blog.shrub

Mark Erelli and Catie Curtis just won the grand prize in the International Songwriting Competition.

Their song, “People Look Around,” is a stark, honest portrait of the United States and a cry for humanity — for us to be more human:

Mississippi River divides this land in two,
Like the way we tend to think of things;
Black and white, red and blue.
If they can keep us fighting about marriage and God,
There’ll be no one left to notice if the leaders do their jobs.

(lyrics, lyrics and mp3)

I found a card at SXSW for a free music sampler from Verve. They want you to go to verveforecast.com/sxsw, then register, thenenter in the “download code” of vforecastsxsw.

The music sampler (Jamie Cullum, Brazilian Girls, Jackie Greene, Rhett Miller, Susan Tedeschi, Teddy Thompson) comes in four formats, all of which are annoying:

• WMA, zip
• WMA, sit (who’d want this?)
• QT, zip
• QT, sit

The QuickTime files are .mov files with an embedded AAC track. However, QuickTime won’t let me extract the track cleanly — I can only export as AIFF, AU (why?) and WAVE.

Glenn Anderson has some handy QuickTime Exporters, including one that will save it as AAC (after downsampling from 256 to 128).

Anyone have any better solutions?

I saw a lot of great music at SXSW. But one performer stood out.

Just after midnight Thursday—making it Friday—I walked in to the Hotel Café showcase at Copa.

I was immediately impressed. No. Amazed is more like it: the woman on stage did in 30 seconds what nobody else did at all night. She blew me away. I had to know who she was.

“Who was that?”

“KT Tunstall.”

Amy and Kevin suggested:

Vanessa Morrison
Carvell Wallace
Kyra Brown
Joe Henry

The Canadian government wants to help you tour successfully.

Sarah Slean takes a break from poetry to share some tales from the road. Her words recall Finding Forrester:

After the requisite used bookstore visit, we return to the room to find a tray full of goodies from our fairy godmother Natasha. Champagne, roses, chocolates, and fruits…heavens! I enjoy a brief moment of pretending I’m Maria Callas in Milan. The wind howls outside and I remember my toque-wearing self. My guests are impressed. The grapes are delicious. Cool, perfectly taut globes that burst sweetness at first bite. My mind drifts into thoughts of nature’s dazzling perfection.

Boing Boing points us at a New York Times piece and blog entry from OK Go’s Damian Kulash on the futility of DRM:

From the blog:

DRM just flat out sucks.

Its most obvious problem is that it doesn’t work. No matter how sophisticated the particular software, it only takes one person to break it, once, and the music that was “protected” by the DRM is free to roam the vast expanses of the P2P networks. It’s the most ridiculous house-of-cards model imaginable: one single breech and the whole system implodes. As if to underscore the superlative absurdity of their goal, the lightbulb-heads also managed to cook up software that is comically easy to break. Way to go, guys.
…
s I understand it, EMI decreed that all of its labels (including our label Capitol) would be required to copy protect all of their releases starting on the day of our album’s release. When I heard this, I fucking lost it. Not only did our label want to make a gigantic business mistake across the board, but we, apparently arbitrarily, were chosen to be at the prow of the crashing ship. Guinea pigs, as it were.

And the more tempered Times piece:

Conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it’s the right thing to do, just get insulted. They’ve made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them an inferior product hampered by software that’s at best a nuisance, and at worst a security threat.

On your left, booker extraordinaire Natasha Bishop. On your right, Pollyanna Bush.

Some musicians are more comfortable in studio than on stage, and it shows. While on stage, they often resort to clichés and canned lines.

We should have a game called “musician bingo.” We can print out cards and bring them to shows. Here’s what I have so far:

1. musician mentions name of city
2. musician asks how crowd is doing
3. musician mentions name of city, but gets it wrong
4. musician mentions name of bar
5. musician mentions name of bar, but gets it wrong
6. musician thanks audience for coming
7. musician thanks sound guy
8. musician thanks lighting guy
9. musician thanks bartender
10. musician tells audience to put their hands up/together/in the air
11. musician mispronouces other performer’s name
12. musician mispronouces city
13. musician mispronouces bar
14. musician asks if anyone is from other city
15. musician tosses guitar picks or drumsticks into crowd
16. musician toasts (with) audience

16 four down, 8 to go.

“One day you’re gonna miss me / but you’ve gotta have a heart to have a broken one.”
—Luke Doucet, Broken One