s so prejudiced, so far behind, it’s almost like he came from the ’20s or ’30s. In terms of understanding racism or religion, he just kind of says what he says. It’s never appropriate, and that, to me, is the mark of a man I have to play. [Laughs]

Is there a difference between humor today and 20 years ago?
Of course. It’s always going to depend on the humor of the people—that is to say the perspective and the social mores and taboos, which do change over a period of time. When I think about the ’60s through the early ’70s, those were drug years, those were pot-smoking years. And so much of the humor that we did back then was done on pot, for people who smoked pot. [Laughs] It was just another generation at that time.

And what’s everybody doing these days?
It’s quite amazing to see how now if I go into the show in the mornings, the big drug of choice is a bottle of fresh water. [Laughs theatrically] Just keep hydrated and healthy. This is the way the world is. It changes, and it learns from itself, and that’s going to obviously change perspectives and the way humor—which is perspective—is received.

What puts a smile on your face in the morning?
Oh! I do. [Laughs] Jayni’s always up a little earlier than I am, and I go into the bathroom where she’s getting prepared for the day and I start clowning around. I think that’s when we laugh the most. But, listen: In being a, quote, “cynic,” it just means I care less about many things and mostly care to make people laugh. It’s just a part of me. There’s plenty to smile about.

Let me ask you about your musicianship. You have perfect pitch, correct?
Yes.

So if I asked you to sing an E, you could just sing it?
[Sings] Eeeeee! [Ed. note: It is, indeed, an E].

What do you play for pleasure when you’re at home?
The bass.

Do you?
[Laughs] No, no. I wonder if Paul [Simon] does that when he’s home, just the bass? No, I don’t think so. I play piano.

Paul Simon is a good friend of yours. When did you first meet?
The first year of Saturday Night Live. He just became a great friend of Lorne’s and mine. He’d be in the office with us late into the night while we were working out what sketches would be what and on when, what was funny or what wasn’t. He just fit right in. It’s funny, the two Paul’s [Simon and McCartney] are our best music friends.

Have you ever had a nice family get-together with both of them there?
No! Jayni, have we ever had a dinner or something with both Pauls? Oh yeah, we used to every Sunday. I forget these things.

Burlesque

2011-10-21T13:45:00.000-07:00

Essential Burlesque Dance Series
Time Out NY
Sex Issue, Classes

“Eye contact is the fake orgasm of burlesque!” declares Jo Weldon, the head of the New York School of Burlesque, after stressing the importance of connecting with audience members. A dozen or so ladies are here for the second session of a female-only, four-part workshop covering the basics of burly-Q. Some are dressed in fancy undies and are exploring the art form; others are wearing sporty duds and appear more interested in utilizing the skills in the bedroom. Weldon introduces the Diva in a Hoodie routine, during which we’re taught how to saucily remove street clothing. The class went faster than I’d like as a newbie, but much of burlesque is about attitude, and Weldon is a master at coaxing even the most sheepish of students out of her shell—or sweatshirt. 81 White St at Benson St • 440 Studios, 440 Lafayette St between Astor Pl and E 4th St • (schoolofburlesque.com).

2011-10-21T13:44:00.001-07:00

Time Out NY
Live Preview

English people love Elbow. Granted, this is not a wholly reliable endorsement, given that Brits also have a predilection for binge drinking and desserts made of lard. But go a little deeper, and what really rings true of the English sensibility is a kind of weird, gray-skied eccentricity, a rain-soaked romanticism that’s at the heart of Elbow’s music.

Briefly: The group formed at school in Ramsbottom (yes, there really is such a place), in the north of England, in the ’90s, and released its first album in 2001. Velvet Underground hero John Cale championed the band, as did Michael Stipe, and Elbow finally hit the U.K. mainstream with 2008’s garlanded The Seldom Seen Kid—a huge-hearted, love-struck effort. Non-Brits will likely recognize tracks from Hollywood movie trailers, but not much else: Elbow’s big moment has yet to arrive in the U.S., possibly because the band seems too British (a fate shared by the Kinks and Blur).

Elbow is often compared to Coldplay, but Chris Martin’s songwriting is the lyrical equivalent of the euro—transferable in most any country. Guy Garvey, on the other hand, makes no attempt to play down his Northern accent and sings of what he sees. Sometimes the detail is parochial and kitchen-sinky, but more often than not, Garvey’s lyrics glide into the universal, as on new album Build a Rocket Boys! Recalling a teenage tumble in a field, he thinks of the birds: “Do they keep those final kisses / In their tiny, racing hearts?” And that, in the end, is what makes Elbow an English gem anyone might treasure.

Marc Anthony

2011-10-21T13:42:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY
Live Preview

Ah, the crazy world of fame. Just three months ago, Marc Anthony performed a saucy salsa number on American Idol with his wife, Jennifer Lopez, which ended in a smooch. “Now we know what they do at home!” Idol judge Randy Jackson quipped. Less than two months later, the couple announced their divorce. Anthony was controlling and jealous, according to one source, and objected to photos of J. Lo as being “too sexy and unbecoming for a 40-year-old mother of two.” Then came allegations that he was having an affair with his Hawthorne costar Jada Pinkett Smith, since denied.

All of which celebri-chatter obscures Anthony’s genuine achievements as an entertainer. You might not like his vibrato-intense, knees-to-the-floor croon, but his voice is smooth as a silk shirt. He’s racked up sales of more than 12 million albums worldwide, along with about three mantels’ worth of Grammy Awards. And his acting credentials aren’t too shabby: He’s played alongside Denzel Washington and Salma Hayek, and worked for Scorsese (Bringing Out the Dead).

To the thousands who will flock to the Izod Center this week, Anthony is a bona fide star. Fans will sway along to the singer’s soap-opera-tastic ballads, midtempo pop hits and ravey dance numbers. Perhaps Pitbull will make an appearance for his and Anthony’s new single, “Rain Over Me.” Perhaps Anthony will make some dignified comment about his marriage, or a cutting remark about the Jada rumors. And perhaps by then, the crazy world of fame will have found better things to talk about.

Beyonce and Kreayshawn go head to head

2011-08-25T12:03:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY
Live Review

There were two hot-ticket shows last night: one starring a singer and entertainer at the peak of her powers, in control of her musical direction and multi-million-dollar empire, the other featuring a young upstart with a novelty hit ("Gucci Gucci"), barely old enough to drink.

It goes without saying that there’s a huge gap in terms of Beyoncé's and Kreayshawn's experience as performers; Beyoncé has been in the biz since she was nine, Kreayshawn, well, hasn’t (read our exclusive interview here). But the stark differences between these sold-out shows, and more importantly the approach each artist takes to putting on a show, do shine a light on pop culture and the way it’s shifted in just a decade.

Beyoncé makes much of the fact she was inspired by Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five (as does her husband, Jay-Z). Like Jackson’s career, Beyoncé's success is rooted equally in talent and elbow grease. Beyoncé learned her craft under the strict tutelage of her dad—that kind of charisma doesn't come without grind—and she was clear about the way she grafted from the beginning of last night's Roseland blowout, opening up with a Jackson song ("I Wanna Be Where You Are") and a story about her father cutting off Destiny's Child's first audition (complaining, "I can hear that snot in your nose"). The singer then rolled out her hits like an endless red carpet, existing just for Beyoncé to strut on. It was a glorious show, beginning with a medley of singles (and the stories behind them) and culminating with her new album, 4, being performed in its entirety. Lady Gaga, Frank Ocean, Maxwell, Jay-Z, Jennifer Hudson, the Dream, Ne-Yo, Kelly Rowland and Adele all watched the show, presumably feeling the same giddiness as the fans in the crowd (hip-hop kids, gay boys and well-coiffed girls). You simply can’t watch and not be awed.

Beyoncé wore a shimmering gold leotard while her hair was tossed and tousled by a wind machine. Kreayshawn, on the other hand, dressed down to prove her merit. For her official NYC debut, the Oakland rapper wore a horrible white T-shirt tucked into ratty cut-off shorts. Was she being one of the boys? Or is she embarrassed by the spotlight? Kreayshawn’s exposure to the mainstream and fame has come fast—probably too fast—and that’s how it goes in 2011. In a media meritocracy where every last YouTube commenter has a say, unseasoned performers like Kreayshawn get to sell out the Highline before they even have enough songs to fill a headline slot. (To be clear, by unseasoned we’re not talking about age; Shirley Temple was seasoned at six).

Kreayshawn’s large, straggly entourage crowded the stage, and she needed the support; she doesn’t yet know how to work a crowd and shared MC duties with White Girl Mob cohort V-Nasty (an impressive MC who apparently lost out on a big-bucks record deal because of her liberal use of the n–word). The show was a charming mess nonetheless. I like Kreayshawn because I think the handful of songs she has are great, and because she seems to genuinely enjoy what she does. She smiles a lot, which is rare, and her show felt like crashing a teenagers' house party.

Beyonce's stage at Roseland was packed too, heaving with musicians: A full band, string section, brass section (including gleaming white saxophones), astoundingly beautiful backing singers. And still it felt like Beyoncé was the only person onstage, such is her dazzle.

Of course it’s not bad that Kreayshawn’s live show is a bit of a shambles—that would be like saying that you have to know how to dance to have fun at a school disco. But what a thing to see: make-it-up-as-you-go opportunism contrasted so vividly with old-fashioned showbiz. In New York at least, there is still room for both.

Ke$ha

2011-08-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

The multimillion-selling party girl takes some time out to chat.

Time Out NY
Interview

Sure, Ke$ha might gets her kicks out of making necklaces from fans’ teeth and licking rock stars’ faces (the proof awaits below), but the hard-living pop star is no dummy. On a break from her European tour, the “Tik Tok” hit-maker talked with us about life on the road, in advance of her Get $leazy blowout that’s coming to Jones Beach on Saturday 20.

You’ve just finished touring the U.K. Did you find it rougher there than here?
[Laughs] Oh, God! Yeah, in Scotland everybody was wasted by three in the afternoon—it was awesome! And last night I played here in London and we definitely got into messy, rowdy after-parties.

What’s the most bizarre thing you’ve seen in the past year of craziness?
Oh, you know, I’ve been all over the world…the most bizarre thing? I just played Glastonbury and I brought all my trannie friends, and we were all walking around and they were in thongs, with big fake boobs and giant wigs and wellies on. And one of them fell in the mud, so we all decided to just roll around in it together. So by the end of the night there was a bunch of trannies in thongs and wellies covered in mud, all drunk, singing along to U2. It was pretty good.

You strike me as being very hardy—you Tweeted that you actually like sleeping on the tour bus…
Well that’s definitely the image that I try to uphold, that I am tough, and I am confident. Because I think that that’s a good role model, to let things roll off your back and not take any negativity too seriously, and to really not give a fuck. Of course there are certain things that get to me, but I try and lead by example and show people that, especially with haters, that you should just ignore them.

Do you ever have to take quiet time?
[Laughs] I try to get in quiet time and book time, but really, the only time I ever get that is when I’m on an airplane—I have a fear of flying, but I actually love flying because it’s the only time I can sleep, and it’s the only time I get to read. Right now I’m reading Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins. He’s one of my favorite authors; he wrote Still Life with Woodpecker and he’s great.

You write your own songs and work hard. Do you ever feel like people underestimate you?
I mean, yes—but I’m living my dream. I’m so thankful every day I get to wake up and play music to people that show up to my gigs. So is it hard, is it a grueling schedule and do I work my ass off? Absolutely. But that’s not what I’m going to focus on, because I just feel so lucky, and it seems a little bit pretentious. And the party-girl image—it’s true, I do drink whiskey. But to maintain the kind of schedule I have and to work on all of my songs—and I play almost every instrument if you come and see my live show—there’s brains behind that. I write for other people, and I am a smart person. I don’t think you could be dumb and be conquering the world.

What makes a hit song? Is there math to it?
I think anybody would have a different answer to this, but for me what’s really important for my songs is that they’re honest [Emphatically] and they’re real. I can tell when someone’s singing a song and they don’t mean it. I write every song. It’s coming from me and my life and my experiences. So it’s all real. And when I can connect with somebody and I believe them, I think that makes the song more tangible to me and, you know, a hit.

What music is believable to you?
Well, for Animal, I’d always listened to Licensed to Ill, the Beastie Boys record. It was just so funny and irreverent and youthful and no matter what, when you put on that record it makes you wanna destroy and party and it puts you in a great mood. And I always wanted my record Animal to be like that. Just ’cause I believed them. They were out of control and running around New York City. And I loved it. But another song? Iggy Pop, “Nightclubbing”. I believe he goes nightclubbing at all hours and is kind of just lurking around, slithering around like a weirdo in the night. I believe him when he sings that.

Tell us about your Hands On Nashville project. That sounds pretty noble.…
Well, I’ve snuck into shows since I was 13 years old. And I know there are people who don’t want to break the law, but I thought I could give kids a way to get into my shows, by giving back to the community—they can earn their way into the show. I know when I was younger I couldn’t get a [break], so this is a way for them to do something good and get a free ticket to a dance party.

Your fans are so devoted, they’ve started sending you their teeth.
Ah! [Laughs]. They are devoted. One fan sent me one tooth, so I made a necklace out of it. But then I found a bunch of my baby teeth, and started realizing I would love to wear a piece of my fans’ bodies on me. I mean, it sounds kind of weird, but I’m very much into wearing gemstones and natural pieces of jewelry ’cause it makes me feel grounded. And I started thinking, maybe I could make some sort of garment out of my fans’ teeth. I have almost 500 and I’m still collecting more. I got four yesterday.

Are you at all grossed out by it? Or is it just, Yep, got the teeth?
No! That’s, like, the animal inside. I love bringing that out of people.

Is your mom a bit of a hippy chick?
Yeah. I mean, she’s definitely a hippy—she lived in a school bus, and then a teepee for part of her life. So I guess I get the free spirit from her. And then I get a little bit of the rowdiness from my brother.

There’s a messiness to what you do—a critic remarked on the fact you did a cartwheel onstage that was not very good but really joyous…
[Giggles] Well yeah, that sums up my message pretty accurately—that what I’m doing is messy and imperfect, but it’s really fun. And it’s just a big celebration of life, and nobody on my stage takes themselves very seriously. We’re good musicians and we play a good show, but we act a little bit like jackasses. I never want to be pretentious.

You recently licked Slash on the face.
Ah! Yeah. I was playing the Oxegen festival, and I’d just gotten off stage and I was on this high. So I get out of my car and see Slash doing an interview, and I try to go kiss him. But I couldn’t reach ’cause he’s really tall, so I just decide to lick him. [Laughs] It was a good one.

Is Ke$ha onstage a persona like Ziggy Stardust, or is that straight-up you?
I think it’s like me times ten.

Kreayshawn

2011-08-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

The small MC with the big mouth sets the record straight.

Time Out NY
Preview

“I mean, I said I wanted to be a stripper seriously as a seven-year-old, but I didn’t know what a stripper was.…” Kreayshawn offers an incredulous whatever frown as she recounts a recent interview. Welcome to the world of being misquoted, we say. “I know!” Kreayshawn responds.

The tiny California MC is curled up on an ornate sofa at the Box, a fashionably clandestine Lower East Side hotspot, getting ready for a showcase. She’s still reeling from the news that she’s up for a trophy at the MTV Video Music Awards (“I’m the newest artist in the New Artist nominees!”), and as if to confirm her newfound celebrity status, the 21-year-old was misidentified just this morning: “I was in the black Navigator and I rolled down the window for a second, and these girls are saying, ‘[Gasp] Oh my God, is it really you, Lady Gaga?’ ” She laughs. “And I’m like, ‘No, I’m not Lady Gaga! But I’m even cooler! I’m Kreayshawn!’ ”

Is Kreayshawn cooler than Gaga? Her cool, controversial friends from back in the Bay (Odd Future, Lil B) indicate so, and her crisp beats are certainly fresher than Gaga’s hackneyed Eurodisco stylings. But in terms of having something to prove, and achieving any kind of enduring fame, Kreayshawn has her work cut out.

Her big-bucks record deal with Columbia is a result of the success of a novelty single, “Gucci Gucci,” directed at girls whose identities hinge on their branded accessories (“Them basic bitches wear that shit so I don’t even bother”). She’s been accused of minstrelsy, caused outrage by using the n-word in a tweet and reputedly got her start because Bruce Willis is her uncle.

But if Kreayshawn is a fake, she does an extremely convincing job of suggesting otherwise. She doesn’t seem to try too hard in person. Her laid-back attitude and slightly monotone speaking voice may suggest she’s bored, confident, insouciant or just really stoned—but it sure as hell doesn’t scream stage school, or even really show-off.

Kreayshawn categorically isn’t Bruce Willis’s niece. Born Natassia Gail Zolot, she was raised by her mother in Oakland. Mom was just 16 when she was born, and a member of garage band the Trashwomen; ergo, there wasn’t any money around, and Natassia was raised with music in the house. (Tito Puente, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Kool Keith were big hits with junior Kreayshawn). She enjoyed taking graffiti classes after school, and started directing music videos, working with rappers like Lil B.

“I definitely grew up running around Oakland streets,” she says, “And there’s a lot of sick shit.” Like what? “Like, child prostitution is everywhere, you know what I’m saying? Everywhere. The average age for a prostitute out there is 12, 13. There’s usually 250 murders a year and there’s only, like, 300,000 people living there, which means it’s a killing every other day. It’s hella crazy.”

The n-word scandal shocked her, as she was quoting a song lyric, she says. And in any case, Oakland is different: “It’s so multicultural and everyone’s blended in together; the only thing that we battle with in the Bay is just, like, fighting with the police, which brings everyone together.”

Nevertheless, Kreayshawn moved from the Bay to L.A. (“Small circles mean more and more drama, and you can only do so much out there”), where success found her, fast. She wrote “Gucci, Gucci” to amuse herself and her friends, but says she knew it was something special right away. “I never thought of signing to a label—it never even crossed my mind. [But] when I made ‘Gucci, Gucci,’ I was like, This song’s hell tight, showing my friends, listening to it all day. Then we made a video, and then it just rolled all over the Internet after that.”

Fact is, one can discuss Kreayshawn’s authenticity, her supposed right to make the kind of music that she wants to make, pretty much indefinitely. But it seems daft to deny that “Gucci, Gucci” is a brilliant pop song, and a shame to not be able to enjoy Kreayshawn’s posturing—this skinny little kid acting like a gangster, unbothered by notions of prettiness: “I got the swag, and it’s pumpin’ out my ovaries!”

“I’m a confident person,” she says quietly. “But people bring it up, that it’s going to be hard as a white female in this hip-hop game, you know? And I’m trying to say for me, I don’t wanna be looked at as a white rapper anyway. I wanna prove to everyone that I’m a artist. Sooner or later it’s not going to be hard at all, ’cause I’ll make my own name.” In the meantime, there are shows to play, awards to be (maybe) won. “I’m excited,” she says. “I’m excited just to be on the red carpet and kick it, you know?”

Bon Iver

2011-08-08T14:45:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY
Live preview

Does bigger mean better? Bon Iver expands its sound, and plays two huge shows.

Even if you’re not a fan, you are probably aware of the mythology that has sprung up around Bon Iver’s debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago, since its release in 2007—the lore being that before singer Justin Vernon became BFFs with Kanye West, he locked himself in a cabin for an entire winter and made the saddest songs ever recorded.

Well, if For Emma was the log cabin, then the newly released Bon Iver is the Playboy-style 1970s country retreat. The snow is still falling outside, the guitar still leans against the wall—it’s just that this time around, your feet are sinking into thick shag carpet, and you’re pushing ice cubes around a tumbler of Scotch.

What does this mean sonically? Simply that Vernon has traded acoustic guitars for glistening electric strings and pitter-pattering drums. Bon Iver is an album of textures, trading as much in space as it does in melody. This expansiveness is borne out in such far-flung song titles as “Calgary,” “Minnesota, WI” and “Perth.”

Factor in the notion that at least one song here sounds like a lost Bruce Hornsby and the Range cut, or perhaps an Alan Parsons Project single, and you can practically feel the velveteen sofas and see the mood lighting. Those who love a GHM (Good Hard Mope) may be more resistant to the charms of this new record; for the rest of us, Bon Iver invites us to luxuriate in melancholy. Expect some serious escapism at these two big shows.

Britney Spears / Taylor Swift

2011-08-08T14:43:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY
Live Preview

The object of a million teen crushes goes head-to-head with the perennial teenager.

Little girls have big crushes on Taylor Swift, and it’s easy to see why—from the singer’s perfect curls and well-chosen outfits to the pearls of grown-up wisdom that seem to fall from her lips (“Words can break someone into a million pieces, but they can also put them back together,” she writes in the sleeve notes to her latest CD, Speak Now). Swift’s fans show their devotion online with such breathless comments as, “I wish I could have a wonderful sister like Taylor Swift.”

But how would the “Swifties” really react to having Taylor as their big sis, wafting around the house in a cloud of serenity and making the right choices all the time? (Even when Swift loses in love, she triumphs in song.) Surely there’d be a bit of irate foot-stomping and bad attitude.

While Britney Spears is Swift’s senior in years (a mother of two at 29) and in record sales, she is the younger sister to Swift’s shining example. Spears is in defiant mode pretty much all the time; her new video, “I Wanna Go,” has the pop star cursing at journalists, grabbing a fan’s crotch and flashing a police officer. She’s awkward, too; after nearly two decades in the game, Spears still stands pigeon-toed, not quite sure what to do with her hands.

For tweenage girls, quaking understandably at the prospect of their first kiss, Taylor is obviously the winning choice, at least fantasywise. To those of us past our door-slamming teens, however, naughty Brit is by far the more appealing option. We’ll take our ticket with a pair of ripped tights, please.

Rihanna

2011-07-18T15:46:00.000-07:00

Time Out New York
Preview

Is the pop star making history or just ruffling feathers?

WELL-BEHAVED BITCHES SELDOM MAKE HISTORY reads Rihanna’s current Twitter avatar. It’s an interesting thing for the pop star to say, given that she’s just been chosen as the face of Vita Coco coconut water, and her most recent single, “California King Bed,” was a plodding, middle-of-the-road ballad used to sell Nivea skin care.

But you get the message, loud, clear and in pink letters: Rihanna works hard to establish that as bitches go, she is not well behaved, from her record titles (Good Girl Gone Bad, Rated R, “S&M”) to her ever-decreasing wardrobe and increasing tattoo collection. It’s rather a shame, not just because plenty of well-behaved bitches have made a durable impact on history (show of hands—Mother Teresa, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marie Curie, Jane Goodall), but also because the pose obscures the singer’s less-visible philanthropic work. It prompts the question, what kind of history is Rihanna trying to make?

She’s already one of the best-selling female artists of all time, having shifted more than 20 million albums worldwide. Thanks to such catchy pop nuggets as “Umbrella,” “What’s My Name?” and “Only Girl (In the World),” the 23-year-old is as bankable a pop star as exists right now. As regards an enduring legacy, however, one can only imagine where the present trend for stripper-feminism lands today’s little girls in a decade’s time. Will any of this keep Rihanna’s two huge New York shows from being fun? Hell no. Will you leave the stadium feeling optimistic about women in the entertainment industry? That’s your call.

Greatest Mustaches in Rock History

2011-07-18T15:43:00.000-07:00

For the full slideshow—including John Oates, Freddie Mercury, Frank Zappa, Lemmy, Chuck Berry, Ringo, Franz Nicolay, Prince, JD Samson and Donald Fagan—click here.

Sade live review

2011-07-18T14:15:00.000-07:00

Time Out New York
Live Review

“Thank you so much for being here,” Sade Adu said, addressing her Newark audience on Saturday night, “All these years, keeping the flame alive.” It’s been ten years to be precise, since the group last toured America; what’s remarkable is that in all that time, Sade hasn’t changed an iota. The singer is still breathtakingly lovely, her face unmarked by lines (and astonishingly unsagged by jowls.) But more than that, the band’s modus operandi remains the same: the London soul veterans are ambassadors for a classy restraint that’s all but extinct in an era of brash skankiness. The songs still sounded ice-cool—the better, even, for being removed from the decade they defined.

Sade is no longer just your mom’s music. Sure there were older couples at the show sharing a smooch, but there were hot young things, too: Perfectly coiffed girls in matching outfits, R&B boys in scruffy jeans whose college smoking sessions were soundtracked by Lovers’ Rock. The show kicked off with a moody, marching “Soldier of Love,” the singer emerging from under the stage clad entirely in black, wrists cuffed in sparkling diamanté. As the crowd roared its delight, Sade smiled assuredly—as if pleased and utterly unsurprised at her reception. She strode the stage in six-inch heels, eschewing a Gaga-style meat dress or Beyonce-style aggro dance routine in favor of smooth wiggles and knowing nods, while her band stood stock still, as if awaiting her next command.

Lightening the mood, “Your Love Is King,” and “Kiss of Life” followed, a giant screen beaming images of Sade running through a field of daisies looking about seventeen (Freckles! At 52!). The show was a solid stream of hits (see full set list below), divided into themed segments. After an opening lounge-style section, a film noir voiceover and sirens chimed up along with old-fashioned neon signage that read first “CHICAGO” and then “KEY LARGO”; a delicious moment when the entire stadium realized that “Smooth Operator” was next. The ’80s megahit sounded crisp, its sax solo positively (and unembarrassingly) thrilling.

Red curtains unfurled from the rafters for “Is It a Crime” and “Stronger than Pride,” and the singer skipped off stage for a costume change. She returned, hair disheveled, barefoot and wearing a red-brassiere-revealing silver gown—looking suitably used for a melancholy “King of Sorrow.” If Sade’s music has aged magnificently, then so have her fans: As she sang “No Ordinary Love” (wind machine on full blast), an older married couple in the crowd danced together in the blue light. Sade closed the show with a sweetly sincere “By Your Side,” as petals fluttered over the crowd, returning for an encore with “Cherish the Day.” Wearing a red silk bomber jacket and gown, the singer stood on a plinth that rose 20 feet above the stage, with a black-and-white New York city skyline projected behind her. Way to own this city.

Click past the jump for the set list

Sade at the Prudential Center
Set list

“Soldier of Love”
“Your Love Is King”
“Skin”
“Kiss of Life”
“Love Is Found”
“In Another Time”
“Smooth Operator”
“Jezebel”
“Bring Me Home”
“Is It a Crime”
“Love Is Stronger than Pride”
“All About Our Love”
“Paradise”
“Nothing Can Come Between Us”
“Morning Bird”
“King of Sorrow”
“The Sweetest Taboo”
“The Moon and the Sky”
“Pearls”
“No Ordinary Love”
“By Your Side”

Encore
“Cherish the Day”

Sade

2011-07-18T14:14:00.001-07:00

Time Out New York
Preview

The Brit soul sensation returns, still sexy after all these years.

For so many pop acts associated with the 1980s, the link to that era is permanent and usually not altogether positiveSuggest: So many pop acts of the 1980s are permanently linked to the era—usually not in an altogether positive way. Most stars are doomed to a career of revival tours, or at least a lifetime of staying faithful to a certain haircut. You’d think the same might be true of British soul-pop sensation Sade, who typified a certain ’80s style: Fronted by uncommonly beautiful singer Sade Adu, the band (yes, band) scored hits like “Smooth Operator,” which namechecked exotic destinations (Chicago! Key Largo!) to the sound of a languorous sax riff.

In their day, Sade records had the same cachet as black lace underwear, red Porches and cappuccino machines. But for all its cool and sexiness, Sade was never flash. There is subtlety to the music, and a tantalizing air of mystery to the singer—who has never conducted her relationships in public, posted embarrassing tweets or shown off her beach body. Instead, she reappears with a new album, seemingly out of the blue, every decade or so, with both music and musicians existing outside such petty concerns as time and trends.

That kind of grace is timeless—and these days unique. Will it be sufficiently potent to transport 16,000 fans beyond these hulking stadiums for a few hours? If anyone can pull that feat off, it’s Sade.

Lykke Li

2011-07-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

Time Out New York
Preview

The Swedish pop star ups the drama on her new record—and in real life.

The Swedish singer Lykke Li recently canceled tour dates in Europe because of complications arising from a panic attack of sorts: “I had some kind of complete meltdown at Marks & Spencer in Glasgow,” she wrote on her website by way of explanation. While many U.K. shoppers will tell you that’s par for the course, Lykke Li (born Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson) does have a dark side that her pinup looks and cool-girl cred don’t immediately suggest.

Apart from anything else, one would assume that all would be peachy if you were collaborating with Kanye and Drake, as well as being remixed by Beck, courted by Kings of Leon (who requested that she cover one of their songs) and featured in Glee. But the Swedish propensity for melancholy throbs through Zachrisson’s songs (as it has in the work of fellow Swedes the Cardigans, Robyn, ABBA, Roxette…). Her new, second album, Wounded Rhymes, draws heavily on ’60s girl-group pop, but unlike the dislocated, flat sound of, say, Vivian Girls or Best Coast, Zachrisson ups the drama and goes full Shangri-Las: “I’d rather die in your arms than die lonesome,” she swoons over booming drums on “Love Out of Lust.” Similarly, the Hammond organ on “Youth Knows No Pain” suggests “Monster Mash” on downers, the single “I Follow Rivers” Depeche Mode with tambourines. It’s potent stuff, in other words—the sonic equivalent of smelling salts. The fact that Zachrisson also has excellent taste in covers—Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” and A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It?”—pretty much guarantees this show will be a knockout.

Alexander and Fam

2011-07-18T14:09:00.001-07:00

Time Out NY
Preview

Alexander Ebert retires Edward Sharpe and comes up trumps as himself.

Part of the charm of the song “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros is that it’s about coming home, finding yourself, returning to something abiding. It’s an affirmative, rooted yes. It was cool, too, that the backstory matched up so neatly: that singer Alex Ebert had been around the block a few times—fronting Ima Robot, getting addicted to drugs, generally self-destructing—before finding sweet salvation performing as Edward Sharpe.

Didn’t last long, though. Ebert is now making music under his own name; he plays all the instruments on his solo debut, Alexander, and is currently touring with a band called Fam. No official, juicy explanation has been given for his old band being shelved, but this new album is sweetly appealing stuff, combining 1960s spaghetti-Western pop (à la Lee Hazlewood) with a pinch of old-school ska.

It’s the kind of music that comes on when you’re having a lovely drink on a beautiful day and you think, Mm, this is nice. And just as you know that this little moment in the sun will pass (as all things do), so too Ebert will likely return to NYC next year performing as someone else entirely. What to do? Enjoy it while you can, of course.

WNYC Soundcheck: In Studio, Okkervil River

2011-05-24T14:27:00.002-07:00

WNYC Soundcheck
Guest Host

Okkervil River’s ambitious sixth album, “I Am Very Far,” bears the sound of band that has deliberately placed itself outside of its comfort zone. The band’s songwriter and frontman, Will Sheff, joins us to talk about the making of the album – and the stories inside its songs. Plus, he's joined by bandmate Patrick Pestorius for a live performance in our studio.

WNYC Soundcheck: Bob Marley, Life and Legacy

2011-05-24T14:27:00.001-07:00

WNYC Soundcheck
Guest Host

Today marks thirty years since the death of reggae icon Bob Marley. Guest host Sophie Harris of Time Out New York takes a look at the life and legacy of the Jamaican music legend.

WNYC Soundcheck: A Beastie Homage

2011-05-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

WNYC Soundcheck
Guest Host

Over 25 years and eight albums, the Beastie Boys have celebrated their hometown with brash shoutouts - and subtle inside jokes. Today: Guest host Sophie Harris of Time Out New York examines how the hip hop trio's newest album once again pays tribute to New York. Plus: British electronic composer James Blake brings his "post-dubstep" sound live to the Soundcheck studio.

WNYC Soundcheck: In Studio, James Blake

2011-05-24T14:18:00.000-07:00

WNYC Soundcheck

Earlier this year, the full-length debut from James Blake helped launch a civil war inside the British electronic genre known as dubstep. Purists decried the lack of manic dance beats, while innovators applauded the album’s icy R&B feel and Blake’s vocals, which recall a classic era of blue-eyed English soul. (His cover of Feist’s “Limit to Your Love” was just petrol on the fire.) He joins us to play live.

The Lonely Island: Interview

2011-05-13T14:48:00.000-07:00

Time Out New York Cover Feature
The Lonely Island Summer Preview Special

For the full package—including track by track, interviews with Akon and Michael Bolton and dating tips—click here.

“Throw your ass into it!” yells the photographer, across a floor spattered with ketchup and mustard. The Lonely Island boys duly lean into an enormous tray of hot dogs before retiring to change into tutus and, later, to smear ice cream over their faces. Such is life in America’s hottest comedy troupe. Headed by Andy Samberg—whose dad watches the shoot from the sidelines, saying sweetly, “Andy was never shy”—the trio brought life back to Saturday Night Live when they joined in 2005 and reanimated the comedy-music meme. (2006’s “Dick in a Box” video racked several zillion YouTube views long before the Gregory Brothers got their Auto-Tuning hands on Antoine Dodson.)

Two years later (following several movie roles, a debut record that sold 350,000 copies, and a Grammy nom for the single “I’m on a Boat,” which went platinum), Samberg and his childhood pals Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer are set to release their second album, Turtleneck & Chain, which features collaborators Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Beck, Snoop Dogg and even Michael Bolton. Obviously, these are gents with enormous cultural acumen and a lot of experience in having a good time. Who better to steer you through your perfect summer?

It’s nearly summer. Are you guys tanners?
Andy Samberg: We don’t really leave the building. But I also just don’t like baking in the sun. And now what with all the depleting ozone layers…
Jorma Taccone: Thank you for getting that in there. I went to the doctor recently and she actually prescribed that I go out for ten minutes a day, I’m so depleted on vitamin D.
Akiva Schaffer: I take a lot of ladies’ vitamins, because I never buy my own and that’s what’s in the house. More iron…
Samberg: I wear a lot of ladies’ underwear for the same reason. If you want me to not wear it then wash my underwear!

Click past the jump for more

What’s your favorite thing to do in the summer?
Samberg: Get a coconut frozie fruit little Popsicle. You can get it at any bodega.
Schaffer: One of the great things about living in a big city is that there are specialized ice cream places where there are just Popsicles and stuff. You know the special Popsicle place [Popbar]? The whole place was just Popsicles, and they were beautifully set up almost like the jewelry section at Barneys. A glass case and each one is perfectly lit.

You have some intense fans. Even back at a 2009 signing session for Incredibad with Paul Rudd, the kids were already going nuts.
Samberg: For us it’s always weird, because we’re comedy. You certainly never think, when you’re making songs about jizz and dicks, that teenagers will scream for it.
Schaffer: It’s also because we’ve been near actual pop stars that they would scream for.
Samberg: I think they think if they cheer loud enough that Justin and Rihanna will appear.

Kristen Schaal introduced you at the Comedy Awards in April as “the little Orson Welleses of the Internet”—do you see yourselves as pioneers of the comedy-song meme?
Samberg: To me, the only thing that’s unique about us is that we’ve done it with modern popular music, which is saying hip-hop and R&B. There have been joke rap songs since rap existed. We love Al Yankovic, he’s our hero. But we’re more in the Tenacious D category in that we make original songs. It’s not just direct spoof. Hip-hop is what we grew up listening to and loving.
Schaffer: And if we do poke fun a little at the grandeur, we’re doing it from a place of love.
Taccone: When we came out with “Lazy Sunday,” the greatest compliment I heard was that ?uestlove had it on his iPod.

You use a lot of rude words in your songs. With great power comes great responsibility.…
Taccone: A friend of my family had an eight-year-old kid who heard “Jizz in My Pants.” He had to ask his mom what it was, and she had to explain all of sex to him. So she thanks me routinely.

Did you feel sheepish, using mom and fucking in the same sentence in “Motherlover”?
Samberg: Well, Jorma’s mom was not into it; my mom really loved it.
Taccone: My mom loved “Dick in a Box,” thought it was great, and then really was not into “Motherlover.” Bizarrely. She found her limit.
Samberg: My mom thought it was a good message: that moms are sexy, that moms have sexuality too.
Taccone: She hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been happening online for the last ten years. [Laughs]
Samberg: [Nods] She does not troll MILF sites.

The guest list on Turtleneck & Chain is crazy. Did you have a list of fantasy collaborators, like Michael Bolton?
Schaffer: Bolton was our first choice for [the Pirates of the Caribbean–inspired track] “Jack Sparrow,” always. We worked very hard to make it happen.

How did Nicki Minaj get involved?
Schaffer: It was just through hearing her music, the way anybody does. It was in the summer before she blew up.
Samberg: It was a satisfying feeling of foresight on our part that we had asked her to do it in summertime before she got booked on the show. Like, yeah, told you she was great!
Taccone: She plays a good sexy nerd.

Does anyone ever say no to your requests? Have you asked for Kanye?
Schaffer: There have not been specific songs, but we always put the feelers out to Kanye. We always say, “We’re making an album and whenever you’re ready.” And that goes for now as well.
Samberg: I’ll say this now about anyone ever who we’ve asked and they’ve said no: You just have to want to. And there’s nothing wrong with not wanting to. People have so much to lose, and in certain people’s eyes, not as much to gain.
Schaffer: Yeah, he doesn’t need to be more famous or reinvent himself. He would just have to think it would be a fun thing to do.

Ever feel that you’re co-opting an urban genre?
Samberg: I hope we’re never co-opting it. We want it to feel like we’re celebrating it.
Taccone: I think we make a point of saying this is fake rap, we don’t consider this real rap.
Schaffer: It’s not like Elvis, taking the music and white-ifying it and replaying it. We’re paying respect to it.
Samberg: We always say that the joke isn’t that it’s rap, we use rap to tell the joke. And one of the other reasons is that none of us can sing or play any instruments.

The Lonely Island: Track by Track

2011-05-13T14:42:00.001-07:00

Time Out New York Cover Feature
From the Lonely Island Summer Preview Special

A hip-hop jam featuring an ’80s–style chorus about Pirates of the Caribbean, belted out by Michael Bolton.

How do you arrive at an idea this outlandish?
Samberg: That one was inspired by the beat. Because the beat starts out and it’s very club jammy, and then the chorus breaks and it feels like you’re on Pirates of the Caribbean all of a sudden.

Did you meet Bolton in the flesh?
Schaffer: Oh yeah, we had a meeting and many phone calls about changing lines and getting it just right. And we were on Skype while he was in the studio.
Samberg: I was laughing the whole time. The first time he sings on the track, it’s not even the main joke of the song, but when we play it people are like, this is awesome. And it’s no coincidence that dude has sold 80 trillion records; he really knows how to record and how to layer—he’s just built for it. It was very impressive.

Did he write any of the lyrics? I’m thinking: “This whole town’s a pussy/waitin’ to get boned”?
Taccone: That’s a quote! From Scarface. Once you see the video that doesn’t exist yet, it will explain everything.

And “the jester of Tortuga”?
Taccone: Tortuga is just a hilarious word so we try to put it in as often as possible. That’s just our loving description of Jack Sparrow, over the course of three films. Certainly I don’t think there would be anyone who disagrees that he is the papa of the surf, nor the jester of Tortuga. [They all crack up.]

Some would argue Pirates of the Caribbean is a terrible film.
Samberg: It’s friggin’ Depp! I could watch Depp stab a penguin. That actually sounds like quite a good movie.

For the full Turtleneck and Chain track by track click here

Raphael Saadiq

2011-05-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

The consummate soul man plays it cool.
Time Out New York Feature
Read it in full here

There’s posh, and there’s posh. At Sony’s midtown headquarters there are two reception areas: one for the general public, and one for the Sky Lounge on the 35th floor, where a mustachioed gent in a bow tie directs me to the Raphael Saadiq photo shoot.

Saadiq is of course no entry-level musician, having fronted R&B troupes Tony! Toni! Toné! and Lucy Pearl; collaborated with Stevie Wonder, Erykah Badu and the Bee Gees; and recorded five superb solo albums—the fifth of which, Stone Rollin’, drops on Tuesday 10.

A style icon, Saadiq strides into the interview room in crisp wool slacks and red-and-white brogues. (He’s been wearing suits since he was seven years old and singing in church, he says.) Poised in a leather armchair, Saadiq insists that music has always been “a gentleman’s game” for him. “My music is more blues-oriented,” he says. “It’s never really been about the ‘I’m too sexy for my shirt’ thing.” His charming, guarded demeanor supports this notion, as does his description of his first big break, touring as part of Sheila E.’s ensemble with Prince: “I was too young for it to blow my mind; I was more stuck on being professional out there,” he says. “They had a lot of fun, but it doesn’t seem like anybody was too wild.”

So far, so businesslike, but Saadiq was basically touring the world with Mr. Sex. Similarly, the video for the Tony! Toni! Toné! smooth jam “It Never Rains (in Southern California)” had Saadiq shirtless and positively glowing with desire. In 2007 he posed naked, entwined with Joss Stone, for a portrait accompanying her album Introducing Joss Stone, which he produced. And in 2002, Saadiq cowrote D’Angelo’s Grammy-winning “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” a song (and video) so sexy that its merits are still debated in Ph.D. dissertations.

Saadiq had quite a partnership with D’Angelo, but quickly dismisses the notion that they might be two sides of the same coin. “That’s definitely not me,” he says. “I’m only around for the creativity, then I’m gone.” How does he feel, then, about his songs being used for seduction, as they surely have been since the get-go? “Some people use no lights for sex, some people use light, you know?” he shrugs. “Once they get the product in their household, they can do whatever they want with it. It’s only up to me when I make it, then it’s out of my hands.” It’s a wonderful gift, though, isn’t it? Saadiq laughs. “I mean, I’ve heard people say, ‘We’ve made babies to your songs,’ ” he adds. “That’s flattering. A lot of people say they named their daughter Deja [from ‘Ask of You’]. I think that’s cool.”

There’s plenty of baby-making music on Stone Rollin’, from the outrageously slinky, harmonica-drizzled title track to the raw garage-rocker “Over You.” “This is the beginning of a cycle of records that will really define me,” Saadiq says with quiet confidence. “When I say, ‘Go to Hell,’ and I sing, ‘I can see my name written across the sky’—I didn’t write that down. I just started singing it, and it opened up, like, ‘This is it!’ ”

Saadiq recorded the album in his own Los Angeles studio (“You can sit there and create and make all sorts of faces; it’s a huge joy”), playing all the instruments himself and taking occasional breaks to go to the driving range. Is he good at golf? “Nah, I just like to hit balls,” he says. “I’d rather be good at music than golf.” Making the right choices early on is important, Saadiq asserts. “As a youngster you just have to pick those five or six things—and make sure you’re pickin’ ’em wisely because you’re gonna pay for it [Laughs], whatever they are.”

Saadiq chose wisely. He’s an astonishing talent, and he knows it. Even so, his enduring success over three decades is unusual. He remembers a turning point in the early days of Tony! Toni! Toné!, when, as the band was about to walk onstage, he passed a promoter whose face was hidden in darkness. “And the guy said, ‘Yeah, this is your first record. Let’s see what your next single sounds like,’ ” Saadiq says, shaking his head. “He said single. He wasn’t talking about albums. And that always stuck with me.”

Accordingly, Saadiq’s next single has always been good. He’s a soul survivor. With the exception of some iffy fashion choices in the ’80s, he got here without compromising his dignity, without scandals or bad music. He’s built a career on solid, enduring tunes and killer live shows. Now that’s a gentleman’s game, well played.

The Hot Seat: Kylie Minogue

2011-04-29T14:32:00.000-07:00

Time Out New York
The Hot Seat
Click here for the full interview

The tiny, iconic popstrel dishes on her $25 million tour.

Why did you decide to go for the ancient Greek look on this tour?
It stemmed from the song “Aphrodite,” on my [new] album—there’s so much to play with visually, and of course we don’t go mildly or meekly [Laughs]. We’ve gone Fantasia—you know, we’ve brought Vegas on the road.

There are male dancers in Dolce & Gabbana playing bongos on each other’s bums in the show. How camp is too camp?
I don’t think we’ve reached that stage. [Laughs] In a way, this tour is not as camp as some of the others, unless my radar is off-kilter. The On a Night Like This tour had lots of sailors, and I arrived on a bedazzled anchor from the ceiling. Actually, my creative director e-mailed me a little YouTube clip of Miss Piggy—I’m a Muppet maniac—[with] Miss Piggy doing the full Esther Williams. It’s hilarious because that’s our show!

Has burlesque had a big influence on your shows? Both experiences are sexy, but funny, too…
Yeah, we’re always really aware of what we’re doing, and we take making joy seriously. But we definitely have a laugh, and I don’t think a lot of what I do would translate if there wasn’t that kind of understanding from the audience that we do it knowingly. You don’t see me winking, but you know I am.

You’re planning a duet with Britney? Will your styles clash?
[Laughs] Yeah, I put a tweet up because I’d heard some of her songs and I was genuinely excited by them. Then the question was raised, Would I like to do a duet with her? I think we’re both agreed that, yeah, of course it’d be interesting. And fabulous! And it’s almost, like, in people’s minds it’s already done! They’re just like, [She pretends to swoon.] Oh, Kylie and Britney equals heaven.

What do you make of Lady Gaga’s persona? You’re both showgirls, but you’re in a gold chariot and she’s in a rubber egg womb…
[Laughs] I get it, and I really appreciate that—that’s her character and it’s who she is. I watched an interview where she said finally people were seeing beyond the costumes. So I can relate to her. I think what I find really amazing is she’s still so young. Maybe I’m underestimating myself slightly, but when I was her age I was kind of going along and trying to do the best with what was presented to me.

She takes herself very seriously. Your early stuff was more playful.
Yup, probably more like an inquisitive puppy. [Laughs] But it’s a lot different now, I’m probably a bit of both.

How do you unwind after performing a Grecian-themed water extravaganza? It’s hard enough to calm down as a fan.
Yeah, you’ve got thousands and thousands of people having a joyous experience and screaming your name—and it’s going from that to putting the kettle on, on your own, in your room. It’s a weird one, but I’m still doing it after all these years, so I definitely do love it.

The Hot Seat: Bronx Zoo Cobra

2011-04-29T14:27:00.000-07:00

Time Out New York
The Hot Seat

The Bronx Zoo Cobra dishes on fame, freedom and ankle-biting.

For the full interview, click here

Have you had any crazy ad opportunities thrown your way since you’ve become famous? Any fears about becoming the reptile Snooki?
A few offers, but nothing that really met this cobra’s high standards. Snooki gets attention for showing up. I get attention for disappearing.

You now have your own line of merchandise, including thongs. Was that your idea?
It wasn’t my idea, but I love the idea of thongs. Snakes love exposed ankles.

Have any celebs gotten in touch? I know you tweeted you were a fan of Tina Fey, and you got a shout-out from Mayor Bloomberg!
Ellen DeGeneres, Ryan Seacrest, Jon Favreau, Julie Benz and Martha Stewart all had nice things to say about me. That is the great thing about Twitter. It’s a place where a snake can hobnob with the big shots.

But you heard nothing from Justin Bieber?
Sadly, still no word from Justin. But never say never, am I right?

Your Perfect Lunch

2011-04-29T14:26:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY
Your perfect lunch cover feature
Click here for the full story

TV on the Radio

2011-04-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY
Preview

The day after TV on the Radio gives an intoxicating, thunderous performance at the SXSW music festival, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton addresses the Austin Convention Center with a talk titled “What Would Gaga Do?,” asking how musicians can best exploit modern technologies. He suggests that the way for new artists to get championed by big platforms like Vevo is to put themselves out there by any means available. Where does this leave shy musicians, TONY asks. Hilton frowns, then giggles, saying, “Well, Susan Boyle made it!” It’s hard not to leave the discussion thinking that quieter creative types are basically screwed.

Two weeks later, in a Williamsburg coffeeshop, jocular TV on the Radio frontmen Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe have reached a similar conclusion. Malone says his friend, local musician Sharon Van Etten, was giving a guitar lesson to a little girl who said she wanted to make a record someday but wasn’t sure she could: “What if I don’t win on American Idol?”

Singer Adebimpe, whom you may recognize as the groom in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, laughs and sighs. “I feel lucky to have grown up at a time where I got sent a tape from Seattle recorded on a 4-track that sounded a bit like I could’ve made it,” he says, remembering his own DIY past. “You didn’t have to have a TV studio or a contest to be popular. It’s a strange way to get into any creative field.”

The TVOTR story is now pretty much Brooklyn lore: The band’s emergence in the early 2000s is the reason aspiring artists still spill out of the L train. The group didn’t have to work on its “web presence” to achieve early success, which grew instead from its brand of odd, groovy art rock, running from its 2003 debut, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, to its new fourth album, Nine Types of Light.

There’s always been a romantic streak to TVOTR’s songwriting, and this latest disc is full of love songs and dreamy arrangements. (The album will be released with a download of short films to accompany each song.) But this time around there’s realism to the romanticism; consider the refrain, “You’re the only one I’ve ever loved,” on “You,” which Adebimpe deems the kind of beautiful-sounding lie you resort to when trying to express how much you care. “It requires a lot of delusion to fall in love,” he says. “I think about people that I would’ve thrown myself off a cliff for, and when I think back on it, 80 percent of what was cool about them, I made up [Laughs].”

The album’s tender tone is also a little surprising given the band’s base while recording in Los Angeles: down the street from Rodeo Drive, in what Malone cheerfully describes as “the most soul-sucking, sad, douchebaggy corner in hell.” “Where there are two reality shows being shot in the same café,” Adebimpe adds, grimacing.

So what keeps the band grounded while on the road? “The time you get to actually play music, which is the point of being on the road, becomes the time of sanity,” Malone says. “Every town you get to, it’s like: bookstore, coffeeshop, comic store, art store,” Adebimpe adds. “I’m working on my collection of 9,052 Magic Markers [Laughs].” The group’s members also busy themselves with solo projects: Malone helms Rain Machine; Adebimpe acts and directs; producer Dave Sitek delivered his starry Maximum Balloon project last year; drummer Jaleel Bunton plays with Reverend Vince Anderson; and bassist Gerard Smith (now undergoing treatment for lung cancer) recently composed music for a public-education documentary.

Clearly, a lot of water has passed under the Williamsburg Bridge since TVOTR started out. As if to emphasize the point, three acquaintances trail into the coffeeshop in succession this afternoon with babies, strollers and papooses—delighted to see their old buddies back in the ’hood. Besides fuller beards, success doesn’t seem to have had the least effect on the band. “Popularity is relative,” Adebimpe says. “I’ve definitely got into situations where I think someone recognizes me, and it’s just that I have some crap on my face.” If anything has changed in the past decade, it’s the machinations of the music industry. But perhaps one redeeming factor about its current, rather ugly incarnation is that it makes one hell of a foil for TV on the Radio’s defiantly human way of working.

TV on the Radio plays [node:120084 link=Music Hall of Williamsburg;] Tue 12 and [node:120438 link=Radio City Music Hall;] Wed 13.

TV on the Radio Q&A: The band talks love, death and witchcraft

2011-04-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY

This week, we’re having something of a TV on the Radio blowout to coincide with the band’s dates at Music Hall of Williamsburg (Tue 12) and Radio City (Wed 13) and the release of its splendid new album, Nine Types of Light.

There’s our feature in the magazine, plus Wilbert Cooper’s exploration of how TVOTR is connected to pretty much every other artist in the musicsphere; and here, we share our full Q&A with TVOTR frontmen Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe, with whom TONY recently spent a delightful afternoon in a Williamsburg coffeeshop.

Click past the jump to read Malone and Adebimpe’s thoughts on love, death, sleeping on floors (too old), GPS (failure to operate), L.A. (disgustingness therein), Dave Sitek’s lovely house in L.A., witchcraft, fame and perfumed books.

“If it were possible to write a love song about loving absolutely everything equally, with the same fervor that you did a person, or whatever, that would be great to do. I think that would be a terribly long-winded love song. Maybe not so great. I don’t think it would have any words.”—Tunde Adebimpe

TONY: I recently saw Rachel Getting Married [in which Adebimpe stars with Anne Hathaway and sings a cover of "Unknown Legend," above]. Tunde, how do you feel about the movie world—are you into the razzmatazz?
Tunde Adebimpe: I’ve been fortunate enough to work with really good people, and any time I can get a job doing that kind of work, I’m psyched about it, but outside of that… I like the spectacle of that world. I mean, Hollywood itself is completely and totally ridiculous. But I like what Hollywood can generate at its best. It’s super beautiful and kind of off-putting to me at the same time. That side of it is interesting. But like we were saying earlier, it’s nice that that part of the world can employ so many artists and creative people.

I’d done different acting things before [check out 2001 indie flick Jump Tomorrow], and that came up just after we got off the tour. I read the script and our manager mentioned that Jonathan Demme was directing it and I said, "Oh yeah? I would like to at least meet Jonathan Demme!" [Laughs] So I went and did a reading and tried out and then I got it—it was really cool. But I would say that that was as far from a traditional Hollywood experience as anyone could have, you know?

Did you go to the Oscars?
TA: [Emphatically] No, no, no, no. No. I missed out. [Laughs]

[Kyp starts filming me using an old-fashioned-looking but tiny hand-held device.]

So I was watching your virtual-reality video [at the start of this post]…
TA: Oh yeah, the “Will Do” video

And I thought—you’re roughly the same generation as I am, and I remember watching those old TV shows where they’d show the first virtual-reality goggles, or they’d be spreading jam on CDs—
TA: It would’ve been cool to have that in the video [Laughs]

I wanted to ask you how you feel about technology. Is there a point where we stop trying to keep up?
Kyp Malone: [Looking at my old cassette-tape recorder] The last person we worked with has the same tape recorder. I like these.
TA: Me too. It doesn’t take any more time to go through tape than digital. [Laughs]

So do you ever wonder? Or do you love technology?
KM: Um. I feel seduced by a lot of it. I did a lot more recording of myself when I was just using a cassette TASCAM four-track. And I have all these things that are supposedly higher quality but they’re just not as accessible to me as that machine was. But I still get seduced by it. I’ve got a phone that’s a Droid or something, and for the first two weeks I had it, I felt romantically toward it. To the point that, I was embarrassed by it, but I kept finding myself like, stroking it.… But I feel like it’s insidious in a way, too.

In what way?
KM: Well. There’s things that I’m perfectly fine without, and I don’t think that they are indispensable, but if it becomes, like, part of the societal infrastructure, then it does become indispensable. And it’s… I don’t know. I don’t need an iPad. Everyone talks about the iPad and no one needs one, it’s a toy basically. I know someone who has two.
TA: But you’re plugging into this bridge between you and the rest of the world… and that can be knocked out.
KM: You’re not in control of it.

It’s enfeebling, I think. I drove down to SXSW using my iPhone as map, which was great—but I’m fucked if I don’t have it.…
KM: I mean, I’ve been on tours before where there’s GPS, and we were fucked! [Laughs]

What’s the lostest you’ve gotten?
KM: I just did a short run with my friend Jolie Holland, and we woke up one morning in Kentucky, and we didn’t want to eat at a Waffle House, we wanted to go somewhere independent. So I looked up on-the-line about some restaurant and put it in the GPS. Forty-five minutes down this rural single-lane road to, like, an abandoned barn, [with a] Children of the Corn–style vibe. There was nothing there. Except for wild dogs. [Laughs]

I think of you as artists who are understandably a bit shambolic, with the GPS and so on—but at the same time, you are in the mainstream. Are you ever surprised to find yourself here? Or are you secretly ruthlessly brilliant with arrangements? Efficient as well as artistic?
TA: No! No. [Laughs] Not in any sort of maneuvering way.
KM: I’m a mess. Anything that you’ve heard about that’s worked out in my life has been with help from a lot of other people that are a lot more organized. I’m good at some things, but not that.
TA: Just, as far as the place that the band is in? It’s a lot of accidents. [Laughs]
KM: There’s some people in the band, like Jaleel, [who are more organized].

Is he the wife-type person, steering the band?
KM: I think Jaleel is definitely tired of being the wife of TV on the Radio. [Laughs] It’s hard to be the wife and also still be in the band.
TA: He definitely lobbied for divorce many times.

Is it great to be as popular as TVOTR now is?
TA: I feel like it’s relative, I totally do. It can be a strange thing to believe. Because it’s constantly something you’re figuring out and finding out about. When we’re somewhere else, in a different country or something, and people are like, Oh yes, TV on the Radio, then it’s a little surprising to me, because I don’t think about it. it’s a weird thing to give a place to in your mind. I’ve definitely gotten into situations when I think someone recognizes me or is looking at me for a certain reason and it’s just that I have some, like, crap on my face. [Malone laughs.] It’s really, like, in different ways, very much like that… "Don’t you know who I am?" "No, I don’t know who you are." [Laughs]
KM: if you’re spending time in Silver Lake [L.A.] or North Brooklyn, or you’re on tour and interacting with people who came to see you, or you’re in a college town, it can skew your perspective. I don’t think that my parents would know who TVOTR was if I wasn’t in the band.

Did you aspire to any of this when you started out?
TA: I don’t think we really thought or cared about that.

Honestly?
KM: Because our kind of music, it’s not the model we grew up with. I wanted to be a drifter…
TA: …which you kind of are! You got your wish. But I feel like the bands we grew up with—when I first started getting into music, like, punk rock or a scene in Pittsburgh—it was kind of an embarrassing thing, people who wanted to be pop stars. It was so not punk rock at all [Laughs]. It was more like, you make the work, be part of a community making work and sharing work. It’s not about being above anyone else or being idolized in any way. It’s weird because it’s about being part of the community but also being super individualistic within that community. It’s weird now because I do think about that. Someone was telling us—
KM: Sharon Van Etten taught a little girl guitar, and the girl was like, "I wanna make a record someday," and [Van Etten] was like, "That’s great! You should make a record." "I don’t know if I’ll be able to, though." She was like, "Why wouldn’t you be able to make a record? Anyone can." And the little girl was like, "What if I don’t win on American Idol?"
TA: And we didn’t have that. I feel lucky enough to have grown up at a time where I got sent a tape from Seattle that was recorded on a four-track that sounded a bit like I could’ve made it, and that was great. That’s the model. There wasn’t the idea of, like, you have to have a TV studio or a contest to be voted to be popular or make it. Which I think is really strange. It’s a strange way to get into any creative field.

Even on another level, I talked to someone recently who is just a little younger than us, 25, and we were talking about how they were just starting out—they asked me for my advice on the music industry. And I basically told them to do everything themselves and initially don’t put too much in a label or wanting to be on a label or seeking acceptance in that way. And he had real concerns, he said, "I wanna put these songs online, but I’m really worried about—it’s so easy to put something online and have a billion comments that would discourage you. Like an hour after you put something up you’ve got strangers from every walk of life going like, [In lunk voice] 'This is terrible!' " And it sounds really fey to be like, "Well, people shouldn’t be so mean!" But if every time I made a four-track song and replayed it back there were 12 people going [Snarky] "Oh, that’s not very good!" then I would’ve shot myself in the face. I wouldn’t have kept going.

I saw Perez Hilton give a talk with the head of Vevo at SXSW that I found pretty alarming, insofar as it seems there’s a handful of people who get to decide which artists get this megapush—and part of the grounds for that decision is, has that person done a lot of work already, put themselves out there? What worries me is that artists are traditionally shy....
KM: I mean, I don’t know how that whole thing works, but what I see promoted via those type of forums [like Vevo], it always seems like slick, commercial, part of the same old, same old. I know that there’s new artists, new names, but it doesn’t seem like something new to me. Just a different haircut and a different hair color.
TA: I’m old. I graciously admit that I’m old, as far as that goes. [Laughs]

I have a question about old age. [Adebimpe laughs.] I ask this because there’s lots of love songs on the record. And there’s always been something very romantic about TVOTR. I remember reading an interview a while back with Kyp saying you’re both Pisceans—
KM: We already had our birthdays.

Do you think that as you’ve gotten older you’ve got more cynical or more romantic?
KM: I feel more cynical right now. And I’m not happy about it.
TA: I feel more realistic about it. I remember seeing this Burroughs thing on French TV in the ’70s, where they were talking to William Burroughs about falling in love, and they said, "Well, you were so enamored with that person, is that still the case for you?" And he said, "I know too much about myself and the world to ever fall in love with anything ever again." He just said, "I’m too realistic."
KM: Said the man who shot his wife!
TA: He said he couldn’t delude himself. It requires a lot of delusion to fall in love. Which is, I think—the initial falling in love part, yeah, it’s probably, chemically, enormous spurts of dopamine that psych you out. But I feel like after that it’s really, I don’t know—I think about people that I would’ve thrown myself off a cliff for and when I think back on it, 80 percent of what was cool about them, I made up! [Laughs] It was a complete projection.

It’s so weird, the difference between falling in love as a grown-up and as a teen, where you’re thinking, I can’t believe this person is talking to me! When you’re older you’re more like, I’m all right! I can believe it.
TA: Yeah, you’re not out of your mind nervous every time you speak to this person. But it’s an awesome thing to feel overwhelmed by another person. It’s great.
KM: I don’t trust that, though.
TA: I don’t trust it at all.

But you wrote “Lover's Day!”
KM: I know. Somebody wrote The Wizard of Oz, and it was a made-up fuckin’ story. [Guffaws, nearly chokes laughing]

I wish I hadn’t asked! That song got me through some tough times!
KM: I’m glad! That’s what it’s for. That’s what the tooth fairy is for, that’s what Jesus and Santa Claus… to get you through tough times. No, that was an honest expression. But an idealization of desires. Yeah, I mean, there was a time when I felt that way. I was doing lots of acid and I had my first lover and it’s amazing! It’s an amazing experience and a privilege that we have, to get to feel that way. Not sustainable. [Chuckles.]

So you wrote a super-romantic album.
TA: That’s what people keep saying. I guess so. I don’t know, I would much rather put the word love into the air as many times as possible than anything else. Just to have it out in the world doing something.

Did you read that The Oxford English Dictionary now includes the heart symbol?
TA: Oh really, it got put in? [Malone giggles.]

I flinched at first, but then thought, At least it’s love....
TA: Yeah, exactly. As far as emoticons go, pretty good. Yeah, I would much rather that, in all its permutations. In a love song it’s usually—if it were possible to write a love song about loving absolutely everything equally, with the same fervor that you did a person, or whatever, that would be great to do. I think that would be a terribly long-winded love song. Maybe not so great. I don’t think it would have any words. [Laughs]

But then there’s the soft, wafty song on the album, “Killer Crane.” That’s like when you feel a gentle in-love-with-the-world feeling, no?
TA: I guess, maybe
KM: But is that a love song? I think it’s about death.
TA: Yeah, it is. But it’s also about the grand appreciation. I guess that it can be about love, realizing that you’re going to leave everything, and so the things you love about life are more numerous than the things you won’t really miss about it.

Let’s talk about the record. You made it in L.A....
KM: And New York. A week or two at Headgear in Williamsburg, then we went to Dave’s house in Beverly Hills for two months, then did a week at the end at Brooklyn Recordings this past fall.

Does Dave have a very different life to you all, out in L.A. in his Beverly Hills house?
KM: I can only assume so. I mean, it’s one of those things that’s kind of like the tyranny of small details. It’s not that different compared to if he was a bedouin, you know?
TA: Yeah. He’s driving around, he’s driving a lot more than he would have here [Laughs]. Yeah, he likes it out there.
KM: It’s suiting him.

When I heard you recorded Nine Types of Light in L.A., I assumed that was at the root of the title: The light there is so beautiful…
TA: Oh yeah, no, it’s gorgeous. I don’t know if that—yes. Yes! Make that so! [Laughs] Make that part of the folklore!

You recorded it quickly—I wondered if that was because you’ve said you didn’t like where you recorded it…
KM: Did I say that? No, where we were staying.
TA: Where we recorded was great.
KM: The actual process of recording, as long as there’s a good engineer and a minimum of interruptions, it doesn’t matter where it’s happening. Dave has a really beautiful spot and it’s at the top of a canyon and there’s lots of sunlight and greenery. It’s very nice. Where we were actually staying was the opposite.

Couldn’t you just sleep on Dave’s floor?
KM: [Flatly] I don’t wanna do that. I’m a grown man. [Laughs]
TA: After doing that for the better part of seven years, when you get a chance to not do it, you never wanna do it again. [Laughs]

So you chose to stay next to a plastic-surgery institute rather than sleep on the floor…
KM: I didn’t choose that. [Laughs]
TA: That was bungled by someone else, who didn’t mean to bungle it that hard, but they did. People have different ideas of what nice is.
KM: I think if you live in L.A., you’re used to driving. And I’m not into driving, at all. I don’t like car culture. I choose to live places where I can get around by walking or public transportation. Or taxis. But for someone else… no, I hated where we were staying, I can’t make any excuses for it, it fuckin' sucked. It was like the most soul-sucking, sad, douchebaggy corner in hell.
TA: It’s true. But in a way I’m really glad. I used to have this attitude, living here—especially when I’d just moved to New York—I was just like, I’ll never go there. But I realize I had this very, like, cartoon version of New York versus L.A.: New York is black leather jackets and the Ramones and L.A. is… horrible. I didn’t know anything about it, I was just like, L.A. is Pamela Anderson and horrible. So I had this very cliché idea of L.A., and the only place that I saw that cliché matched and overtaken by a more grizzly reality was where we were staying. Where you go to a café and there are two reality shows being shot in the same café with different crews.

Ew. Though they do shoot them here, too; I’ve seen a crew at the Knitting Factory.…
TA: Right, but at least when they shoot them here, there are at least four or five people going, That sucks. Whereas over there it’s like, Oh, I wonder if I can get in, move a little closer to that flame. [Laughs]
KM: But there’s a lot of incredible culture there, incredible people. I don’t wanna bag on it, cause I actually really love California, I consider California to be one of my homes. I just was not at home where I was.

And when you are in the crazy tour machine or in a funny place like that, is there something you can do to make yourself feel normal? Is it hard keeping grounded?
KM: People are adaptable, or can be. I also feel like the time that you get to actually play music, which is the point of being on the road, becomes the time of sanity. That’s the most grounding part of the day for me. And the bunk, on the bus: It’s a place to hide. Make it dark and quiet. Put earplugs in. if you’re in a hotel or motel there’s always, watch Law and Order.
TA: And bookstores. Whenever we’re done with a tour, there are boxes of books that are sent home. Every town you get to it’s like, bookstore, coffeeshop, comic store, art store. I’m working on my collection of 9,052 magic markers [Laughs]. I’m almost there! It’s stuff like that. I think we’ve had two tours where I was like, Yeah, I’m on tour! I’m gonna go for it! And then it was just, like, unsustainable. It’s an unsustainable way of being. To hate yourself every day, more than you already do. [Malone laughs.] It’s too much for one person to take on.

I mean, given that you went to art school, you knew that you weren’t signing on to a particularly normal life, to an extent…
TA: Yeah, and my experience is, the older that I get—I have a lot of friends who are still, who are definitely making art and having creative lives, but I feel like in my twenties, all my friends had some sort of aspiration, like, I’m gonna paint, or I’m gonna write…and sometimes your life takes you in a different direction. And I think as you get older you realize that you’re [working] kind of by default sometimes; you’re still doing it, but it’s not a normal job. It can be strange. It can also be strange explaining it to someone who thinks you’re having fun 24 hours a day.

Above: Kyp Malone's solo project, Rain Machine, "Give Blood"

Do you miss each other when you’re not playing together? Or is it a necessary breath of fresh air?
KM: I mean, we live—
TA: —like a block away from each other. [Laughs]
KM: I’m sure if I was given enough time in another scenario, I might. No, I don’t miss, but as soon as we started again I was really, really excited and happy to be doing it again. I don’t think it’s a negative to not—you have to kind of be where you’re at. I keep making the analogy, or trying not to, actually, between romantic relationships. Like, I’ve been around the block, I’ve had my share of loves, not-quite-so loves. And I don’t think about my whole history when I’m in the now.
TA: It’s like, if someone were to hold me down and go, "Well, how do you feel about everyone you’ve ever loved?" then I would say I still love them, even if I’m not with them right now. Because they made me who I am. And it’s completely irreversible. And I’m gonna see them again. Like, we’re contractually obligated to each other [Laughs]. It’s like, that’s your family and your friends. We go to each other’s shows, we hang out.

How was SXSW for you?
KM: I like playing. I like being with friends. I talk a lot about the compulsion, the desire, to bite the hand that feeds [Laughs]. Well, when the hand that feeds is pushing you to do really annoying press things between shows, there’s resistance to being told what to do, regardless of the relationship. I don’t wanna listen to anybody,and I’m not alone in that. Most people don’t wanna be told what to do.
TA: It depends on what the situation is. But when you’re supposed to do an interview for a major Internet network and your tour manager comes back to you and says, "Well, the interviewer just told me to ask you what questions to ask you," and I say, "He should not have let that out of his mouth [Laughs] because now that’s going to be super weird and antagonistic when we get there.…" But that’s just, South By is when you can get the most in that period of time, every band is there, every reporter’s there—but it does turn into this very weird…

Does it feel a bit whorish?
KM: The whole thing feels whorish. There needs to be, if this structure was the one that was going to keep going, for events like this [bands] wouldn’t just have a drummer and a rapper and a singer, they’d also have the press guy. Who’s totally good at saying what needs to be said and skirting the truth and being enthusiastic. [Laughs]

Like with the Vevo selection process!
KM: I know! I don’t think we’re going there, cause I don’t think we’re allowed in that door, but I think that’s where things are going. [Pauses] But there will always be punk rock. It won’t be called punk rock, but there’ll always be resistance to that.

Yeah. And then that resistance will become fashionable and then that will become mainstream and then it’ll go round again.…
TA: Yeah, flip it over again.

How did you feel when you got back to Williamsburg? Do you still love it?
KM: I hear people, talking about Los Angeles, I hear some people bag on Williamsburg and Brooklyn for so long, and it’s like, guess that’s why people keep movin’ here, cause it sucks so bad. [Laughs] I mean, you could characterize a place and say it’s full of trust-fund kids making bad art or shitty music. And there’s definitely that here. But we’re looking out of the window now, and that group of women is not coming from the bank getting money from their parents. There’s families, there’s been neighborhoods full of families for years and years, and a lot of them are still here. And there was a time when it was a really great place for creative people and artists to be, and a lot of those people are still here. Cause I see them. I don’t think this is the only place I could live, but it’s been really good to me. There’s things that annoy me about it, but there’s things that annoy me about everywhere.

Do you miss it, the way Williamsburg was when you first started?
KM: By degrees. The amount of times that I think about the fact that I go by a place and think, Oh, I can’t go into that new place, that’s new shit, and I realize after I’ve been saying that about a place that it’s been there for five years or something…that people have met there, had babies there—
TA: And then it closed! [Laughs]

So there’s a movie coming out with the album?
TA: It’s ten videos and ten different directors. Every song on the record has a video coming with it. And I shot a short film that’s gonna—it’s not tying everything together, but it’s the frame for everything.

A narrative arc?
TA: Kind of. It’s an abstract narrative arc. Our friend Petro [Papahadjopoulos, dir. “Golden Age”] directed a video. And Barnaby Clay did a video. And there are three really incredible animated pieces and I directed one of ’em. I think it’ll be available with the deluxe version of the record; the day the record comes out there’s going to be a screening on YouTube and a broadcast channel screening.

It’d be nice to get it as a DVD.…
TA: Initially I thought, yes, this is a DVD, and what I was told was, nobody’s buying DVDs any more. Which is weird cause I bought nine DVDs last week. [Laughs] I dunno, it’s a DVD, you can take it to places and play it. but I guess I’m old.

That’s like Kindle verses book…
TA: Yeah. Have you seen the audiobook commercial, though? [Starts laughing] There’s an audiobook commercial that says [In announcer voice] “I love to read, but who has the time?” I said, it takes just as long to listen to someone reading a book! As it does to read a book!

It’s like, don’t take two books to the beach! Take one, that you have to shield from sand and sun!
KM: I haven’t looked at what titles are available, I guess I really like looking for arcane obscure shit; that’s interesting to me. I need to make an experiment and see how much of my personal book collection is available online. I don’t think I could find a lot of it—obscure stuff, shit on witchcraft and the occult.
TA: Or someone who writes a dissertation on Ionesco or something, can you find it?
KM: Or histories outside the dominant narrative? I know there’s a lot, I’m not trying be dismissive of what’s obviously a really incredible pool of information, and I’m sure that it will grow. I just also like collecting books.

And they smell nice.
TA: They smell nice, exactly.

Imagine if they started perfuming books! It would give off a fusty smell, or new-paper smell…
KM: Eventually you could probably program what smell you want.

And sound as well, like crackling fire. Ambient Kindles! Who has the time?
TA: That’s pretty awesome.

It’s exciting you’re playing Radio City.
KM: It should be fun.
TA: I know, I kinda want to go there before we play.…
KM: I feel like it’s a high stage. Maybe it’s just psychologically a high stage.
TA: The last show I saw there was probably 12 years ago, the Smashing Pumpkins. It was circa not-the-whole-band. [Laughs] It was circa Billy Corgan coming out and playing the pipe organ for fifteen minutes to start the set.

In a cape.
TA: Basically. A real Nosferatu thing going on.
KM: Yeah, we need to figure out a way to make it special in there. We could just have the Rockettes.
TA: That would be good if we could afford the Rockettes.

WNYC Soundcheck Smackdown: The Strokes

2011-04-11T11:26:00.000-07:00

WNYC Soundcheck Smackdown

Julian Casablancas and Co. debuted in 2001 with the critically acclaimed album Is This It and helped put New York rock back on the map. Now the Strokes are back - after a puzzling, difficult five-year hiatus - with the new album Angles. J. Edward Keyes, editor-in-chief of eMusic, and Sophie Harris, music writer for Time Out New York, join us to debate this comeback album.

SXSW 2011: Saturday, Kanye steals the show (again)

2011-03-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

Kanye West interrupts. Besides being this decade’s big musical genius, interrupting is his thing: Katrina, Taylor, the fact he bumrushed every single end of year musical poll in 2010… And in 2011, he hijacked SXSW. Those who tried in vain to get tickets to Kanye’s show at the Bowery Ballroom will be familiar with the particular type of heartache the secret Kanye show delivers—the fact it’s seemingly impossible for you as a fan to get tickets, the fact a bunch of models got in free... You know the deal.

And so it was this week at South By, when Vevo announced that yes, Kanye would be playing a show on the last night of the festival (of course!) at a disused power plant (POWER!) to celebrate his G.O.O.D record label in the company of Mos Def, John Legend, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, Cyhi Tha Prince and Mr Hudson. Time Out was therefore duly astonished to get hold of two coveted Kanye laminates, and even more astonished to find itself at the front of the line before the show, somehow lumped in with a gaggle of models, coatless and shivering at midnight outside the Power Plant.

After a two-hour wait while Kanye and co soundchecked, we were let in, and so ensued something of a model stampede, the thunderous sound of a hundred odd pairs of stillettos on wood. Inside the building looked like the disused factory in Kanye’s “Runaway” video; huge, clean, industrial. Bars were set up at the side and exotic dancers showed off their moves on metal staircases. An enormous GOOD sign was illuminated on stage. So far, so awesome.

The only weird thing about the night was that it was far less a gig than a TV performance; TV cameras swooped around, and there was nary a word of banter from Kanye himself. So if you’re wondering if you missed out on the show of the year, fear not. This was a hell of a spectacle, however. The show opened with all Kanye’s guests lining up at the front of the stage, wearing balaclavas, naming their hometowns. “Cleveland, Ohio.” “Brooklyn, New York.” Wearing a sparkly eyemask (well, why not?) Mos Def played the first set. Once the initial excitement of the fact that at around 1am the show had finally started wore off, Mos’s 40 minute set seemed a little excessive. Solid but unexceptional performances followed from Pusha T, Cudi and co. until Kanye took the stage—at last!—at around 2am.

Click past the jump for the full review

Dressed in a fancy leather jacket and shades (which he kept on for the duration), Kanye was all steely professionalism last night; no rants, no chit-chat and no real experimentation. This didn’t dent how great it was to see him play songs from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, live, but it was hard to feel a connection with what was going on onstage.The sound too, was pretty bad; immaculately mixed for sure, but the acoustics of the building meant it boomed and echoed at the front and back of the crowd.

But who wouldn’t be thrilled to see John Legend sit himself at the piano for “Blame Game” (which sounded gorgeous)? Legend also played his own “Ordinary People,” and Cudi joined Kanye for “Gorgeous.” The show was heavy on songs from My Beautiful…, though we did get a peek of “Say You Will,” and “Can't Tell Me Nothin'”.

Funniest moment? Kanye returning for an encore, resplendent in a red suit, for “Power,” only to discover seconds in, that the beat had become somehow mangled. Rather than apologize or laugh, he stormed off-stage (“He’s so gonna punch someone” said a dude behind me), returning, wordless, once it had been fixed. For a thrilling “All of the Lights,” an elaborately decked-out marching band strode up. The real treat though, was Jay-Z, who joined Yeezy around 3.30am. Tearing through “Monster” and ”HAM,” it was the first time Kanye seemed expressive (rather than performing), grinning and cracking off-mic gags with Jay. The show closed at 4am with Justin “Bon Iver” Vernon coo-ing a beautiful “Lost in the World.” Well done, Mr West, you did it again

SXSW 2011: Friday with Odd Future, Matt & Kim, Chromeo

2011-03-23T10:36:00.000-07:00

Check out Loren Wohl's pics for TONY and full coverage here

“It’s just one dude and all he’s saying is fuck and shit…” So complained possibly the only person in Austin not excited about seeing Odd Future—undoubtedly this year’s South By show-stealers. The Cali collective played the Scoot Inn earlier on Friday, causing a stampede (the festival’s second, after Thursday’s Strokes fiasco) as reported by TONY’s Corban Goble, and I caught their Fader Fort show in the dusky, sweltering afternoon. Of course, it’s not just one dude—what’s so awesome about Odd Future is that each of its members is prodigiously talented, from soulful crooner Frank Ocean to crazy-eyed Tyler the Creator.

And apart from the fact that there’s nothing wrong with a little (or a lot of) cursing, Odd Future are hella funny MCs. “This is my eee-lectronic press kit, it’s so fresh…” grinned Tyler. What makes ‘em Odd Future so special is that they feel genuinely dangerous—you really don’t know what you’re gonna get at a show, and yesterday’s show had the crew hurling water bottles into the crowd like footballs. A bunch of ‘em made contact—it was like watching someone getting punched in the face, the only difference being that the kid I saw get hit started laughing. “I still got ammo!” grinned a Wolf from the stage.

Click past the jump for Matt & Kim at Chromeo

A million miles away from Odd Future musically, Matt & Kim still mine the same vibe of crazy, messy mayhem onstage. Both were hammered by their own admission and kicked off their Fader Fort set recounting a tale of St Patrick’s Day SXSW excess: “I saw a girl holding another girl’s hair while she vomited in the street—and that girl holding her hair was vomiting too.” The duo makes music like a super low-budget Girl Talk, mashing up favorite cheesy hooks with snarly rock attitude. It wasn’t a huge surprise that Erykah Badu joined em on drums—Badu credited M&K’s “Lessons Learned naked video as the inspiration for her own “Window Seat” and she’s Texan—but it sure was fun. Show highlight? Kim crowd surfing in her short-shorts, as introduced by Matt: “If you’re near enough, look up ‘em and you’ll see the mouth of the beast!”

Green Label Sound has a hell of a roster going this year as attested by its showcase at La Zona Rosa. The bill featured MNDR, Theophilus London and a bouncy, impressively stoned Cool Kids, closing with Chromeo. Chromeo never appears to take itself too seriously—as we pointed out in our live review here, the duo looks like a dress-up version of Wham! and its song titles rarely carry a weight of seriousness (“Needy Girl,” “Tenderoni” etc)—but Dave 1 and P-Thugg put on an awesomely tight show and last night’s packed out crowd began and ended the show chanting “Chromeoooooooooh! Ohhhhh!” with football match gusto. Fun times.

SXSW 2011: Thursday with the Strokes and TVOTR

2011-03-23T10:32:00.000-07:00

Time Out New York
SXSW Coverage

To a New Yorker, the apparent lack of organization—or just plain naivite—at last night’s Strokes show was almost unbelievable. Here was a free event, open to all, to see a really, really popular band, crowds of more than 25,000…and no police or even real security in sight. Admittedly, we are in hippiesville Austin where everyone’s easygoing. But a half hour before showtime, things were looking more like Altamont than Woodstock. Crowds outside the gated entrance were chanting “Let us in!” and by the time the band took the stage, hundreds of people at either end of the area had crashed the barriers and flooded in to the space. While TONY’s Corban Goble watched the show from the front—see his account here—I climbed over the steel railings at the entrance in the dark and joined a bunch of kids sitting on a tin generator for an eagle-eyed (and rather scary) view of the show.

Click past the jump to find out just how awesome it was, and to read about TV on the Radio’s not-really-secret show at Stubb's.

It seems safe to say at this point that the Strokes are always going to be a formidable live prospect: Has anyone ever seen a bad Strokes show? But last night’s performance felt truly special, not least because it’s been ten years since the band’s SXSW debut, but also because the Strokes played like they were loving it. This was no charming-but-depressing Pavement-esque trudge through the back catalog; Julian Casablancas spat out angry tracks like “Reptilia” with genuine venom, and sighed out a perfectly nonchalant “Under Control.” It was a gloriously surreal scene from where I was perched: two little kids fighting each other with glowing lightsabres, while at the front of the stage, a signer dressed in a bright red blouse translating the Strokes’ lyrics into ASL (with no small measure of swaying around thrown in). David Lynch is set to direct Duran Duran’s webcast, but he’ll have an hard time topping this.

“Did they play last night?” one kid sitting on the generator asked his friend. “I don’t know, I wasn’t here…” “No, I mean the song.”

We couldn't have scripted that better; “Last Night” remains the Strokes' biggest hit, and to their credit, they played it like they weren’t sick of the sound of it. The song ended the show, accompanied by a massive fireworks display. Some 30,000 people filed out of the park and over the bridge and through the traffic (with no kind of policing, etc.) without a hitch. That’s Austin for ya. Next up: TV on the Radio. Around 2,000 partygoers flocked to Stubb's to catch a 1am show from Brooklyn beardies TVOTR, celebrating forthcoming fourth album Nine Types of Light (due next month).

Unlike the Strokes, who still have a loucheness to their live shows, TVOTR have an air of taking everything very seriously. This is by no means a bad thing, but you’ve got to be up for it: up for the sight of singer Tunde Adebimpe waving his arms around like a bird's wings, and for the furious energy that propels songs like “Young Liars.” The band opened its set with that song, transitioning effortlessly from a tambourine-accompanied waltz into something far more powerful. Similarly, “The Wrong Way” hurtled along like a juggernaut. Slower numbers from the new album showed off the scorched tone of Adebimpe’s voice and Kyp Malone’s spooky falsetto. While TVOTR bassist Gerard Smith is currently undergoing treatment for lung cancer (a stand-in took his place last night), the band still sounds thoroughly reinvigorated.

SXSW 2011: Time Out North America/NPR showcase

2011-03-23T10:27:00.000-07:00

It may be the only time that Yuck gets to open for Duran Duran—but the junior British upstarts threw down the partying gauntlet with glee at last night’s Time Out showcase. Whereas 2010’s show featured TONY’s fave New York acts (Andrew W.K., Das Racist, Javelin, Japanther), this year we went big, representing Time Out North America, complete with an international, chart-topping lineup (and a capacity crowd that included Jon Hamm.)

Click here the jump for the full review and Loren Wohl's TONY slideshow

The Low Anthem

2011-03-02T09:15:00.000-08:00

Video: Sophie Harris

Time Out New York Preview

There’s something very appealing about the seriousness with which Rhode Island combo the Low Anthem takes itself. When the band recently debuted a song from its new album, Smart Flesh, on The Late Show with David Letterman, drummer Jeff Prystowsky stepped up to the mike to twang a mouth harp with the kind of care a giant might take to change a baby’s diaper. A cautious approach perfectly suits the trio’s music—the Low Anthem specializes in hushed, rustic songs, played on double bass, guitar and clarinet, that draw you in by dint of their quiet simplicity, like hearing the wind blowing outside your window on a cold night.

WNYC Soundcheck: The Grammys

2011-03-02T09:10:00.000-08:00

WNYC Radio

All eyes will be on the top categories at the Grammys on Saturday, but what about "Best Banda Album" or "Best Surround Sound Album?" Plus: Cyndi Lauper is nominated for Best Traditional Blues Album...and "Helter Skelter" might win an award. Music critics Sophie Harris of Time Out New York and Chris Richards of The Washington Post help us go off the beaten path with a look at little-known categories, strange matchups, and unsung nominees. Plus, Nacional Records founder Tomas Cookman helps us parse out the many, many Latin music Grammy categories.

Lady Gaga

2011-03-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

Time Out NY Preview

Contentious as Lady Gaga’s new single, “Born This Way,” purports to be with its same-breath references to God and gayness—“I’m beautiful in my way, ’cause God makes no mistakes,” she sings, “Don’t be a drag, just be a queen”—it’s really just a modern take on Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” And as with that awesome old pop song, audiences are already protesting the offensiveness of “Born This Way” with glee—in this case, on the grounds of its supposedly racist references (“Whether you’re black, white, beige, chola descent, you’re Lebanese, you’re orient”).

So far, so predictable. But while Gaga may not be quite as innovative or avant-garde as she’d like us to think, she’s still one of very few true pop stars with the balls to pull off a razzle-dazzle stadium show. It’s tempting to imagine Madonna looking at the pics on Gaga’s website and fuming, Damn, why didn’t I think of a fire-shooting basque? And for these things, at least, we are truly thankful.

WNYC Soundcheck Smackdown: Taylor Swift

2011-03-02T09:06:00.000-08:00

Taylor Swift called her second album Fearless, and with good reason: the 21-year-old singer seems to be on an unbreakable winning streak. Fearless was the top-selling album of 2009 and snared the Grammy for Album of the Year; Swift followed those successes last year with a blockbuster tour and a chart-topping third album, Speak Now. But not everyone’s got Taylor Fever.

Music writers Sophie Harris of Time Out New York and Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone will debate whether the reigning princess of pop is worthy of the crown.

The Hot Seat: Robyn

2011-02-10T15:15:00.000-08:00

Time Out New York

The Swedish dance-pop sensation is here—and she brought her robot.

You’ve been touring since you were 16. Are you a pro at checking out of hotels on time?
I am efficient when I get to it, but I end up being on the phone or googling something. So, usually I’m late even though I’m pretty good at actually getting done quickly.

It’s snowing like crazy here, and it made me think of how you wrote “Dancing on my Own” about the very dark winters in Sweden. It’s not just a desperate love song.
Yeah, I wrote it in the middle of the winter. I was clubbing a lot and I was in that kind of mood. Most of the songs I write that are sad love stories are usually about something else.

Do you have any tips for getting through the winter blues?
I like work! That’s what happens when it’s dark and cold; it’s so horrible to be outside, so you end up staying in and you can get quite bored. I think work is the best medication for that.

I guess for you work is more fun than a lot of people’s day jobs right?
Right! I guess. I mean, if you don’t have a job you like, then maybe a hobby… [Laughs]

You have a very loyal audience in New York.
It’s the girls that know me from ten to 15 years ago, and then there’s a huge gay audience, and then there’s some hipsters and some nerdy gothy kids, and there’s the girls from the hood. All kinds of people, actually.

Why do you think you have such a big gay following?
I don’t know, I think it’s up to other people to analyze what that is, but I hope it’s because they like my music. I think I always connected to and was inspired by outside culture myself, and the gay community has always embraced that.

What have your biggest pop moments been in your life?
The Thriller album was the probably the first album that I got into as a kid where I was really obsessed for years and years—and the Dirty Mind album that Prince made at the beginning of his career. And Big Science, an album that Laurie Anderson made in ’82. Yup!

Laurie Anderson talks a lot about her fascination with technology. What draws you to the world of bleeps?
What I like about it is that it’s an extension of us now. It’s not for just a few people now, it’s for everyone—it’s in our daily lives now and it’s something that we take for granted. It’s almost like we’re already cyborgs because we’re on our computers so much. I like when technology and humans start mixing. [Laughs]

It doesn’t have to be physically, it could be emotionally or on a theoretical level as well. Everyone’s gone crazy about Facebook and Twitter now, and I understand that—when I made this album it was very much about that, about how I was communicating with my surroundings. It’s like it’s become our new feathers or face paint; it’s still very primal but the technology is pushing it forward.

How good is your robot dance move?
It’s okay! [Laughs] I mean, I love robots. I don’t like romanticizing about the future, and I don’t like being romantic about the past, either. I think that the present time is what’s most interesting. I’d like to be able to stay in it as much as I can. I am a sci-fi nerd—but when I talk about robots it’s more as a metaphor for human things.

You had a hit single really young. What was the first ridiculous thing you bought was when you knew you were gonna be famous?
Ooh. Well I didn’t buy anything just because I knew I was gonna be famous I guess I bought it because I had money! [laughs] I was really excited about getting a car when I was 18. It was a black BMW 325 and then I had amazing rims on it and changed all my lights to white lights except for the brake lights. It was a fly car. Black leather seats. Good stereo. Yeah.

You’re opening for Katy Perry this summer—how did that happen?
I was asked by her to do it and thought it was a good way of getting to know her audience. It’s bigger than mine. [Laughs]

And are you a fan of hers?
You know what? I have to go now. [Giggles]

Really?
Yeah! I do. But it’s nice to talk to you.

Iron & Wine

2011-02-04T13:19:00.000-08:00

Time Out New York

The quiet rocker talks risk-taking, fatherhood and skirting the big time.

Sam Beam has built an awesome-sounding life, even if he doesn’t know quite how it all happened. Settled on the outskirts of Austin, he and his wife live with their five little daughters in a cottage they designed themselves; in the mornings, Beam drops the kids off at school and heads to his studio to work (“It’s like going to the office”). It just so happens that the music Beam produces as Iron & Wine is of such poetic loveliness that it’s won him fans around the world, seen him performing on television and so on. And this week, Beam brings his band to Radio City Music Hall, to celebrate the release of his fourth album and first for Warner Bros., Kiss Each Other Clean.

“I don’t feel a whole lot of pressure on me, ’cause I never expected to be in this position in the first place,” Beam says with what sounds like a friendly shrug, speaking by telephone from his home. “I don’t really know how I got here, so I don’t know how to stay here [Laughs].”

Actually, a crucial point in Beam’s trajectory was meeting his future wife, Kim, at art school. Back then, she was a sculptor and performance artist—“a kook,” Beam says, laughing. “I thought she was incredible.” Now she’s a midwife. Does Beam see parallels between the way he creates art and the way his wife delivers babies? “Well, that’s funny you asked,” he replies. “When we had our first baby, she realized she would never be able to make something that perfect and beautiful—and so she started studying to be a midwife, which I thought was incredibly poetic. That was her journey.”

It had a huge effect on Beam’s work too: “You get very patient,” he grins. Beam has been a parent for as long as he’s been making Iron & Wine records—nearly a decade, before which he worked on movies and commercials and taught film and cinematography—so the sense of wonder and fear you hear in his early records is very real.

“I remember immediately feeling this connection to these two extremes,” Beam says of becoming a dad. “A connection with the world that I didn’t realize before, where you walk down the street and you realize that everyone has been through this violent, beautiful thing. But at the same time, the world seems that much more dangerous because you have this small person to protect. So you feel closer to the world than you ever have before, but at the same time, more frightened of it than ever. It’s a strange feeling.”

A devoted Iron & Wine fan (and they do tend to be devoted) could quote you any number of Beam’s lyrics that evoke such sharp, tender emotions; “Naked as We Came,” for instance, has Beam whispering, “One of us will die inside these arms / Eyes wide open, naked as we came.” Still, his approach to making music is pretty fearless. This new album is his lushest yet, dabbling in African highlife rhythms and choruses backed with swoony oohs and doo-wops. It makes sense given that Beam grew up on Motown and Carole King records, but it’s a great leap forward from the hushed intimacy of his early songs.

“At art school you realize that in order to stay engaged you have to ignore the critics, good and bad,” Beams explains. “And the way it’s gonna end up should be a surprise; the game is the making, and not what you end up with.” To this extent, he adds, even with his favorite artists, “I’d much rather hear them royally fail at something new than just do the same record again.”

Accordingly, the band he’ll be playing with at Radio City is a wily bunch of old associates whom Beam describes as “subversive cats.” They’ll never play it straight, he says. “A thing can be too pretty and perfect, so if you kick some dirt on it, then it feels like you wore it around a bit [Laughs].”

Beam is as happy with the level of his band’s success as he is with the fact that he has no idea where he wants to go next with Iron & Wine. “We’ll see what happens, what feels the best,” he says cheerfully, “what shoes fit next.”

Stars of 2011: Theophilus London

2011-02-04T13:15:00.000-08:00

Time Out New York

Click here for the full Music Team preview

“Babes give me roses when I do my showzes” rapper Theophilus London writes on his blog, and fair enough: The ladies do love London. A recent shirtless photo shoot didn’t hurt in this regard, but it’s the music that makes this Brooklyn MC a really interesting proposition; London raps with smoldering street smarts, mixing electro beats and synths with a pinch of ’80s gloom pop (check out debut single “Humdrum Town” for evidence). Last year he delivered a handful of great mixtapes, contributed to Dave Sitek’s Maximum Balloon project, and worked with Solange Knowles and Dev Hynes on the dreamy single “Flying Overseas.” London’s most recent video stars a clothes-defying Lindsay Lohan, and his debut album is due for release this year. Catch him opening for Little Dragon at Music Hall of Williamsburg January 20 and Bowery Ballroom January 21.

Ólafur Arnalds

2011-02-02T09:47:00.000-08:00

Time Out NY Preview

Icelandic whiz kid gets NYC swooning.

A mechanical bird flaps its way across a dark, snowy sky in Ólafur Arnalds’s new video for “Hægt, kemur ljóso”: the perfect visual accompaniment to the 24-year-old composer’s fairy-tale instrumentals. Surprisingly (and pleasingly), Arnalds started out as a drummer in a hardcore band called Fighting Shit, before pursuing this quieter direction; since 2007 he’s cut a handful of records, including last year’s sophomore full-length, …And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness. Like fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós, Arnalds makes music that is simultaneously melancholy and uplifting, but his work is also far more spare and elegant. Fans of sophisticated foreign animation (The Triplets of Belleville, Spirited Away and so on) will likely dig these similarly otherworldly, heartwarming flights of fancy.

The best (and worst) of 2010

2011-01-18T13:22:00.000-08:00

Go to Time Out New York for the full Music Team list

1 Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Roc-A-Fella) The best hooks, the most melody, rhymes so snappy you could sing along after one listen and a weird-ass comedy outro from Chris Rock? Yeah, there was a reason this was everyone’s favorite album. Including Kanye’s. Buy My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy on iTunes
2

Vampire Weekend, Contra (XL) Taxi cabs, balaclavas, tights draped over the sink: This record sounded like a New York winter—and makes the prospect of a New York winter approximately one hundred times better. Buy Contra on iTunes

3 Joanna Newsom, Have One on Me (Drag City) The singing harpist joked to TONY that she doesn’t deliberately try to blow minds when she records. Still, that’s what she always does, and this three-CD set contained her most direct and affecting songs yet. Buy Have One on Me on iTunes

4 Arcade Fire, The Suburbs (Merge) Of course they weren’t gonna let the kids down: Arcade Fire delivers first-pumping anthems and eerie melancholy with its third album, a wildly ambitious opus on urban sprawl. Buy The Suburbs on iTunes

5 Drake, Thank Me Later (Young Money/Universal Motown) The verging-on-obnoxious title was deserved: Drake’s debut album dazzles at every turn with its curious, seductive mix of vulnerability and swagger. Buy Thank Me Later on iTunes

6 Phosphorescent, Here’s to Taking It Easy (Dead Oceans) Matthew Houck completed his transformation from Alabama troubadour to proper rock star with this country-rockin’ groover. Buy Here's to Taking It Easy on iTunes

7 Hot Chip, One Life Stand (EMI) The British electropop outfit gave us its finest record yet, a triumph of sweet beats and hand-on-heart lyrics. Also, a video in which a bald yogi electrocutes a boy band with lightning bolts from his eyes. Buy One Life Stand on iTunes

8 LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening (DFA Records) James Murphy told us he tried to be “less chicken” on this album—accordingly, you got some of his most unguarded singing and intimate lyrics, plus grooves scientifically proved to be irresistible to hips. Buy This is Happening on iTunes

9 Sufjan Stevens, The Age of Adz (Asthmatic Kitty) Those curious about where Stevens had been these past five years got an answer: having a physical-emotional breakdown of sorts, processing heartbreak, obsessing over an outsider artist named Royal Robertson and writing his most complex, weird and personal album yet. (Let’s not even start on the amazingness of the live show.) Buy The Age of Adz on iTunes

10 The Black Keys, Brothers (Nonesuch) The Keys’ Blakroc rap-blues collaboration album was great, but it was on Brothers that the Ohio duo really cut loose. Falsetto vocals, swoony organ hooks and shuffling drums made its sixth album a slow grower. Buy Brothers on iTunes

Joanna Newsom: Live Review

2011-01-18T13:14:00.000-08:00

Time Out New York
The Volume

“Joanna Awesome!” yelled an enthusiastic fan from the balcony of Carnegie Hall last night (Newsom/Awesome, geddit?)—to which the musician gamely replied, “Cool.” Newsom is a rare combination of being, on the one hand, technically skilled, focused and musically gifted—and on the other, up for a laugh and excellent company (as we learned in our March interview). Both sides of the harpist showed at this, the final show of her current tour.

Click past the jump for more

The sheer size of Newsom’s oeuvre is impressive; the diminutive 28-year-old may have skipped onstage and seated herself girlishly, but this was a mature set, cherry-picking from the artist’s three albums—the latest of which, Have One On Me, divides its songs across three discs. Not once did the set drag, thanks in no small part to Newsom’s backing musicians; in a setting like Carnegie Hall, the economy of the lineup (a couple violins, banjo, trumpet, drums) allowed the songs to really sing. Newsom herself described the acoustics at the venue as magical.

Props in particular to her arranger and banjo player Ryan Francesconi, and to barefoot drummer Neil Morgan, who plays as if he’s trying to stop animals from escaping. Highlights from the set included a glorious “Good Intentions Paving Company,” Newsom’s trumpeter turning an impressive shade of damson during his brass freak-out, and a heartbreakingly delicate “California.” Older songs like “Inflammatory Writ” fared well with new, sprightly arrangements.

It’s easy to idealize Newsom, of course; when I spoke to Devendra Banhart, years ago, before Newsom found popular appeal, he said that watching her play was like watching an angel—and it kind of is. Therefore, it’s no surprise to hear fans shouting comments like, “What’s it like to be a goddess?” A joy then, that the musician can shrug and reply, sweetly, “If we all write enough letters to Dolly Parton, maybe we can find out?” Joanna Awesome? Yeah, we’ll buy that.

Set list:
"Bridges and Balloons"
"Have One on Me"
"Easy"
"Cosmia"
"In California"
"Inflammatory Writ"
"Go Long"
"Good Intentions Paving Company"
"Emily"
"Peach, Plum, Pear"

Encore:
"Colleen"

WNYC: Top of the (Christmas) Pops

2011-01-18T13:12:00.000-08:00

WNYC Soundcheck Smackdown

"It's a British tradition--a race to top the music charts each Christmas season. Music critic Sophie Harris of Time Out New York and BBC contributor Gary Burton square off on their favorite seasonal hits from back home."

Listen here:

Kanye West

2010-12-10T14:49:00.000-08:00

Time Out NY Album Review

* * * * *

Just in case you were wondering how to come back from being called a jackass by last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, here’s your answer: Make a record as absurdly good as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

Of course, part of the pleasure of listening to the album—the first few times, at least— is hearing what Kanye West has to say in response to his supposed misdemeanors: “Everybody knows I’m a muthafuckin’ monster!” he leers. But, as the adage goes, it’s not what you say, but how you say it.

Thus, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is 2010’s best record because its execution is equal to the boldness of its ambition. That brashness is evident in obvious ways, like the rowdy brass fanfare that opens “All of the Lights” and the stars who join West on that number: Rihanna, Jay-Z, Justin Vernon, Sir Elton John, Fergie—more an index from a Madame Tussauds’s brochure than a guest list. As a great big “fuck you” to the haters (and West has more than most), the album is not just a custard pie to the face; it’s also smooshing that pie around for sheer pleasure.

But the appeal runs deeper still. If Kanye really did go to hell post-Taylorgate, he must have made one heck of a Faustian pact while he was there. The record is saturated in melody and pop hooks, and the rhymes are breathtaking (“Restraining order / can’t see my daughter / her mother, brother, grandmother/hate me in that order”). On the whole, the tone is defiant and righteous, with West riding a surge of creative energy from album opener “Dark Fantasy,” through the anthemic “POWER” (best line: “They can kiss my asshole / I’m an asshole”) and the campy menace of “Monster.”

But a kind of inevitable emotional hangover kicks in right after seduction song “Devil in a New Dress,” with its slow, slippery breakdown. “Runaway” is the album’s 808s moment—its spluttering vocoder wig-out is the point you remember West bawling on the floor in VH1 Storytellers. Similarly, lingering kiss-off “Blame Game” (which features John Legend) offers a kind of disgusted distress, the sonic equivalent of an “ugh” in the pit of your stomach. “With so much of everything, how did we leave with nothing?” West asks, before segueing into a bizarre, X-rated imagined telephone call—the heart of his dark, twisted fantasy, if you will.

West’s “real” life may be unimaginably outlandish, but the sentiments he evokes on MBDTF cut right through the bullshit—both the Twitter blurts and his ongoing, curious dance with the media. You will recognize yourself in West, like it or not. This is not a comeback— it’s a go-forward.

WNYC Soundcheck: Kanye's Year

2010-12-10T14:44:00.000-08:00

WNYC Soundcheck

On the newly-released Kanye West album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy the rapper-producer states, "No one man should have all that power." Yet many critics are calling the album the best of the year. Today on Soundcheck: Guest host Sophie Harris of Time Out New York weighs whether Kanye can do no wrong, or is simply overblown. Also: Twin Shadow is the work of one George Lewis, Jr. He brings his synthesizers and pop sensibilities to perform live in the studio.

WNYC: Best Music Writing

2010-12-10T14:40:00.000-08:00

From WNYC Soundcheck

Da Capo Press has anthologized the best essays about music every year since 2000. Today on Soundcheck: a look through the 2010 edition as guest host Sophie Harris of Time Out New York talks with contributors. Plus: Electronic musician Matthew Dear visits a dark place on his latest album "Black City." He and his band play live in the studio.

Sufjan Stevens: The Age of Adz

2010-11-30T16:01:00.000-08:00

Folk’s gentlest poster boy cracks up, bares his teeth and makes a career-defining record.

Even in his days as a whispery-voiced troubadour, there was no doubting Sufjan Stevens’s brilliance as a musician or the dizzying scope of his ambition—from his intricate chamber-folk tributes to Illinois and Michigan to his multimedia meditation on the BQE.

Stevens’s sixth album, however, is a game changer, just as the events that shaped it apparently rerouted the course of the musician’s life. Stevens told The New York Times about an exhaustion-related virus that racked both his body and his mental stability; at a recent gig in Seattle, he described the record as “songs of heartache and mental illness, rendered through the phenomenon of the apocalypse.”

Accordingly, The Age of Adz is an invigorating, baffling, often very beautiful work. Retrofuturistic synth sounds burble and splutter alongside orchestral flourishes, and galumphing, righteous songs sit side by side with shimmering, exquisite choral arrangements. Besides the surprise of hearing Stevens yell lines like “I’m not fuckin’ around!” repeatedly, one of the album’s chief delights is its gradual unfolding; if the epic, 25-minute end song “Impossible Soul” sounds disjointed and overwhelming at first listen, it reveals itself as a perfectly paced pop suite over time.

Above all, Adz is Stevens’s most full-blooded record, addressing actual love relationships with disarming directness—as alive as a screaming baby, as soft and warm as a lover’s cheek and, of course, as complex, ambivalent and all-over-the-place as a real human being. Here’s to this most exciting new age.

This isn't the first time that a meltdown has resulted in a masterpiece—Go to Time Out NY for our favorite WTF? albums...

Sufjan Stevens Live at the Beacon

2010-11-30T15:52:00.000-08:00

Time Out NY
Live Review, Photos at The Volume

It’s easy to forget how very funny a performer Sufjan Stevens is. Partly it’s that much of Stevens’s recorded output up till now has erred on the quiet, melancholy side. And partly, truth be told, it seems astonishing—even a little unfair—that someone can be an exceptional musician and composer, a gifted lyricist, dreamboat handsome, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Stevens’s live shows have always been playgrounds for whimsy (musicians wearing butterfly wings, etc.) and humor (remember the cheerleaders on the Illinoise tour), but last night’s Beacon gig—the final show on the current tour—was an all-out joy, featuring robotic dance routines, a balloon flurry, projections and costumes from outer space. “I’m your entertainment for the evening,” Stevens announced at the beginning of the show. And how…

Click past the jump for the full review

If you’ve listened to his new album, The Age of Adz, you’re already aware that there’s been a significant shift in Stevens’s sound and worldview. His first proper album in five years, Adz is a response to heartbreak (he sings of “a broken heart that you stabbed for an hour”) and physical meltdown (the singer talks about the latter at length in this New York Times interview.) Accordingly, it’s a crazy-sounding, deeply affecting record, a glorious mangle of retro-futurist beats and knee-buckling orchestral arrangements (check our full review here).

The record was also inspired by the outsider artist Royal Robertson, whose work Stevens discussed at length last night. Robertson’s wild, mystical sci-fi paintings became dramatic animations projected on a huge screen behind the band, while the musicians themselves were dressed in raggle-taggle space wear: tinfoil capes, fluorescent stripes and so on. Backed up by three singing lady-dancers, Stevens busted out some impressive robotic moves, gyrating his way through a number of onstage costume changes. This was a show—Stevens’s own space odyssey, thoroughly thought-out and devised to delight.

Props, too, to the set designer (probably Stevens): When the slow-burning "Vesuvius" hit its volcanic climax, projected flames licked the stage on a mesh screen, the musicians dappled in orange and red light. The real breath-taker, though, is still the beauty of the songs. Stevens came to the front of the stage for a handful of stripped-down numbers, and his voice is shockingly pretty live; listen to new song “Futile Devices” for a full-on shiver.

The show’s chief delight was Stevens’s gleeful physicality; he said the record is about sensation, “sound-writing,” rather than song-writing; accordingly the music and the performance felt like a release, like Stevens is plain ol’ happy to be alive. Chatting between songs, he said he’s always been into physics, trigonometry and algebra, the equilibrium of the universe. “That may sound incredibly elementary-school bookish,” he said, “but that’s kind of where I’m at right now”—this, while wearing crinkly plastic trousers and fastening a homemade headband around his head.

For the epic “Impossible Soul,” a space pyramid floated down onstage, and Stevens donned a golden, pharaoh-style headdress; as the song reached its vocoder freak out, he pulled some awesomely disgusting neon shorts over his trousers and galumphed around the stage as the audience leapt to its feet. The encore, after a two-hour show, was Stevens’s Little Miss Sunshine hit, “Chicago”; its teary excitement was amped up by huge balloons tumbling from the ceiling at the Beacon. Some fans looked a little perplexed by the balloon-popping mayhem, maybe because it’s assumed that the answer to “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?” is rarely "they cut loose and have a Xanadu-style dance party." Thank goodness for Stevens, who demonstrated a glorious alternative.

Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles

2010-11-30T15:47:00.000-08:00

Time Out NY
Theater Preview

Young men dressed as British coppers stand on guard outside the Neil Simon theater, setting the tone perfectly for this razzle-dazzle tribute to the Beatles. With unfailing perkiness, Rain takes you through the key eras of Fabness, restaging such milestones as the group’s U.S. debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, and imagining the performances the band would’ve given had they not quit performing live pre–Sgt. Pepper’s. The idea, of course, is to take you there, make you feel like you were really one of the screaming thousands at Shea Stadium; to do so, the production mixes nifty set design with actual footage of Beatlemania. Between sets, giant screens beam up TV ads from the era—meaning you get to contextualize the band’s development, and George has time to put on a ludicrous fake beard.

And what of the individual players? Joey Curatolo turns in a terrific Paul; a little cheesy (and therefore more like Sir Paul is now), but vocally, he’s double-take perfect. Steve Landes’s John looks a little like Ozzy Osbourne in a white suit but turns in a thunderous performance of “A Day in the Life,” and the actual playing is magnificent.

Often the band encourages its (largely silver-haired) audience to get to its feet for rockier numbers, generating something of a cruise-ship vibe, not helped by the oh-so-literal visuals projected behind the band during songs from its psychedelic era (raining strawberries in “Strawberry Fields,” Eleanor Rigby’s actual tombstone).

In the year that John Lennon would have turned 70, one imagines the singer horrified (or at least shocked) at being cast as an entertainer, grinning and high-kicking on a Broadway stage; it was Lennon, after all, who described the early group as “the biggest bastards on earth.” And yet, to use his parlance, you’d have to be a stupid git to begrudge so many Beatles fans having so much fun.

Read more: Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles - Theater - Time Out New York http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/theater/529473/rain-a-tribute-to-the-beatles#ixzz16oRp9xom

Cee-Lo Green

2010-11-03T16:52:00.001-07:00

The Hot Seat: Cee Lo Green
Time Out NY Magazine

Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” crooner spills about “Fuck You.”

There’s no pleasure quite like yelling a profanity at the top of your lungs, and Cee Lo Green knows it. His hit “Fuck You” is rising on seven of Billboard’s charts, and the song’s text-only video—not even the “real” version—has gotten more than 7 million YouTube hits. The self-described “rude boy” made his name with Goodie Mob before touring the world and wearing an assortment of ridiculous wigs as one half of Gnarls Barkley. Though he canceled a recent New York City show, he promises to return: “I am going to set New York on fire,” he whispered to us when we called the hip-hop star on tour in Europe. Green gave us the lowdown on his potty mouth and the ultimate kiss-off anthem to gold diggers.

How does it feel to be the man of the moment?
Am I really? [Laughs] I guess I am having a moment, though. But I’m sure someone else is too, wherever they’re standing at.

Working on the song, when did you know you had a hit on your hands?
Well, in all honesty, with a song entitled “Fuck You,” you would be more certain about where it wouldn’t work than where it would. So no, it took us about a year to be completely sure. It goes back and forth, like, “Well, I love this record,” but then tomorrow it’s like, “Eh, let’s try a cowbell.”

You cowrote “Fuck You” with Bruno Mars.
This particular day, I was walking into the session and I could hear the framework of the hook. And in the years I had been making this record, I had gone through a bit of distress—being that I had recorded over 70 songs and nothing seemed to be sticking. All great music, but [not] that quantum leap of a single. So I was all up for saying “fuck you,” because I was perturbed with the time it was taking.

I love how you sing the chorus like it’s true, like you really mean it.
Well, how could it be true, Sophie? I’m rich! [Laughs uproariously] Yeah. I’m joking. I was rich, now I’m just fortunate after taxes. So no, no, no, it’s not the whole truth. It’s a tale of trial and error—solely for entertainment.

You didn’t write it with one particular lady in mind?
No. No one would dare [do that]! But then again, I think we’re all able to separate ourselves from the story and apply the statement of “fuck you” to anything that has become a nuisance at one time or another. That’s where it holds true. Even as adults, it’s hard. It’s hard out there. I think we all need a good excuse, a golden excuse, to say “fuck you” out loud every once in a while.

Are parents going to get mad about the profanity?
The song is definitely tongue-in-cheek. You would have to be a total prude to take this song too seriously.

Are you wary of it being tagged as a novelty single?
Well, I know that term has a negative stigma attached to it. It’s no different than going to a novelty shop, though—meaning, a place where you can only get this in particular. So it becomes a collectible in its own right. I believe this moment in time will endure to a point where it can be considered a pop-cultural reference, an antique, if you will. At the very heart of it, it’s just good, clean fun.

The album is called The Lady Killer…
I mean, there’s different takes on the term lady-killer. First of all, I am a ladies’ man, obviously. But also, it’s a sophisticated way of saying I’m a lover and a fighter. Also, the same way that you can call a storm “she” or a ship “she,” you could also call our industry “she” as well. Our business is something you have to be kind and courteous and consistent with. You have to court it. So therefore, the game is the lady. The lady is the game, but my aim is on the game. Do you feel me?

Yes, I do feel you. Is the rest of the album as good as the song?
I think it is. Of course, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and “Fuck You” has been quite a flare in the air.

You’ll be playing it at all your shows forever. Does that bother you?
[Laughs] I could see myself doing a cool Vegas version when I’m about 65. “Fuck you very much! Fuck you, ladies and gentlemen!”

Arcade Fire live

2010-11-03T16:45:00.000-07:00

Madison Square Garden
MOJO Magazine
Live Review

To put it mildly, Arcade Fire is currently enjoying a “moment.” Not only is the band touring behind its first new album in three years, The Suburbs (which has since topped the charts in the UK and the US), tonight’s show is being webcast live by director Terry Gilliam, long-term hero of bandleader Win Butler. It’s also the Montreal septet’s first go at playing New York’s biggest arena, and even Gilliam—king of the grand spectacle—is impressed. “Once you've reached Madison Square Garden, you've reached the peak,” he says, looking relaxed and jolly on camera before the show. “There's only the abyss waiting. So live free, for one night only!”

The Gilliam/Arcade Fire connection is obvious when you think about it. The director’s sympathy-for-the-little-man perspective chimes clearly with the band’s first two albums; when MOJO interviewed Butler on 2007’s Neon Bible tour, he spoke in baffled amusement about record companies trying to keep up with the kids by introducing Word of Mouth Departments: “It’s the most perfectly depressing thing,” he grinned. But The Suburbs is truly the band’s Brazil, a meditation on urban ennui. Accordingly, a shaven-headed Butler is dressed in drainpipes and bovver-boots, while his wife, Regine Chassagne, skips onstage in a silver sequin dress.

Behind the group looms an concrete overpass and a video screen styled as a highway sign, and as they launch into the strummy, Hunkydory-esque title-track, the screen beams out a slo-mo, grainy home movie of kids riding around on bikes; violins swoon (Owen Pallet joins Sarah Neufeld on strings) as Butler laments lost youth, “Sometimes I can’t believe it, I’m movin’ past the feeling...”

While the record may be trimmed of any showy excess, tonight’s performance is as energetic and teary a sweat-fest as Arcade Fire has ever pulled off, thanks in no small part to Will Butler (Win’s younger bro), careening across the stage thwacking whatever he can lay his hands on. It is hard though, to keep your eyes off Win Butler; where he used to cut a commanding but awkward figure, he’s now a proper frontman. Guitar-less for “We Used to Wait,” he strides out into the crowd, tottering along railings and grabbing at outstretched hands. The old songs still sound magnificent, and Arcade Fire’s set lists are as immaculately sequenced as their albums: a gnarly, dense “Power Out” dissolves into white noise, from which rises the heartbeat thud of “Lies.”

For all the viewer-friendly flourishes you get at tonight’s show (including a giant ticker tape snow cannon in “Tunnels”) its loveliest moment comes via a fuckup. The first encore song is “Sprawl II,” a giddy, fluttering Chassagne number, but the drum machine breaks and the song collapses. When Chassagne makes a wobbly second attempt, Butler runs over to her mic stand and kisses her. She’s thrilled, a bit embarrassed, and she does a little twirl; the song soars. There’s an almost ceremonial feel to the show closer, “Wake Up”—you half expect giant flags to lower as 20,000 fans yell along to its anthemic refrain (including David Byrne in the front row). If the abyss really is waiting, as Gilliam says, Arcade Fire don’t seem to have noticed.

WNYC Soundcheck: Break for a Pause

2010-10-15T13:12:00.000-07:00

A Break for a Pause

"On the show yesterday, author Jennifer Egan talked about a character in her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad who is obsessed with pauses in rock and pop songs. Today, we’ll revisit the topic with Sophie Harris, music writer at Time Out New York, and Elizabeth Margulis, associate professor and director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas."

Drake

2010-09-24T15:08:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY
Fall Preview

Sept 28, 29 Drake prepares to collect bras

You must get a lot of weird stuff thrown onto the stage.… Is it basically underwear?
Yeah, yeah. I have a trunk, it’s a big black trunk, and it’s got about five or six hundred bras in it. Panties I don’t save. I can’t save panties, that’s too personal. What do I do with [the bras]? I just hold them. There are days when I’ll just walk over to the trunk and open it and stare inside.… [Laughs] And that’s pretty much it. I just keep them, and one day—one day I think when I can afford a huge house—I’m gonna have the bra room. I’m just gonna make a room and put all the bras in the room.

That’s better than my fantasy, which is that you’d give them away to charity and they’d be in some remote place, all these women wearing real sexy bras.…
[Laughs] No, no, that would be unfair to the women that have gone braless at all my shows. I could never give them away, I’ve gotta somehow make a shrine for these women that take off their bras. But I will continue that, by the way, on this tour. Bras are always welcome. No matter how old I get.

Radio City Music Hall (866-858-0008, radiocity.com). $44.25–$95.25.

Click past the jump for the full interview

All these demands on your time—are you going to be able to give New York your full attention?
Oh, yeah! I mean, I put my all into every show. I rest as much as I can, I have a vocal coach. When I’m on the road I don’t drink that much—I might have one or two, but I really don’t drink, I definitely don’t smoke. I keep my mind and body in the best condition I possibly can so I’m hitting that stage in the best condition to give people a great show. And now on this new tour the greatest thing is going to be incorporating production. I’ve never really had that production element, I’ve always had just a DJ or a band and a couple lights on stage, and I have to go out there and really make the show appealing. So I’m excited. Especially about New York. I know I was told not to say anything [we assume about the "riot" at his hyped NYC Seaport show in June], but I’m just excited; I feel like I’m coming there on a mission, you know? To prove that Drake performances are a great thing!

Radio City is this stately, grand, old-fashioned venue—it seems an unusual choice for a hip-hop show.
Yeah, the acts that have played there, and the energy, the tradition, it’s a venue that I’m honored to even step foot inside, let alone grace the stage of. Despite how great Young Money’s doing, I feel like we’re all very much rookies, with the exception of Wayne; the rest of us are all very fresh and new—we’re like the new kids in class. I want people to laugh and enjoy it. The one thing I always hear about is great nights in New York, like, Oh, man, I’ll never forget this. So I just wanna have one of those nights.

Last time I saw you play was Bamboozle—this couldn’t be more different. Are you still going to pull up girls onstage?
[Laughs] Yeah, I mean, I’m always gonna be me. Just because the venue changes or the crowd changes, I never change. I love playing festivals cause they’re a challenge, but I love when it’s my own show because we both know what to expect. I love when it’s my own show, I can’t lie to you.
I’m super excited about being in such a legendary, timeless, classic venue. To bring that new energy of hip-hop. I’m looking forward to who’s gonna come out with me that night and do their thing for the people, too—I know I gotta have some tricks up my sleeve that night, it’s New York City. So I might have to make some phone calls [Laughs].

You reveal a lot about yourself in songs. Is it ever weird, people knowing that much about you and singing along to it?
Nah, you know, I’m very proud of the person that I am and how open I am with my emotions; that’s something I struggled with when I was younger. I’m not saying that I’m always right or that I always do the right thing, but they’re just genuine choices that I make. And for the world to know the real choices that I make, it never scares me or throws me off. I hope that my music encourages people to be real with themselves, and really themselves.

Why d’you think you’re so famous?
Oh, man! I don’t know, am I that famous? I think I got a lot of work to do [Laughs]. But I truly love this, I truly love music and I love speaking to the people. I don’t take any opportunity for granted as far as songs go. Especially now that the world is listening. When you can face your reality with a great melody, it makes it a little easier. So maybe that’s why.

You must get a lot of weird stuff thrown up on stage.…
I do, yeah….

Is it basically underwear?
Yeah, yeah, I have a trunk, it’s a big black trunk, and it’s got about five or six hundred bras in it. Panties I don’t save. I can’t save panties, that’s too personal. What do I do with them? I just hold them. There’s days where I’ll just walk over to the trunk and open it and stare inside [Laughs] and that’s pretty much it. And I just keep them, and one day—one day I think when I can afford a huge house, I’m just gonna have the bra room. And I’m just gonna make a room and put all the bras in the room. I just came up with that right now.

That’s better than my fantasy, which is that you’d give them away to charity and they’d be in some remote place, all these women wearing real sexy bras…
[Laughs] No, no, that would be unfair to the women that have gone braless at all my shows. I could never give them away, I’ve gotta somehow make a shrine for these women that take off their bras. But I will continue that, by the way, on this tour. Bras are always welcome. No matter how old I get. [Laughs]

WNYC: Soundcheck Smackdown

2010-08-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

WNYC Soundcheck Smackdown. Listen here.

"True to their namesake, Arcade Fire are a hot commodity: the Montreal ensemble knocked Eminem off the number-one spot on the Billboard albums chart with their new disc The Suburbs. But not everyone is moved by the band's hyper-dramatic anthems and onstage theatrics.

We’ll turn the heat up on Arcade Fire in a Soundcheck Smackdown; guests include Washington Post pop critic Chris Richards and Time Out New York music writer Sophie Harris."

BBC: Empire State of Mind

2010-08-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

BBC Radio 1 Documentary with Huw Stephens. Listen here.

"In this two-parter, Huw Stephens goes native in the city that's brought us everyone from The Strokes to Fifty Cent to Madonna, to find out why NYC has always been the music capital of America. From Brooklyn to the Bronx, he gets under the skin of one of the most fascinating cities in the world in this definitive guide to the New York music scene."

MGMT

2010-08-19T19:04:00.001-07:00

MGMT dishes on the making of Congratulations
Time Out NY Preview

By now you will have already seen our highly scientific thought-bubble chart on the making of MGMT's Congratulations album. Rest assured, it's based on 100 percent fact, gleaned from an illuminating chat with singer Andrew VanWyngarden. Check out the full Q&A here, and go see the band in action at Radio City next week (August 17 and 18).

"We like being ridiculous and I think that’s lost on a lot of people, or they think we’re coming from this super serious angle, and that’s too bad, really."—Andrew VanWyngarden

TONY: Let’s talk about the ingredients of Congratulations. What went into making the album?
Andrew VanWyngarden: Okay, yeah. First, you’d have to have a little bit of upstate New York in the dead of winter. So maybe some dirty snow, and the smell of a wood-burning stove. And some kombucha? And then we went to California, so there’s definitely some sort of Malibu Canyon springtime, hummingbirds, coyotes crapping at the highest point around the hot tub. [Laughs] And some mulled mushroom wine. Maybe Sonic Boom and a suitcase synthesizer. And some surfing.

So let’s throw in some bands. You’ve mentioned Joe Meek before?
Yeah! Our guitar player James was a fan. I heard I Hear a New World—the Joe Meek and the what’s it called? Blue Man Group or something [Laughs loudly]—I forget what it’s called. I heard that and I was really into that and really impressed that those crazy sounds were being made in the late ’50s. But then when we went to Malibu and we were working there and Sonic Boom came out, he brought a four-disc Joe Meek box set. And we’d be eating dinner and he’d be DJing, and a lot of the songs he played were produced by Joe Meek and we got really into that stuff. So that was a really big influence on us. On some songs, you can hear that Telstar-y sound. And also his use of reverb; I know on the song “Siberian Breaks” [on Congratulations], there’s a little sound that comes in, in the transition…I guess you would have no idea what sound I’m talking about. [Laughs] But there is a big influence.

And early Van Morrison?
Yeah that’s another one that Pete brought, a disc called Bang Masters? It’s got early versions of some songs that are on Astral Weeks. There’s a really good early version of “Beside You,” and another song called “It’s Alright,” which I was really into. And a lot of those songs were clearly recorded more quickly and with a mike in a room, but there’s a really cool sound with the drums and the bass together and I think that was an influence on us, so we were just trying to figure out how they recorded it like that.

It was a lot of experimenting with mike positions and getting different sounds, and unfortunately I think so much of the stuff that we did in Malibu wasn’t even recorded. Like we had…[Laughs] this giant reverb box called the EMT250 or something like that and it looks like a robot with this giant, red handle. And yeah, we rented that and it was something that we used a lot but never really recorded. And also a ton of late-night jams with Sonic Boom and playing Spacemen 3 songs—really special moments. That we have and can think about, but no one will ever know about!

It feels like the record combines two seemingly opposite approaches—on the one hand, that Joe Meek/ToeRag Studios vibe, where everyone’s working in lab coats, and it’s really neat and precise. And on the other hand there’s this sprawling, psychedelic element to it. Was there a split between sometimes being all neat and precise and sometimes lying on the floor in a mess?
Yeah, I think that less of the lying on the floor stuff made it to the album than the precision stuff. Ben and I are too uptight and particular about arranging and panning and mixing and everything to really let loose—and I think a lot of the psychedelic music that we listen to is something that we love but could never relate to ourselves because we’re too obsessed with pop music and melodies to let go and just, like, do something, like a Can song that’s a 12-minute funk-bass jam. So we’ll take elements of that stuff and try to incorporate it into our songs but we usually try to stay more precise and methodical.

It’s like the way that people danced in the ’60s, quite neat and jerky?
[Laughs] Yeah.

If you had a set of mental Polaroids of your time making the record in Malibu, what would they be of?
I mean, the first one that comes up is the backyard of the place that we were in. We rented this family home that was in a canyon, so there were the five of us in the band and Billy and Sonic Boom, and people would come up and stay with us, like Anthony Ausgang, the artist who did the album cover. He came up from L.A. a few times, and Jennifer Herrema [Royal Trux] came up and sang on the tracks. The backyard was this little canyon, and it was late March early April, and everything was in bloom, and there was a trail that we could hike through to get to this little waterfall. And there were all these little red-bellied salamanders that were breeding one time we went up there, in these…kind of like sex-balls? Of like, ten salamanders in a ball. And it was just really great ’cause I love nature and being outdoors, so there was that. And then driving to the beach to go surfing and going to get really good fish tacos. It was a pretty nice time.

Did you start surfing in Malibu?
I was definitely into it and interested in surfing for a while before—even on the first record I was dreaming about surfing a lot. So that kind of made it into the lyrics and the imagery of the “Time to Pretend” video. I didn’t start surfing myself until the end of 2008. Then Malibu was when I really started trying to learn and really got into it. I’ve definitely kept it up and it’s something I really love to do.

Are you good?
No. I mean, I think it takes years and years to really get good, but I’ve learned a lot. It’s gotten to the point where it’s at least enjoyable—in the beginning it’s really challenging, and paddling can feel so weird. [Laughs] And paddling out can be the biggest challenge. So yeah I’ve gotten more confident and can stand up and maybe do one turn or something.

Let’s go quickly through some of the folks who you namecheck on the record. Did any of them respond? Did Brian Eno say, "Hey thanks, I love my song"?
Yeah, actually we sent Brian Eno a copy of the album before it even came out, and we were kind of nervous. [Laughs] We didn’t hear back for, like, two-and-a-half months, so we figured he hated it—and then finally we heard from his manager. She was like, "Yeah, Brian really likes the album, really likes the song." So that was good. I mean, he’s hugely influential on us.

Any particular era of Eno?
I mean, it’s changed, but I guess the way he affected me earliest was through his production work with Talking Heads, ’cause my parents played that a lot when I was growing up. But for his solo stuff, the first album I really got into was Here Come the Warm Jets. And then definitely Taking Tiger Mountain by Storm, and now I’m really into Another Green World. And also the Roxy Music stuff. We actually got to see Roxy Music play at the Fuji Rock Festival and it was so amazing! It was great. And actually, a friend of mine had seen them a few weeks before and said, "Don’t go into it with high expectations, you’ll be disappointed, it’s not that great," and I was blown away. It was just…it was beautiful. It’s up in the mountains at a ski resort, and it was raining and kind of misty, a real great setting.

You’re friends with Dan Treacy, though, aren’t you?
Yeah, we are friends with Dan...

And you talk about Hackney Lanes and the underground on Congratulations—have you spent enough time in London to have that, as a flavor?
Yeah, not a lot of time, but while we were touring in 2008 for a while, I was set on wanting to move to London and I spent two weeks living near Hackney with Will, our drummer, and just did a lot of walking around over there. And there are all these weird canals and little twists and turns, and it’s a really cool area. And I have walked around there with Dan before. I don’t know, I was kind of just imagining…[Laughs] Dan walking around, and a typical day in Hackney, and what he’s doing and thinking. And he also, there are a lot of Television Personalities songs that are about other people and stories in the vein of Ray Davies or something. Like “Where’s Bill Grundy Now?” Or “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives.” And so that song's inspired by TVPs. But musically, it’s more inspired by this band the Deep Freeze Mice—I think they’re from Leicester? This guy Alan Jenkins… And that’s really just off-the-wall.

Your enunciation on the record feels really British—not your accent, but the ways your mouth seems to shape the words. It reminds me of the Kinks’ “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”…
Yeah, yeah. [Laughs]

The line about pulling your nylon panties right up tight—
[Quotes] “This week it’s polka dots, next week it’s stripes!” That song is awesome.

So Dan Treacy was happy with his song?
I don’t think… I think it makes him uncomfortable. [Laughs] Yeah, he likes it, but his favorite song is definitely “Kids.” And I think he likes our new record, but that song "Dan Treacy" makes him feel a little funny. Which, you know, is understandable; it’s kind of weird to have a song about yourself.

Did Gaga get in touch with you?
No. Hehe.

Tell us more about what you’ve referred to as “The Snailing Hour” in Malibu.…
The Snailing Hour, yeah! Man, that’s funny, ’cause yesterday we were in Montreal we went out, and I got this little, cool digital video camera when we were in Tokyo. It’s called the digital Harinezumi, and it looks like Super 8 footage, but it’s a tiny camera. And we went out into the woods here and we were just shooting a bunch of snails with the goal of trying to make a band-made video for “Lady Dada’s Nightmare.” Yeah, but we were talking about the Snailing Hour; I actually never experienced it, but Matt and Ben and James were all talking about it. It’s, like, close to five in the morning in the backyard I was talking about where the coyotes take shits. And I guess there’s, like, a magic time when hundreds and hundreds of snails come out. [Starts laughing] Yeah, I don’t really know how that influenced the album, but the fact that we were up for the snailing hour is telling, maybe.

Scooby-Doo was a factor, as well?
Yeah, the whole time we were making the album, we were laughing at certain points because the songs felt real cartoony, with the bongo sounds and some of it feels like the Heathcliff theme song, which we were listening to a lot, actually. [Laughs] Ah. Yeah, "Brian Eno" seems like the theme song to a kids' cartoon movie, where Brian Eno is this kind of slightly sinister musical vampire or something. We’re definitely a band that loves cartoons and grew up on cartoons, so that’s probably in the music.

When Congratulations came out, it felt like people took it so super-seriously, and it’s also a fun record.…
People heard it and instantly assumed—I remember reading about “Flash Delirium,” people did not think that we were laughing when we made it which we were, we were cracking up. Even just, like, the chord progression, there’s little things that Ben and I just… You know when we know we have a song that we like is when we’re on the floor laughing about a part of it. Like, the flute solo or something like that in that song, we like being ridiculous, and I think that’s lost on a lot of people, or they think we’re coming from this super-serious angle, and that’s too bad, really. But I think a lot of people do get it and get that side of it, and I think that’s really important.

Katy Perry

2010-08-19T18:56:00.000-07:00

The badly-behaved pop star returns, slightly out of step.

Teenage Dream
Time Out NY Album Review

* *

A lot can happen in two years—financial crisis, swine flu, KFC’s Double Down—and if you’re a lady pop star, watch out. In 2008, Katy Perry’s sailor-mouthed pinup persona seemed genuinely fresh. But since then, she’s been upstaged in the outrageousness stakes by the likes of Lady Gaga and Ke$ha. Accordingly, much of Perry’s sophomore album, Teenage Dream, seems tame by 2010’s frenzied standards. Its standout singles are phenomenal: The slap-bass, hands-in-the-air idiocy of “California Gurls” is a delight, and Perry belts out “Teenage Dream” with real conviction (she was halfway through writing the song when she met future fiancé Russell Brand.)

But the album as a whole gets wearisome, partly because unless you have the songwriting chops of, say, Joanna Newsom, 12 tracks is a lot to ask of your listener. The arrangements grow samey, and Perry rarely varies the tone of her voice: 90 percent power-yell, 10 percent whisper. Further, Perry is to lyric-writing what Hulk Hogan is to diamond-cutting. On a song like “Peacock” (“I wanna see your peacock-cock-cock”) her lack of subtlety is funny, but so much of the album is built on single entendres that when Perry goes for an empowerment song, you’re not sure if the “pearl” she’s singing about is her heroine’s inner light or her clitoris.

The album’s closer is its most affecting moment. “Not Like the Movies” is a thoughtful piano ballad, invested with the kind of theatrical emotion you expect from Patti LuPone; it suggests that Perry may yet achieve longevity by virtue of being an old-fashioned entertainer.

Arcade Fire

2010-08-03T11:01:00.000-07:00

The buzz band’s new album is worthy of the hype.
Time Out NY Album Review

The Suburbs (Merge)
* * * *

Whether you care for their music or not, one of the amazing things about Arcade Fire is that they write music that stirs the heart, yet is almost never about actual affairs of the heart. The band’s breakthrough debut album was an expression of grief, at points ecstatic and wretched; its second, Neon Bible, a teary, dramatic appraisal of the world’s shittiness. Neither album addressed romantic love, as we’ve come to recognize it in the charts, yet both were deeply romantic records, inspiring fist-pumping, lighter-waving stadium shows around the world.

Arcade Fire’s third album is equally curious. Ostensibly, The Suburbs is a 16-song exploration of urban sprawl. The music is every bit as claustrophobic, weird and lonely as suburbia is; the opening track sets the tone with its rinky-dink picket-fence tempo and carelessly sighed chorus. But of course, The Suburbs is not just about suburbia; it’s about childhood and growing up, boredom and melancholy. And it’s about the strange tension you feel as an adult, when you’re half longing to get back to your childhood and half relieved as hell you’re not there anymore. Hence, “Sprawl I” has singer Win Butler driving to his old house, looking for the places where he used to play and (surprise) finding “it was the loneliest day of my life.”

That so many of these songs are swathed in quiet despond only serves to elevate the album’s soaring, blissful moments—the crazy, fluttering strings and pummeling drums on “Empty Room,” for instance. The past is a foreign country, yes, and you can never go back there—but what a thing, to try.

Arcade Fire plays Madison Square Garden Thu 5.

Spiritualized

2010-07-30T10:53:00.000-07:00

Jason Pierce checks into Heartbreak Hotel one last time.
Time Out NY Preview

If you’d asked me a year ago if I would do these kind of shows, I would very definitely have said no,” Jason Pierce says on the phone from London. Talking frankly about his decision to tour Spritualized’s now-legendary album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space—and the current trend for reviving old albums in general—the singer says, “I always thought of it like battle reenactments, like those guys who dress up as Waterloo soldiers and fire fake cannons at each other. I never saw us as looking back.”

There’s another obvious reason why Pierce might avoid looking back: Ladies and Gentlemen is as close to a musical expression of heartbreak as you’re likely to find. The album was released in 1997, just after Pierce broke up with his long-term love Kate Radley, who married Verve singer Richard Ashcroft four days before Spritualized was due to join that band on tour—ouch. Unsurprisingly, it’s acknowledged by fans and critics alike as one of the saddest albums ever made; the grandly tragic title track turned up in the funeral scene of Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky.

So what changed Pierce’s mind? “I was talked into doing this at the top of Mount Buller in Australia,” he says. The band was there to play a one-off show for the Don’t Look Back series. “It’s 6,000 feet high, so I always had the line that it was a decision made at altitude, y’know?” He’s partly joking: Pierce has always made drug-related gags, from his early days with psych-rock outfit Spacemen 3 (“taking drugs to make music to take drugs to”) to the time when Spiritualized played the 114th floor of Toronto’s CN Tower, recognized by Guinness World Records as the highest gig ever.

But there are some excellent, serious reasons for playing the record now. Ladies and Gentlemen lends itself to being performed whole, because it’s constructed that way, Pierce explains. “It’s like a symphonic piece where the tracks are all relative to each other and the way they work.” And: “The band that made that record couldn’t have performed it like we’re doing it now.” Admittedly, this is partly because Pierce sacked most of Spiritualized’s original members over a pay dispute, but musically, you get the point. This tour features a six-piece rhythm section, strings, brass and a gospel choir from Queens.

The clincher, though, is the way people relate to it. “This album’s sat around for 13 years, so everyone’s got a take on it,” Pierce says. “They’ve already been moved by those songs, so they bring so much more to it. It’s not about doing an accurate rendition—it’s about finding the electricity in these songs, finding the places where the most energy is, and I think we’ve got better at doing that.”

In a way, the spirit of these shows resembles that of Leonard Cohen’s recent world tour; devoted fans, knowing exactly what the show would deliver, were still surprised by the emotional intensity of the encounter; how new those old emotions can feel. Is Pierce wary of this show becoming a big weepfest? “I think anything’s good if you’re moved by music,” he replies. “So much music isn’t particularly moving, so I don’t think it’s a bad thing however you take it. The mathematics of music is the same for everyone—it’s pushing air around to make things sound nice. But there’s something really special to be found, and the most beautiful bits are always the most elusive. It doesn’t really matter how people respond, as long as they do respond—and I think there’s a kind of glee that people bring to this, where they know where they’ve been with it.”

As far as pushing air goes, you couldn’t find a more perfect venue than the curvaceous, elegant Radio City Music Hall, where Spiritualized opened for Radiohead in 1998. “What I like about that place is it’s widescreen,” Pierce says. “The audience wraps itself around the stage.” He feels good about New York, and even lived in Manhattan, at 17th and Third, for a while. “It’s a city where the good hits the bad; whenever you’re in something good, you’re not so far away from the bad. It’s that energy you get from a city.” Perhaps inadvertently, Pierce has perfectly nailed the dynamic of Ladies and Gentlemen: a record on which great waves of heartbreak crash against waves of hope.

Fans would do well to note that this is the last time the group will play the album like this, according to Pierce, who is now working on a new Spiritualized record. “It’s been a short-lived thing and an amazing thing, but I’ve always thought we’re looking to the future.” He pauses and chuckles softly. “And I’m glad I sat at the top of the mountain and thought, If I don’t say yes to this, I’m gonna have to listen to them talk about it all night.”

The Black Keys

2010-07-22T14:50:00.000-07:00

The Ohio duo bursts some rock & roll myths. Time Out NY Preview

For a yowling, sweaty rock & roll band, the Black Keys are remarkably restrained. The duo hasn’t created its own mythology in the tradition of ’60s garage-rock icons Question Mark and the Mysterians (or that other garage band, the White Stripes). And there’s apparently little in the way of Led Zep–style debauchery to its story, unless you count an incident in Northern England in which singer Dan Auerbach was attacked onstage by a middle-aged lady (“They were potato chip factory workers,” sighs Auerbach). The band’s reluctance to ham it up even extends to the point where Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney express relative indifference about Muscle Shoals, the legendary Alabama studio where they made their latest album, Brothers.

“It’s an oddly shaped box with rubber lining on the floor and cinder-block walls,” Carney shrugs. Recalling the band’s experience at the studio, he mentions crummy photocopies of Muscle Shoals vets like Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones tacked to the walls—which they immediately removed. “I mean, we had assembled all the equipment,” Carney says. “So even if it looked like a Holiday Inn conference center, we were gonna have to make a record there.”

Anyone looking for a sensational story may be disappointed. But there’s a realness to what the Black Keys do, along with a lack of pretension that sets them apart from pretty much every other act in Billboard’s top ten (Brothers entered the chart at No. 3). Lately, there’s also a sense of humor, noticeably via a grin-inducing series of music videos with a romping dinosaur puppet and Russ Meyer bikini girls.

That playfulness is also in the music. The Black Keys made their name in 2003, with their lean, muscular second album, Thickfreakness, but the songs on Brothers take in woozy psychedelia, soul and glam rock. That newfound freedom stems from the fact that the band has survived for nearly a decade. “At first I think we were both constantly nervous,” Carney says. “It all feels so fickle.” The pair saw bands like the Datsuns and Hot Hot Heat get huge, and wondered why they weren’t attracting that kind of attention. “But actually I think it was really good for us,” Carney says, “because when all that shit got thrown to the wayside, we managed somehow to not get lumped in with it.”

Expand they did, which is the other reason for the sonic diversity you’ll find on Brothers. On 2008’s Attack & Release, the duo teamed up with Danger Mouse; last fall the Black Keys spent a week recording with hip-hop stars, including GZA, Mos Def and Raekwon, for Damon Dash’s Blakroc project. Those sessions had a huge influence on Brothers, Auerbach’s singing in particular: “Being around those artists and watching them get into character—seeing how cool it was and how effortless it could be helped me loosen up a bit and just go for it.”

Accordingly, the album’s first track, “Everlasting Light,” has Auerbach singing in falsetto over deliciously heavy drums and romantically cooed shoo-waahs. That vocal was recorded in one take; the whole album took ten days. “If it was worth it to us for some reason, we probably could make a whole record next week if we wanted to,” Carney says, matter-of-factly. Are they happiest working fast? “I would feel like a dipshit if I just sat in a studio and ordered expensive meals and wasted everyone’s time,” Auerbach adds.

There is certainly something workmanlike and efficient about the band’s modus operandi, and the friendly but guarded way it tackles an interview. But the real secret to the Black Keys isn’t some saucy rock & roll fact, but rather that in private the pair goof around like kids. “We get paid to be children, basically,” Auerbach confirms. Having played together, in one way or another, since they were nine years old, both took on solo projects for the first time last year.

“Working with other people made us both realize how easy it is when we work together, how effortless it is,” Auerbach says. The album’s title was born partly from this discovery, and partly from one of the songs, “Unknown Brother,” which Auerbach wrote about his wife’s brother, who died of cancer at age 18. “We were talking about how horrible that must’ve been,” Auerbach says. “And Pat said, ‘Why don’t we call the record Brothers?’ Like everything else on the record, it just happened naturally. It sums up the record and pretty much our career up to this point—that it’s all about the bond that Pat and I have, the unspoken connection and the shared vision. Do we feel lucky? Extremely.”

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

2010-07-22T14:46:00.000-07:00

From punk to hippie: Is Alex Ebert for real?

Time Out NY Preview

The big question with Edward Sharpe is, do we believe him? Do we really buy—or rather, dig—the hippie vibe so gleefully promoted by this ten-piece band whose leader, born Alex Ebert, used to front a jerky, Bowie-esque punk outfit called Ima Robot?

On the one hand, Ebert’s transformation into Sharpe makes perfect sense. Miserable and addicted to heroin, as he has since recounted in interviews, Ebert was a wreck when Ima Robot began to fade. He got out of a bad relationship, joined a 12-step program and met a long-haired hippie cutie named Jade, whom he “hooked up with” (his words). The pair started making music together in Los Angeles—of course he was going to emerge resplendent in a white caftan with an ear-to-ear smile and a yoga mat.

But to a lot of haters (and where there are hippies, there will always be haters), there’s something a little studied about the group’s vibe, its happy-clappy sunshine psychedelia and the way it travels around in a white school bus…that, and the fact that Ebert styled his Edward Sharpe persona as a sort of flower-child messiah, sent down to earth “to kinda heal and save mankind,” as he told Paste magazine. “But he kept getting distracted by girls and falling in love.”

Accordingly, you get songs with biblical titles and glossy videos that show Ebert dangling from a crucifix or bleeding rose petals. Clearly there’s a lot of theorizing and (ratty) beard-stroking to be done.

But honestly, who really cares, if the live show is good? And it is good. As opposed to its rather neat presence on record, onstage the band is rambunctious, the arrangements are swell and full of real rustic clatter. And Ebert looks really happy when he sings. Come to think of it, so did the other 50,000 people dancing in the sun at the Coachella fest this year. Perhaps in the end, you don’t have to choose between authenticity and fun.

Squeeze + Cheap Trick

2010-07-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY Preview

The Brits are sometimes puzzled as to why—or really, how—American people can connect to quintessentially English bands. You know, the sorts of bands who drop in kitchen-sink lyrics so specific as to be nonsensical to anyone not brought up on fish and chips and bad dentistry.

And for many a Brit band, the answer is that it doesn’t translate (see the Kinks, Blur). But not so for Squeeze, the London outfit who first scored hits in the late ‘70s with such pristine pop nuggets as “Cool for Cats” and “Up the Junction.” Squeeze made the biggest impression in the US with a slightly smoother sound (after keyboardist Jools Holland had left the band), as on the single “Tempted,” but generally, the formula is simple: a melody that makes perfect sense, and frontmen Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford singing a crisp octave apart.

In any case, regardless of which era of Squeeze you prefer, it’s not what they say but the way they say it; from the unforgettable opening line of early single “Up the Junction” (“I never thought that it would happen/with me and a girl from Clapham”), to the giddy lovers in “This Summer” (1995) who are “Like two flags wrapped around a pole”.

And just as Squeeze gave something unique to new wave pop, Cheap Trick pretty much invented power pop in the 70s. Again, the ‘Trick’s lyrical references might be super-American (from “Southern Girls” to “California Man”) but it didn’t stop the band from becoming superstars in Japan—where they cut their most famous album, At Budokan, in 1979. In 2010 the band celebrates 35 years together and 20 million records sold.

It goes without saying that the musical legacy of both these bands is huge; without Squeeze, you’d have no Hot Chip, no Ben Folds Five or the Streets. And without Cheap Trick, there’d be no Foo Fighters, no Jonas Brothers or Pixies. More importantly though, both these bands still play like they really mean it. And that translates, wherever you’re from.

Idiot Glee

2010-07-09T12:49:00.000-07:00

A dreamy Lexington kid becomes a musical hot property around town.
By Sophie Harris

Time Out NY Preview

Goodbye Blue Monday; Wed 14
Coco66; July 15
Glasslands Gallery; July 16

Ever noticed the expression little kids get on their faces when they’re utterly lost in music? That kind of mesmerized swaying they do? It’s a vibe that seeps from the music made by James Friley, an extremely talented young man from Lexington, Kentucky, who goes by the name Idiot Glee and describes his sound as “post-doo-wop.”

That’s a pretty tidy approximation: On his self-titled debut EP, Friley loops his voice into a one-man combo, throws in some gentle, slightly fuzzed beats and turns the reverb up to Maximum Romantic. A slight clunkiness, the musical equivalent of a teenage fumble, is exactly what makes his music magical; we challenge you not to swoon during his cover of Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine.”

One could easily attribute this unguarded quality to the fact that Friley was raised a Mormon, doesn’t drink and only recently started cursing (beyond “fudge” and “shin”). But it seems simpler than that: He’s out-and-out in love with music, possessing that weird, romantic longing that the best stuff brings out in even the steeliest soul.

Since the blogosphere generally agrees that Idiot Glee is a fine thing, and Urban Outfitters has included a track in its playlist, you’ll likely be hearing much more from Friley this year. A cynic would say, go see these shows quick—that dewy magic won’t last forever! We think Friley will be caught in the spell for some time yet, and encourage you to join him.

Phil Collins

2010-07-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

Full photo slideshow and live review here

The dad-rock icon plays soul classics. By Sophie Harris
Time Out NY Preview

It’s like that episode of 30 Rock where Tracy offers to make Jack a mixtape. Tracy: “You like Phil Collins?” Jack: “I have two ears and a heart, don’t I?” For any Phil fan, this is a perfectly reasonable assessment of the power in the man’s music. It’s also funny and ridiculous—and therefore perfectly suits an artist who, by his own admission, has never been cool.

Now a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee pushing 60, Collins is at the point in his career where he can pretty much do whatever he wants. And while we might wish for an hour-long version of “In the Air Tonight” with 50 drummers and a bagpipe section, what his whims amount to right now is his Going Back project. This fall, Collins will be releasing an album of ’60s soul covers—specifically, those songs that shaped his musical world as a teen. Lovers of his introspective ballads might wince at the prospect of an entire album’s worth of “You Can’t Hurry Love”–style bubblegum pop, but actually the record sounds pretty classy: Original Motown house band the Funk Brothers plays on all the tracks, which include lesser-known gems such as the Ronettes’ “Do I Love You?” as well as Dusty Springfield’s heartbreaker “Going Back.”

These standing-room-only shows are styled as old-fashioned dance parties; Collins’s band will include a brass section and six backing vocalists. Be warned that the set list will comprise exclusively R&B and soul covers (no classic Phil, then), but expect Collins to perform with total conviction…as always.

Decades of NYC: The 1920s

2010-07-02T13:50:00.000-07:00

The 1920s revival in NYC scales new heights at a dazzling July 4th party. We show you how to live like a bon vivant every day.
By Sophie Harris

Anyone with eyes has surely noticed all the Jazz Age–inspired bistros and suspendered bartenders slinging Prohibition-era cocktails around town, not to mention the fedoras and brogues that have become de rigueur attire for any self-respecting hipster. It’s indicative of a larger scene at work, one that embraces the fashion, free-spiritedness and culture of the Roaring ’20s. “There are so many elements to the scene,” says event producer, musician and dapper man-about-town Dandy Wellington, one of the organizers behind The Liberty Belle Spectacular (Empire Hotel Rooftop, 44 W 63rd St at Broadway; 212-265-7400, empirehotelnyc.com; 7pm; $25, advance $20), taking place on Sunday 4. “It’s a whole lifestyle,” Wellington explains. “It’s what you eat, what you drink, what you wear and where you go; it’s what you listen to; it’s how you have fun. It’s all those things combined.”

The Spectacular offers the curious an opportunity to see the ’20s scene in full swing: Party planners Champagne Riot, Wit’s End, Dances of Vice and the Salon (all of whom have hosted anachronistic events around the city) have concocted one glorious party, featuring burlesque, tap dancing courtesy of the Minsky Sisters, and old-timey jazz music from Gelber and Manning (see story, for more on them). Even better, you can clutch your nattily attired beloved while watching the Fourth of July fireworks from the rooftop of the Empire Hotel. If your interest is piqued, pop a cloche hat on your head and take a peek at some of our favorite ’20s-inspired spots in the city.

DINE LIKE A DANDY
Wellington suggests chowing down on a speakeasy-style meal at The Smith (55 Third Ave between 10th and 11th Sts; 212 420 9800, ctrnyc.com/thesmith), which he likes for its dark interiors and antiquated atmosphere. “The images on the walls, the wood that they use, the light fixtures… It’s almost like you’re in a 1920s barbershop,” he explains. “And the drinks menu is exquisite—100 percent ’20s.” Chow down on classic comfort food like a chilled shrimp cocktail ($10) and a Caesar salad ($9)—both popular dishes during the decade—and be sure to arch an eyebrow while you’re eating. Linger over an old-fashioned ($11) as you gawk at the vintage photos that line the walls.

TAKE A SUNDAY STROLL
See work by one of the era’s most interesting Expressionist painters at “Otto Dix,” currently on view at the Neue Galerie (1048 Fifth Ave at 86th St; 212-628-6200, neuegalerie.org; $15, seniors and students $10; through Aug 30). The late German artist captured the so-called “Golden Era” of Weimar Germany—which hit right around the same time as America’s Roaring ’20s—in brilliantly rendered portraits, including a vivid red painting of performance artist–dancer Anita Berber.

In the old days, folks would dress up nice for church and then hit the park for an elaborate picnic; emulate them by grabbing a parasol and waltzing through the Sheep Meadow in Central Park (enter at Central Park West and 66th St, centralparknyc.org). In the ’20s, sheep actually roamed the field, but nowadays you’re more likely to see sunbathers catching some rays. Don a vintage swimming costume if you’d like to join them.

SIP A SPEAKEASY-INSPIRED DRINK
In this scene, mixing has nothing to do with records and turntables; a mixologist is the magician behind the bar waiting to fix you a perfect sidecar or a classic Manhattan. There are all sorts of secret haunts around town, like Please Don’t Tell (pdtnyc.com) and Death and Company (deathandcompany.com), but we dig the vibe and the quaffs at Clover Club (210 Smith St between Baltic and Butler Sts, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn; 718-855-7939, cloverclubny.com), which features exposed brickwork, ornate chandeliers and smartly dressed barmen. “It even smells vintage,” Wellington happily notes. Named after a group of Philadelphia journalists who used to meet at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel before Prohibition to tell witty anecdotes and drink each other into the ground, the joint offers a signature cocktail ($12), made out of gin, raspberry syrup and dry vermouth. Other old-timey sips you can sample include a bourbon smash ($12), with mint, lemon juice and Kentucky’s favored tipple; or a French 75 ($12), made from gin and lemon juice and topped with champagne.

SMARTEN UP YOUR ACT
Stylish duds are a requirement for any ’20s fanatic. “This is definitely not a pretentious scene,” Wellington says (even though he admits to owning four top hats). “But we want people look presentable.” And by that, he doesn’t mean throw on a slip and a ratty flapper headband; he means, y’know, show some flair. Ladies would do well to check out 10ft Single by Stella Dallas (285 North 6th St between Havemeyer St and Meeker Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn; 718-486-9482), a sprawling den of vintage goodies that run the gamut from cheap scarves to beautiful lace gowns (from $65). Gentlemen should try Archangel Antiques (334 E 9th St between First and Second Aves, 212-260-9313), which specializes in buttons, tie clips, collar pins—the kind of baubles Jay Gatsby might have dreamed of. (Ladies can also find accessories like cloche hats.) Expect to pay $100 for a pair of authentic cufflinks, and be aware that the prices are always negotiable.

DO THE CHARLESTON
Michael Arenella and His Dreamland Orchestra (dreamlandorchestra.com) are justly celebrated stalwarts of New York’s ’20s-loving crowd, best known for throwing the annual Jazz Age Lawn Party. The 12-piece brass band not only looks the part, but delivers a truly swoonworthy take on hot-dance jazz; catch ’em at their next soiree on Governors Island, taking place July 17 and 18 ($10, advance $7), and again at the end of August. Worried about your two left feet? If you arrive early at most ’20s-style gigs, you can polish up your skills at a free dance class. “There’s a code to the dance floor,” Wellington warns. “The outside lane, the border of the dance floor, is the traveling lane. Be aware of swing-dance etiquette!”

See more in Own This City

Time Out New York / Issue 770 : Jul 1–7, 2010

The Sweet Cheat

2010-06-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

A community of artists led by Jeff Stark—founder of the Nonsense List—presents a play in an abandoned warehouse. Sophie Harris braves the broken glass to find out why.

3rd Ward Magazine

“We apologize for the elevator situation,” says a man wearing a train conductor’s cap and smart shirt. He is standing next to a gaping elevator shaft, which drops down three floors and is surrounded by tangled rusty steel. Next to it, there’s staircase—except that most of the stairs have flaked away leaving just bars. The landing has fallen out completely, and another man, dressed in a suit and fedora hat, is straddling the empty space, guiding intrepid/scared-looking folks across [“Square yourself. Hold on to the grating with your right hand, and reach forward with your left”]. “I’m in love with you!” one relieved young lady tells him, once she gets safely to the next floor.

It’s nearly 90 degrees this Sunday afternoon, and forty people have travelled upstate to a secret location to be part of this show: a play named The Sweet Cheat that will only ever see four performances. Its organizer, Jeff Stark—the guy in the fedora—describes it as “site-specific theater.” Most people would describe it as pure madness.

You may already be familiar with Stark’s work. Since 2002, he’s been putting out the Nonsense List; a weekly email listings service that details the coolest, silliest/most serious goings on in New York [a sample read of this week’s events will find you the Swan Lake Masquerade Ball, a discussion entitled “Porn From Madagascar,” and a wrestling party.] This service alone would have made us want to know more about Stark, and the underground community he’s a part of. But then we heard about The Sweet Cheat, and we were hooked.

Stark moved to New York 11 years ago and immediately fell in love with the city’s creative energy. “There were two things that got me very quickly,” he says, when we chat on the phone before the play. “The first weekend I was here I went to a party that lasted for two days. It was in huge warehouse space in Williamsburg and it was amazing.” A series of installations included a walk-thru Stonehenge made out of old fridges, reflective pools of water and massive inflatable sculptures. So he was already hanging with the cool crowd? Not at all, says Stark, “I was never able to find that thing again, it was just, ‘Oh my God, what was that?’” A few months later, however, Stark met Julia Solis of the Dark Passage group, and took part in a citywide scavenger hunt that culminated in a sit-down dinner for 40 people in a live subway tunnel: “It was instantly, ‘Who are you people and how do I get to participate in this stuff in the future?’”

And so the Nonsense list began to take shape. “I was looking for a publication that collected all of this information together—and when I couldn’t find one I just started my own,” Stark shrugs. He’s cagey about the number of people who subscribe to Nonsense: “I only had 50 people signed up to it originally and I wanted people to take me seriously,” he says. “*Now, I want people to feel comfortable listing things that happen at their homes. I list things that happen in kitchens and in living rooms all the time and they just find their own audience. And I would worry that if I announced a number, people might freak out thinking that 300 people would arrive, y’know?”

Suffice to say, since its inception, Stark has had several scrapes with the law (“I think that anybody who is active in NYC has,” he says), including arrests for bartending, political protests, riding his bike, putting up posters… You know the deal. Should there be more tolerance in New York, or is that struggle par for the course? “I mean, on the one hand I really thrive in New York because there’s a lot to push against. On the other, we live in a city with far too many police, too much mayoral control, and not enough public space.”

The Sweet Cheat is absolutely a product of this tension. Attendees receive an email the day before the show warning them that the secret venue is dangerous: “You attend this event at your own risk— physically and legally,” it reads. “There will be crawling, climbing, and shimmying involved. You are in charge of your own safety.” But this doesn’t really prepare you for the broken glass and rusty nails on the floor, or the crumbling windows where the last few broken points of glass are barely clinging onto the frames.

Nor, though, does it prepare you for how beautiful the building is. We board the train to travel to the play at Grand Central Station, and half an hour down the line, arrive at an enormous, derelict warehouse—designed by some of the same people that worked on Grand Central. “They don’t make buildings like this any more,” says Stark. “The space itself is monumental, similar to the Tate Modern. So just beginning with that, it’s beautiful. Then you add on the layers of time, and decay, the way that nature finds a way.” There are times when Stark finds this space incredibly depressing and sad, he adds. “And there are times when I’m threatened by it, and there are times when I feel like it’s a giant cautionary tale. And I think that all of those experiences of this space resonate with the play that we’ve made.”

And how. Stark adapted the script from a short story, The Albertine Notes by Rick Moody, which first appeared in McSweeneys. It’s a Philip K Dick-style sci-fi set in New York; following a nuclear blast in Union Square, most of the city has become addicted to a drug named Albertine, which allows the user perfect memory recall. Naturally, the weird, unreliable nature of memory and reality are at the story’s center, and it’s a neat irony that while the play’s protagonists do everything they can to avoid living in the moment, the action couldn’t be more real and immediate for the viewer. Even down to the fact that on this hot, sticky day, hunched together in the warehouse spaces, there’s a sweaty, musty tang in the air—which is exactly what you’d expect to smell (and worse), if a bomb had really gone off in Union Square and left New York ragged and rubble-ized. (Oddly, the night before the performance, an actual bomb is discovered in Times Square.)

For all the play’s bleakness though, Stark is optimistic about the city. “I do really think we’re in a golden age in New York,” he says cheerfully. “But I have to say that I think the golden age for anyone is when they’re young and good-looking and full of energy.” I laugh, and then realize that Stark is dead serious. “We are fortunate that we get all of the most talented kids from all over the United States, who move to New York because it gives them access to something. They come here to contribute, to make things, and there’s a constant cycle of it. You know, there’s opportunity? And it’s a place for re-invention and you can be whoever you want to here. And that is tremendously exciting. The tongue in cheek part of what I’m saying is that New York City was always totally so much cooler, right before you got here, and that’s what everyone will tell you. People are always talking about this lost era. I even hear people romanticizing the Guiliani years, Gimme a fuckin’ break y’know! Everyone talked about being miserable then. or romanticizing the ’70s, the time when the city was completely falling apart. So, I think what happens in New York is that people romanticize their youth.” He pauses for a moment. “Fortunately, we are a city where people have youth all of the time, so it’s *always a golden age for someone.”

But what happens when we get old? “Oh I’m already old!” Stark laughs [he’s actually only 38]. “You make a choice. You can keep fighting the fight and keep playing and trying to have fun, or you can become bitter and complain that it used to be so much better all the time.”

One of the things that’s so appealing about Stark is that he has what a teacher might describe as a good attitude. Meaning, positive, pro-active and un-cynical. It’s rare to see goofy, cheerful hipsters, and so it’s easy to assume that underground artists might also be snooty or at least a little remote. But Stark’s whole deal is about including people, welcoming people. “I don’t come from this place where everything has to be super avant-garde or incredibly extreme,” he says, “I *want people to like the stuff that I participate in. I want them to feel like it’s friendly and it’s for an audience.”

He avoids using the term guerrilla theater, he says, because that has a different implication: “Coming out of the ‘happenings’ of the ’60s, there was this activism in the early ’70s, this strain of guerrilla theatre which was generally about dramatizing some sort of international wrongdoing.” Funny, I say; these days, people use the term to describe Shakespeare in the Park… “I love Shakespeare in the park!” Stark exclaims. “And quite frankly I’m totally influenced by it. Part of the idea of moving around a space in this show comes directly from that. And using flashlights to light people up, I’ve been doing that for a couple of years now too! It’s like when you see the kids running to the next scene in the park—I wanna find the guy that’s having a sword fight on the bridge.”

The crew in The Sweet Cheat are constantly following the action, scrabbling around from scene to scene with spotlights and sound effects. Part of the joy of the play—and it’s a real laugh out-loud joy—is its stream of sensory surprises. As one scene in a squalid drug-den ends, we pick our way through to the main hall and hear music being pumped out of a soundsystem. A glitter ball swings into view and the play’s villain emerges through a doorway in the top corner of the warehouse wearing silver pants and singing Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” into a mic. His henchmen join him, shimmying in turquoise lame. Glitter is being sprinkled on our heads from hundreds of feet up.

While the play has obviously been put together on a tiny budget, its creators’ attention to detail is formidable. You can download videos of characters’ “memories” before the play, and costumier Sarah Mack has integrated these flashes of color into her designs, via patches and prints. Robin Hasty’s sets are striking too; look down to the bottom of the warehouse and you’ll see a row of cots standing in pudgy mud, surrounded by great swathes of fabric billowing gently in the breeze (this is the HQ of the play’s Brooklyn Resistance.) Hasty says that she made all the sets out of materials she found on the site; out of junk, essentially.

What does Stark want people to get out of the play? “I would hope people have an emotionally response to the space,” he says. “An emotional response to the story. That they recognise that it’s been a group of people that have worked together and collaborated and made something with love because they believed in it. For the purposes of sharing it. If people come away recognizing those three things I would be happy.”

It’s a nice, noble sentiment. As the play reaches the end of its final performance, however, adrenalin is running high. Outside the warehouse, cast, crew and audience are standing together in the weeds drinking coffee from plastic cups and chattering excitedly. The conductor has changed into his civvies—orange jeans and a matching neck scarf. I ask him how he feels, now the play is over, and his face lights up with glee. In a half-whisper, he says: “We got away with it!”

DM Stith

2010-05-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

From Offbeat summer concerts, TONY
92YTribeca; June 12
Littlefield; June 13
Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater; July 21

Bloomington, Indiana, songman DM Stith makes spooky, spindly music that conjures many spirits: His wavering voice recalls the (long-dead) Kentucky murder balladeer John Jacob Niles; skittering, paw-scratch drumbeats nod to Kid A, while tender orchestrations suggest a nocturnal Sufjan Stevens. But the sound Stith wove on his 2009 debut album, Heavy Ghost (released on Asthmatic Kitty), stood on its own, and won praise from Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste and Bat for Lashes. (An album of remixes and covers is out now.) Magical and at times menacing, Stith’s music is utterly unsummery—unless you happen to spend yours in a cobwebby attic. But given that you’ve got an entire season of ice cream, beer and jumping around ahead, wouldn’t it be nice to start with something a little stranger and more delicate?

The Besnard Lakes

2010-05-28T16:18:00.000-07:00

Attention, robots! These Montreal rockers will blow your circuits.

In the future when robots have LCD screens for faces, here’s what will beam up when a droid is plugged into a Besnard Lakes track: aaaargtdrgdkfjbgdfkjghfdkjghdf!!! (You can thank us later for this prediction.) We’re being facetious, but any music lover will know that feeling—when you’re at a show, and the mighty power of the music blows your fuses. If this sounds like a fun way to spend an evening, you’d do well to check out this Montreal quartet.

Signed to Jagjaguwar, a label that seems to have a monopoly on all the most interesting bands right now, the Besnard Lakes are based around husband-and-wife duo Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas. The group has been perfecting its heavy, gorgeous, squally sound over the course of three albums, the latest of which is The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night. In the past, the BLs have worked with fellow Canadians Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Silver Mt. Zion, and there’s certainly a post-rockist vibe in epic, questing songs with very long titles like “Land of Living Skies Pt. 1: The Land.” But for a lot of people (insert girls here), there’s only so far you can go without vocals, and Besnard Lakes songs are buoyed by Beach Boys–style harmonies and arms-in-the-air choruses—amped up in live shows. In sum, if you’ve the slightest affection for vast, open plains and star-crowded night skies, there’s every chance that the Besnard Lakes will plug directly into your emotional circuits.

LCD Soundsystem

2010-05-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

No posturing for James Murphy. By Sophie Harris
Time Out NY

Asked how he feels about being cast as a musical hero, James Murphy replies, as if with sincerity, that he’s making Savior soda. “It’s Savior of Rock & Roll soda,” he says. “There’s also Savior of Dance soda, which is more grape-flavored.” Which is as neat a way as any to avoid acknowledging just how much hope and expectation people have pinned onto your band. Three years since he released Sound of Silver and toured with Arcade Fire, James Murphy is poised to drop his third record with LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening. The band’s two “secret” warm-up gigs this past month sold out in minutes—and were blogged about, breathlessly, as the best shows of the year. This week, LCD returns from touring Europe to play four sold-out shows at Terminal 5.

Setting the stage for Murphy’s current success, Sound of Silver distilled the flavor of the time—the hopes and fears of all the years, if you like. Talking to Murphy at the end of 2007 when the record had topped every Best of the Year list, I asked him why he thought his song “All My Friends” struck such a chord. “Because people are old-ish, and sad,” he shrugged.

Then, as now, Murphy was funny, self-deprecating and aware of his situation’s ridiculousness—not least that the hipster hero is 40 years old and didn’t actually dance in clubs till after his 30th birthday—and that’s pretty much the key to his music’s appeal. People loved Sound of Silver because it’s an album you can dance to, run to, make out to and, if you’re so inclined, bawl to.

Despite the weight of expectation, there’s a real sense of freedom to This Is Happening, from the clattering party anthem “Drunk Girls” to the soft album closer, “Home.” The songwriting came easier this time, Murphy says via telephone from Luxembourg, “because I wasn’t worried. It’s usually only worrying and time responsibility that get in the way.” His approach to making music is surprisingly disciplined and, in his words, workmanlike. “When it’s time to make a record, you have a bunch of aesthetic goals that you try to achieve,” he says. “Like, I wanted to sing a little bit more and have more melody. I wanted to use synthesizers differently and try to play a little guitar—just some basic goals—and try to make it a little less chicken.” Less chicken? “Yeah, there’s always a little element of chickening out. Everybody does, I think, a little bit; nobody goes walking naked down the street; if you don’t chicken out, you’re just crazy.”

Murphy and his bandmates moved to L.A. to make the album, installing themselves for three months at a palm-fringed studio that Murphy dubbed “The Manshun,” which they draped with flags and rugs. (“We made it our home almost immediately,” he says.) L.A.-style mega-debauchery was not at the top of the agenda, however: “We were sometimes pretty drunk, but we were working. We kept calling the record ‘The Point’: we have to remember ‘The Point.’ ”

It is to LCD fans’ credit that they remember the point too. Life at home in Williamsburg is still pretty normal for Murphy, who finds he can go about his business relatively unmolested. “Usually people are very nice and friendly, and they might say something small—like, as their subway stop comes, if they’ve been sitting across from you, they might say [Quickly], ‘I like your band,’ and then walk off. It’s pretty mellow.”

And Murphy obviously loves what he does. He’s suspicious of rock posturing. “There are certain things that seem de rigueur for bands,” he says, “just fuckin’ acting like you’re cool and writing songs about how you feel what everyone else feels. [Laughs] All that stuff just makes me wanna die.”

But he’s not averse to at least some of the more enjoyable trappings of stardom; LCD’s show at Coachella had Murphy in a white suit, swigging champagne from the bottle. “I always wanted to be in a band,” he says. “I don’t think anybody produces who doesn’t want that. If you’re a kid who likes baseball, you wanna play baseball. If you like space, you wanna be an astronaut. And if you like music, very often you wanna be in a band. But I gave up on it and forgot about it for a while, and a lot of this has been accidental. There hasn’t really been a big plan, but once it got rolling, we all decided to do it and be in a band.” He pauses for a moment and adds, “As long as we stayed the same wonky band we started out as.”

Laura Marling

2010-05-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

A 20-year-old British folksinger makes a classic album
Time Out NY

Keats wrote “Ode on Melancholy” at age 23. Jackson Browne penned “These Days” at 16, and Nick Drake wrote “Time Has Told Me” at 20. To this list of young overachievers, add Laura Marling, a British folksinger who released her second album having just celebrated her 20th birthday. Of course, a record is either good or not, the age of the person who made it neither here nor there. But I Speak Because I Can stands on its own merits as what critics nervously call a classic album. It’s imbued with an earthy, worn-in quality that is not only mature, but actually kind of ancient. Recorded deep in the British countryside, the album feels like it comes from old kings’ country.

But perhaps what Marling really shares with Keats & Co., beyond youth, is her struggle with depression. Though it’s plainly present in her songs—“I’m not well again,” she sings on “Darkness Descends”—it’s never hammed up or romanticized with shortcut string arrangements or glib cliché. The music has such a bare, easy beauty, it feels like standing in a cold, empty room.

When Marling was 17, her live shows were awkward, halting affairs. But during the past three years. she has become a mesmerizing performer, the kind of musician who can still a room with the first few notes of a song. Call it confidence or courage, it’s a remarkable thing to see. As the singer affirms on “Rambling Man”: “Let it always be known / That I was who I am.”

Phosphorescent

2010-05-06T10:10:00.000-07:00

When did neofolkie Matthew Houck become such a badass? By Sophie Harris
Time Out NY

These days, Matthew Houck is a proper rock star. He rides around town on a beautiful old motorbike that he refers to as “my girl,” hangs out with country legend Willie Nelson and tours the world with his hirsute, somewhat badly behaved band, Phosphorescent (“They’re like puppies in a box!”). His Brooklyn recording studio smells of incense and is strewn with rugs and antique mirrors; there are stuffed lion heads mounted on the walls. One recent Sunday afternoon found Houck sprawled on a gold velvet sofa, gently working his way through a six-pack to celebrate his fifth album, Here’s to Taking It Easy.

Without a doubt, it’s Phosphorescent’s most confident, charismatic and, well, easy record yet—in thrall to Exile-era Stones, Bobby Charles and a warm, mellow ’70s sound that Houck describes as “massive and beautiful,” and reminds me of the movie Every Which Way but Loose. “I didn’t want this to be a regular old rock record,” Houck says in his soft Alabama burr. “I wanted it to be a classic-sounding record, but hopefully a little more interesting than that.” Job done.

Still, Houck’s come a long way (baby). I first saw him perform in 2003, a fragile, wonky-looking kid playing a grotty London basement club. Four years later and beginning to make a name for himself, Houck was “living pretty hard”: The next time I saw him, he was sitting in a dark backstage room, having ingested a lot of drugs, at a show he was supposed to be opening. Tottering on stage alone, he announced, “We are Phosphorescent!” People laughed nervously. It was a bleak show.

The common thread that runs through Houck’s music-making, however, is that he does it his way—as odd and counterproductive as it might seem at the time. The record company may have shuddered when he told them he wanted to put out a record of Willie Nelson covers, but To Willie was a surprise success; Nelson himself invited Houck to pay him a visit on tour (during which they passed around “that famous vaporizer” on the bus), and later to play Farm Aid, the festival Nelson runs with Neil Young and John Mellencamp.

The affinity makes sense; Phosphorescent attracts plenty of hipster attention, but the Alabama-born Houck was raised on country-music radio. “The most grown-up, saddest songs for whatever reason would just paralyze me,” he says. Religion loomed large—not in an overt way, Houck says (though his grandfather was a preacher), but in “an omnipresent wash over everything” that still permeates his music via cavernous, hymnal harmonies and an ongoing tussle between the spiritual and the sensual. But the teenage Houck’s world was rocked by Nirvana’s Nevermind (“Mainstream music was awesome for a couple of years!”) and he responded by getting his first electric guitar. Did he want to be a rock star? “Oh yeah!” he grins.

Sometime between an early move to Athens, Georgia, where he cut his teeth musically, and his recent relocation to New York, things got difficult. “There were several messy years there, where I guess it would be a correct assessment to say I was damaged,” he shrugs. Years of endless shoestring tours took their toll. “And I still don’t seem to be able to find a middle ground,” he explains. “You’re balls-to-the-wall out there, floating and living that kind of lifestyle, and then to try to reconcile that with having a home life…the two worlds are not only polar opposites, but they seem to battle each other.”

It’s not a path you’d choose unless you had an abiding conviction that you were doing something special and rare. “I want people to realize how good these songs are,” Houck told me around the time of his last record, the aptly named Pride. As it happened, people did realize—and Phosphorescent toured constantly for the better part of a year. “We became a fucking world-class band during all the touring,” he says, quietly. “I’ve worked hard for years, and I don’t feel the need to be pretend-humble about it.”

And New York suits him. “It’s the best city in the world,” he confirms. “I’ve been looking for one that’s better but I haven’t found one yet, y’know?” He’s the happiest he’s ever been: “I imagine it’ll shift again, but yeah, life is pretty good.” Given his trajectory so far, I speculate that in five years time we might be catching up with him in some kind of Boogie Nights silk dressing-gown shoot-out scenario. “I certainly hope so!” he replies, laughing. “Yeah, man. Let’s see how weird it can get.”

Phosphorescent plays Other Music Mon 10, Union Pool Tue 11 and Mercury Lounge May 13.

Download a free track from Phosphorescent's new album, Here's to Taking it Easy. Just click here for "Mermaid Parade."

The Bamboozle

2010-05-04T16:38:00.000-07:00

Drake, Ke$ha and pig races. What more do you want?
Time Out NY Preview

Are you between 13 and 24 years old? Fond of fluorescent hoodies? Regarded by your friends as a “go-to” person for music recommendations? Congratulations! You represent 90 percent of the Bamboozle’s demographic. If not, breathe a sigh of relief—but consider checking out the lineup, which is outstanding if you’ve even the remotest love for excellent pop.

The event’s real show-stealer this year is Drake. Voted in as one of People mag’s Sexiest Men in 2009, the hip hop star is currently fronting the Sprite billboard campaign (without his name appearing by the pic—true fame) and he hasn’t even released his debut album yet. Thank Me Later is due June 15, but Drake’s So Far Gone mixtape mixed up futuristic, melancholy, bare-beat weirdness with ridiculously hooky summer jams, like “Best I Ever Had.”

Then there’s glitter-strewn slattern, Ke$ha, who may only have one real hit (the all-conquering “Tik Tok”) but by God it’s good. Brooklyn’s own MGMT has two hits and one very strange new album; Weezer has more hits than we’ve got fingers, and its own line in Snuggies.

Leading the emo/punk-pop charge, you have Bullet for My Valentine, Angels & Airwaves, OK Go and Motion City Soundtrack. But there’s some quality hip-hop on two-day bill, too, courtesy of Wiz Khalifa, Wale, 88 Keys and Mike Posner.

Also promised: carnival rides, dunk tanks, comedians and pig races. Pig races, people. If that’s not a good enough reason to channel your inner 13-year old, we don’t even know why we bother hanging out with you.

MGMT

2010-04-23T16:01:00.000-07:00

Congratulations (Columbia)

Of course, it was always going to be this way. MGMT’s Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden were barely out of school when they scored a (reported) six-figure deal with Columbia Records; a year later, the Brooklyn pair had sold around a million copies worldwide of its debut, Oracular Spectacular. MGMT’s new disc, then, was always going to be the weirded-out-by-success second album—the kind that makes a record company uncomfortable.

“They started off saying it was a great album,” VanWyngarden told Billboard. “But then they said, ‘We just need to make sure that this is what you want?’—like, ‘Are you sure this is what you want to put out there?’ ”

You can hear what might have made the execs uncomfortable. The debut’s delicious disco feel has all but vanished as MGMT V 2.0 opts for a clean, clipped psychedelic sound (courtesy of producer Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3). A clutch of these songs play like novelty Halloween singles from the 1960s (in a good way), VanWyngarden’s fey voice hovering above twangy guitars and quick-fire drums.

There’s a self-consciousness to this record, too; three of its nine songs are about other artists (Lady Gaga, Television Personalities singer Dan Treacy, Brian Eno) as if to say, “Don’t look at us! Look at them!” Even when a tribute is not spelled out, it’s audible; the closer, “Congratulations” is a dead ringer for T.Rex’s “Monolith,” down to the lip-smacking enunciation.

Overall, Congratulations feels like being at a really odd, amazing party: You might not be on the right drugs or wearing the right crazy mask and glittery shoes, but you’re still kinda glad you showed up.

The Morning Benders

2010-04-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY Preview
Nerdy-looking dudes make gorgeous, charming pop.

Unless you’re, say, Travis Bickle, some things in life are undeniably sweet on the senses: cupcakes, kittens, the first sun on your face after winter. The buzzed-about Morning Benders undoubtedly fall into this category with their lush chamber pop. Formed at University of California, Berkeley, the band orbits around the talents of Chris Chu, a young man who looks like a cross between Christopher Walken and Lady Di and has a knack for writing disarmingly charming songs. The group’s 2008 debut album slipped by relatively unnoticed. But Big Echo, a new disc produced by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, finds the Morning Benders exploring a newly expansive sound.

Check out lead single “Excuses” to get an idea: Fluttering drums beat out waltz time while Chu’s voice bobs along on a wave of strings and harmonies. There’s raciness in the mix, too (“I take my tongue to the southern tip of your body,” Chu muses). Elsewhere, the album features groovy, Doobie Brothers–esque basslines and bristling guitars.

Remember the last person you met where you immediately thought, Oh, I like you? That’s the Morning Benders effect. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people agree on the delights of this group, which is why these three shows are sold out. We recommend braving the scalpers, however—or at the very least, buying a cupcake and a copy of Big Echo, and sitting in the sun. If there’s a better band for springtime, you’ll have to let us know.—Sophie Harris

The Morning Benders also play Central Park SummerStage with the Black Keys July 27 and 28.

Florence and the Machine

2010-04-23T15:57:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY Preview
The delightfully nutso Brit singer hits town

If you frowned and thought, Florence and the who? when you read the name, don’t worry—that’s the same response that Florence & Co. drew from British audiences at this time last year. But within 12 months, the oddball singer (born Florence Leontine Welch) has become a bona fide pop sensation in the U.K.; you’re equally likely to hear her music blaring out of a construction-site radio as you are to hear it playing in some hipster nightspot.

The 23-year-old singer is the latest in a long line of British lady-eccentrics with a penchant for tribal drum-thwacking and whirling-dervish dance moves (see also: Kate Bush, Bat for Lashes). Her debut album, Lungs, aligns delicate, Joanna Newsom–style orchestrations with pounding rhythms, and while Welch’s emotive singing style sounds like honking to some, her anthemic choruses exert the same kind of sing-along pull as a-ha’s “Cry Wolf.”

But it’s live that Welch’s charms are most manifest. “She’s this weird, mystical cartoon character, Florence,” British DJ and tastemaker Huw Stephens muses, noting that the last time he saw her perform at a festival, she climbed up the lighting rigs and sang from the top of the tent. “She wears these amazing dresses,” he adds, “and you half expect her to come onstage with a million bunny rabbits.”

In the U.K., there’s already a clutch of Florence-inspired acts breaking out (Ellie Goulding, Marina and the Diamonds). Go see what the fuss is about—and keep your fingers crossed for bunnies.

Maher Shalal Hash Baz

2010-04-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY Preview
Japanese psych-folksters get arty at the New Museum

Just as many of the exhibits at this fashionable gallery may find you scratching your head wondering, But is it art?, so too the music of Maher Shalal Hash Baz may leave you pondering, But is it music?

Under the leadership of Japanese poet, ceramicist and Jehovah’s Witness Tori Kudo, MSHB has been making music for close to 20 years now, and the fact that every performance is basically a bit of a shambles only seems to make the group more beloved in the art world.

Currently signed to Geographic—the Domino Records imprint headed by exemplar of feyness Stephen Pastel—MSHB could easily be dismissed as a cutesy fad: The heavily accented singing and wonky instrumentation are often described in the music press as naive (ugh). But Kudo’s songs are stirringly beautiful; his arrangements have a gentle, almost fairy-tale-like sweetness that recalls Leonard Cohen’s early songs (check out “Open Field” from MSHB’s recent album, Blues du Jour, for evidence). And yes, there is clumsiness there, too, and a seeming lack of refinement—but that, of course, is why it’s so lovely (you wouldn’t describe a toddler dancing as naive or affected now, would you?).

As Kudo writes in the liner notes to MSHB’s album From a Summer to Another Summer, “Error in performance dominates MSHB cassette which is like our imperfect life.” Put like that, the question of whether it’s art or music seems kinda silly.—Sophie Harris

Robert Pattinson talks 'Remember Me'

2010-04-05T10:18:00.000-07:00

The teen heartthrob proves there’s more to life than ‘Twilight’ as he talks to Time Out about his ‘serious’ indie romance, ‘Remember Me’

The hum of nervous excitement buzzing around Robert Pattinson’s hotel suite this morning is such that you half expect him to walk out with golden skin and alarmingly sharp teeth. But in the flesh, the ‘Twilight’ star is warm, earnest and posher than you might imagine, with something of the teenage schoolboy to him, even down to the frayed cuffs on his jacket. In our closely monitored chat (20 minutes! No questions about Kristin!) Pattinson talks about his role as chain-smoking student loser Tyler Hawkins in the US indie movie ‘Remember Me’, about creating ‘mystique’ as an actor and about sucking blood off his co-star’s lip.

You looked scared stiff when you were handing out a Bafta award last month. Are you getting shyer?
‘I think I am, yeah! The more interviews you do, the more stuff you say to people. You suddenly get worried that people are more likely to judge you. If no one knows anything about you, then you can say whatever you want - and just contradict yourself later. But the more contradictions you make, the scope gets narrower as to what you can say before people get pissed off.’

Where does ‘Remember Me’ fit into the ‘Twilight’ craziness?
‘I’d read tons of scripts after the first “Twilight” movie and this was one of maybe two that I liked. I didn’t work for the whole year after “Twilight”. What did I do? Nothing! [Laughs] It was really nice. I was still so used to hanging around most of the time when I was in England. And now that I’ve been working a lot, I can’t imagine going a month without fretting. So now, I’m doing job-to-job-to-job. Which is a dangerous thing to do because you have a film coming out every three months. It’s over-saturation. You have to work a bit on creating some kind of mystique.’

Mystique? Is that what you feel you need? Or what you feel people want?
‘I see people who are in newspapers and magazines all the time. If they’re in every single week, I’m far less interested in their movies. So, yeah, I am always a little bit wary.’

Your new film ‘Remember Me’ is set in the summer of 2001. Did you have any reservations about fictionalising 9/11?
‘When I first read it, I didn’t think it was contentious. I thought it flowed organically; it’s anchored in reality. It hit hard for me so I wanted to portray the same emotions that I felt the first time I read it. I’m terrified of people thinking it’s manipulative. I read the script and I felt this should be made.’

You get beaten up a lot in ‘Remember Me’. Was it fun to act like a real person for a change?
‘Yeah, it’s always enjoyable smashing things up. I guess that’s one of the funniest things about it - from the first fight, which is such a severe beating, there are all these wounds on his face, for two thirds of the movie [laughs].’

And then your screen girlfriend [Emilie de Ravin] kisses you and she’s got a split lip…
‘There was a big moment, which is in the script, where there’s a kind of kinkiness with the cut in her lip but that got cut from the movie – where I’m sucking a little bit of blood off it [laughs]. I think it was a little bit too weird.’

Is this your first sex scene?
‘No. My first sex scene was in “Little Ashes” when I was about 21, and it was with a guy. And I’m supposed to have a kind of nervous breakdown in the middle of it as well. So that was a nice introduction to it!’

Do you feel like you have something to prove, ‘Twilight’ having been so bankable?
‘I think people are really harsh about anything that becomes successful. It’s really weird. I was looking at this article about “Little Ashes”. “He still hasn’t proved his box office potential. ‘Little Ashes’ bombed.” Could it have been the gay theme? Or, er, the fact that it was only released in 16 cinemas?’

There’s a lot of fags, booze and sex in this movie. What about your younger fans?
‘That’s the least of my concerns. I think it’s so ridiculous, people putting pressure on the arts. I think parents should be the ones who teach kids. The more you try to hide things like that, the more exciting and appealing they are. [Grins] The abstinence movement is only a reaction to everybody being so obsessed with sex for the past 20 years and it being so open to everyone. It’s crazy to think that young people, when their hormones are most raging, that they’re suddenly like, “Oh, I don’t want any of that.”’

You’re currently filming ‘Bel Ami’ with Uma Thurman. You play a real swine.
‘I thought it was one of the funniest scripts I’d ever read. When they made the movie in the ’50s with Angela Lansbury, they had to change the story. The novel is about this guy who screws everybody over and seduces all these women and completely gets away with everything. And in the first film, they had to have him shot because they thought that audiences wouldn’t be able to accept it. In this one it’s the total opposite. This guy is a complete arsehole, so arrogant and stubborn and self-righteous about everything. He remains an arsehole to the end and everyone congratulates him for it.’

Joanna Newsom

2010-04-01T15:50:00.000-07:00

Time Out NY Preview

“I’m always flying on planes by myself, seated next to some kindly 60-year-old who starts asking me what my whole deal is,” Joanna Newsom says. “And unfortunately, I’ve started lying—like, ‘I’m a secretary.…’” The singer, harpist and sometime fashion muse is settled in a West Village café, cheerily talking about the occupational hazards of her chosen career path—which this week finds her playing a long-sold-out date at the Town Hall in support of her new triple album, Have One on Me.

It’s not that Newsom wants to hide, exactly. “But it’s explaining that’s just incredibly awkward,” she says. “Like when people will ask me what my music sounds like: It’s like a bare lightbulb shining in my eyeball. I usually say something that I don’t even believe. Like, I used to go on eBay, and it would kill me to type in the keywords required to find the clothes I wanted—it would be like, ‘God help me, Stevie Nicks’…‘You know not what you do, gypsy.’ It was like reaching for some godforsaken word, these words that you know someone will get. And on a lot of levels, it’s just pompous.”

We’ll keep it simple. Have One on Me is Newsom’s easiest, sweetest album yet. Her voice is soft and supple, a far cry from the widemouthed sounds of her debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, and the album’s arrangements are breezy in comparison with Van Dyke Parks’s dense orchestrations on Ys. And we’ll leave lofty dissections of her work to a newly published book, Visions of Joanna Newsom, which includes an essay by novelist Dave Eggers and various academic pieces, plus a rather odd article written by an old school pal, describing Newsom’s childhood in Nevada.

“It was incredibly sweet and an honor that anyone would want to write that stuff, but for me, reading some of that is like the final frontier of hall-of-mirrors,” Newsom says. It’s getting harder and harder for the singer to avoid reading about herself, however. Her celebrity has spread from indie blogs to broadsheets and lately, gossip magazines; her blossoming relationship with Saturday Night Live star Andy Samberg was trumpeted with the publication of a pic of the pair at a hockey game. “Among the worst faces I’ve made in my life, ever,” Newsom declares, face a-scrunch to demonstrate. “I got a lot of texts and saw the photo and got so sad. I think I was so focused on how bad the photo was that I didn’t think about the larger implications, the weirdness. So maybe it’s great that I’m horrible in the photo.”

Given the strangeness and grating tones that sometimes surface in her music, it seems surprising that Newsom should admit to worrying about others’ opinions. “I’m very self-conscious and worried about not wanting to be ugly,” she admits, “but for some reason that self-censorship hasn’t bled into the music making. Wanting to make a record a certain way becomes almost a biological imperative, in the sense that the urge to do things that support that concept or vision is stronger than the urge to be polite or pleasant. It’s like if you were really, really hungry and you were trying to have a conversation, but in the back of your head you’re like, I need food right now. It’s kind of like that.”

Artistically, there’s no question that Newsom’s gift is extraordinary, whether her music appeals or not. In a sense, the real revelation is that in person, Newsom is so grounded. She’s laugh-out-loud funny, quoting Monty Python as she tells a story about getting drunk for the first time, with a sixth-grade friend. Her speech is as graceful as it is goofy: Discussing the fact that her fans know all her lyrics, and sometimes prompt her with them when she draws a blank at shows, she says: “Fixating on those things can create tumescent patches of toxic thinking in your mind. Pretty soon you’re like, I’m pretty great! It’s funnier to just laugh at it and be like, Wow, I’m a dumb-ass! I forgot an entire section of my song. Aren’t people nice?”

And just in case you get carried away thinking that hey, she’s actually pretty normal, she’ll slip in some little romanticism that might just set your heart on wings; she says that touring and traveling alone is not a natural thing for her: “I always want to tug someone’s sleeve and be like, ‘Look at that moon!’?” It can be hard to know what to do with that feeling, can’t it? She pauses for a moment, then says, “I imagine that’s what music is about.”

Joanna Newsom plays the Town Hall Thu 18. Download Have One on Me now.

Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/music/83762/joanna-newsom-at-the-town-hall-concert-preview-interview#ixzz0jtLUKVmt