"So, let us not be blind to our differences - but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." JFK, June 10, 1963.
Yes, due to the miracle of the iPod, I carry 5,000 songs around to listen to while I'm walking or driving. The other day I put on Stephen Malkmus' 2011 Mirror Traffic, an album I liked considerably when it first came out and listened to incessantly for months. I also saw the triumphant hometown show in Portland featuring songs from the album
It had been forever since I'd listened to the album, and it was a joy to hear it again.
It made me think, for a minute, of this phenomenon of loving and living and breathing an album for a while... and then completely dropping it for something new, never to listen to it again.
But more than that, it made me remember how great Malkmus is, as a writer, singer, frontman, and, especially, guitarist.
Hope he comes back to Portland eventually after his "Berlin period".
Lots of good shows coming up in Portland soon - Christopher Owens, Spiritualized, and Unknown Mortal Orchestra.
Things I want to download right away - new albums from Wavves and The Foals, new songs from The Smith Westerns and M.I.A., an Atoms for Peace album... and I guess I will give The Strokes new album a chance, but I'm not expecting much based on the first songs we heard from it... and... that single featuring Brittany Howard and Ruby Amanfu sounds interesting....
Jack White has said he was always surprised that his former band The White Stripes started getting recognition after three albums.
"It was always shocking that people started caring after three albums," White told The Guardian of the band's third album 'White Blood Cells', which propelled them into the mainstream. "What, now people are getting it?! We'd assumed it was a style of music that nobody would be into and had resigned ourselves to always playing to 50 people. It was good for us, because we'd made up our minds to never care about that, and that's when success happened. It was sorta weird like that, but I think if we'd have watered it down it wouldn't have worked."
White was speaking about his new project with his Third Man Records label, which will see him work with small Scottish label Document Records to reissue early blues material. White's label has partnered up with Document Records to reissue the complete works of Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell and the Mississippi Sheiks on remastered vinyl.
Speaking about the Mississippi blues artists that inspired him, he revealed: "As a songwriter, even if you're singing about other people or making up characters, it's still your job to be against the world and that all began in the 1920s and 1930s with these blues singers. It was the first time in history that a single person had been recorded to tell whatever story they had to the world. Before that you had to be in a German polka band with a tuba, or jazz orchestra…But suddenly anybody – they didn't even have to be good singers – could have their own voice."
"It was always shocking that people started caring after three albums," White told