The path of least resistance for anyone with a lot of sound-making tools is to keep making more sounds. The path of discipline is to say: Let’s see how few we can get away with. | | | | Esperanza Spalding in London, May 28, 2012.
(C Brandon/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “The path of least resistance for anyone with a lot of sound-making tools is to keep making more sounds. The path of discipline is to say: Let’s see how few we can get away with.”
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| | rantnrave:// I'm going to keep this short because every minute you're reading this is a minute you could be watching ESPERANZA SPALDING create her next album. Likewise for me and every minute I'm writing this. The jazz singer/bassist turned on the cameras at 9 am PT Tuesday for a 77-hour marathon FACEBOOK feed, during which she's writing and recording a 10-song album from scratch. "Testing the theory that creations are at their most powerful the moment they're released." A rock-solid theory, by the way. Science. Raw, unedited and streaming in real time, it's as good a documentary of the process of making music as I've ever seen (if all 77 hours aren't archived and preserved exactly as is, it will be a crime). Bantering and building a rapport with engineer FERNANDO LODEIRO, who's the co-star of this documentary. (They've worked together before, but you have to build and rebuild that rapport every time.) Reaching for words and melodies. Humming lines over and over in search of the perfect notes and the chords to support them. Writing everything down before she forgets. Is that an F? Yes it is. Asking Lodeiro to play it back "a little to the left," which is how you literally describe rewinding in a visual recording medium like PRO TOOLS. Lodeiro counting bars and copying-and-pasting. Spalding settling on a melodic line and then "let's try to build that; let's try to put some opening in the clouds." Bouncing ideas and notes and keys off ANDREW BIRD, who's writing a stunning duet with her as I write—please release this song, like, today—and who would prefer it not be in D-flat, and who's fighting with a faulty tube in his FENDER amp, Spalding watching the clock, "OK we really need to start going," before everyone agrees to forget the amp and play acoustic, and they do, and it's beautiful, but they still have to work on the vocal blend and hey, "You wanna take a stab at some lyrics? I'm gonna eat something," and now I'm watching the clock, they've been at it a few hours, it's just one song, beautiful as it is, is everything going to get done in 77 hours? I'll be watching... BEYONCÉ, STEVIE and SCOOTER BRAUN get political at Hand in Hand telethon, help raise more than $14 million... SINÉAD O'CONNOR to DR. PHIL on the reaction to her infamous SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE appearance: "Silence everywhere. It was fantastic." But then: "About 10 years after that that I don't remember because that's when it became acceptable and it became the norm that I was treated... like I was an absolutely insane crazy person." MusicSET: "Sinéad O'Connor's Universal Truths"... RIP VIRGIL HOWE. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Over just three days, we're attempting to concept, write, record, and produce an album of ten songs. Entering the studio with nothing prepared. Testing the theory that creations are at their most powerful the moment they're released. | | |
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| Nashville’s Hatch Show Print is a 138-year-old business that doggedly sticks with a 578-year-old printing method, letterpress. As a result, Hatch is to country music as Gutenberg was to the Bible. | | |
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| How a progressive congressman -- and former bassist -- from El Paso is threatening to unseat the Senate's most hated Republican. | | |
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| Lil Uzi Vert, iLoveMakonnen, Lil Peep, and a few others are pioneering a new form of rap that sounds completely unfamiliar. | | |
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| Grammy Award winning Singer Sinead O'Connor is best known for her shaved head and her haunting rendition of the Prince song "Nothing Compares 2 U." A recent Facebook video posted by the Irish songstress revealed she was depressed and desperate for help, living alone in a modest motel room in New Jersey. | | |
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| Entertainment litigator James Sammataro explains why non-human creation shouldn't be dismissed as merely monkey business. | | |
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| Putting together the best playlist for running through the sewers and fighting a homicidal, shape-shifting creature? The 'It' soundtrack's got you covered. | | |
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| Marion "Suge" Knight's original terrordome was the defensive line. It's where he starred for four years at Lynwood High School, 20 minutes from Compton, California's much-loved Tam's Burgers. The scariest man in rap was a star lineman at UNLV -- and a scab Los Angeles Ram. | | |
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| Tell 13-year-old Warner Music Nashville signee Tegan Marie that teens in another era might have been laughed at by classmates for listening to country music, and the reaction is one of complete disbelief. | | |
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| Jack Antonoff re-arranged three songs from his band's latest album, "Gone Now," for the Tiny Desk. | | |
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| The South African icon, who is being treated for pancreatic cancer, is holding his last concerts ever, including a show at Berklee. | | |
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| From Brazilian gospel to Puerto Rican reggaeton and Dutch hip-hop, music streaming company Deezer is scouring the globe for gaps in the market where it can survive and thrive against Spotify and Apple. | | |
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| Rap went pop in China this summer--but the good stuff is still underground. | | |
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| Wade through the pulsing intro, the rapped verses, the shimmering chorus and you'll get to the meat of the matter. Boom, boom, clap. We're here at the space where the long-awaited, always lauded Taylor Swift bridge should be. | | |
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| Mixtapes used to be bootlegs sold out of trunks. Now everyone from Drake to rookies still releases them, even though they’re indistinguishable from albums. | | |
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| The fact that Pandora's interim CEO, Naveen Chopra, was the company's representative at Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference this week speaks to the state of transition in which the company has found itself in recent months. | | |
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| The New York Review of Books |
| Jonathan Gould has written an absorbing and ambitious book about a life cut short, a life devoid of the melodrama and self-destruction that enliven the biographies of so many of Otis Redding's contemporaries. | | |
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| I like it when musicians break out of the bands they’re supposed to belong to, the box they’ve been put in. | | |
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| Bobi Wine spent more than a decade singing about social justice issues in his native Uganda. This year, the ‘Ghetto President’ was elected to parliament, and now he’s trying to change the system from the inside. | | |
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| The B-52s celebrate their 40th anniversary this year, and both Fred Schneider and Cindy Wilson have solo projects. They share anecdotes from the early days and go in-depth on their new works. | | |
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