SPINNER: Jack Rose, a renowned Philadelphia-based acoustic guitarist, has died of a heart attack at 38, the Philadelphia Daily News reports. Rose was considered instrumental in bringing ragtime into the modern era and transforming it into something that was both referential and original. But as a self-taught player proficient on the guitar, including the 6-string, 12-string and lap steel, he brought a wide range of influences to his music. Explaining his process in a 2007 interview, Rose said his favorite music was “anything that’s pre 1942; Cajun, Country, Blues, Jazz all that stuff… that’s my favorite kind of music.” Rose […]
WORTH REPEATING: Needle Thru The Camel’s Eye
EDITOR’S NOTE: Anybody in a band should read this tragicomic dispatch from former Too Much Joy frontman Mike Quirk about the bizarro universe of major label accounting. The piece is called My $62.47 Royalty Statement: How Major Labels Cook the Books with Digital Downloads, but this end note about predatory lending practices of the royalty system is a good place to dig in. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. A word here about that unrecouped balance, for those uninitiated in the complex mechanics of major label accounting. While our royalty statement shows Too Much Joy in the red with Warner […]
TONIGHT: No Sleep ‘Til Stonehenge
Back in 2002, Greg Weeks, a recent transplant folker from New York and a dead ringer for Woody Allen in Sleeper, together with Brooke Sietinsons, Ophelia-voiced Meg Baird and a revolving cast of red-eyed weird beards, formed the Espers, a strummy collective of whispery acid-folk that evokes sugar-plum visions of woodland fairies doing the maypole dance around Stonehenge. Last month the Espers released their third album, the aptly-titled III. As ever, the band’s warm wigwam of sound evokes blood-sugar-sex-magik rituals celebrated by the hangman’s lovely daughters on misty moonlit moors. In other words, this is what flowery noontides sound like […]
CONCERT REVIEW: Top 5 Things You Should Know About Josh Ritter At The TLA Last Night
1) No one has ever been happier about playing in his own band. From the moment he literally bounces onstage, Josh Ritter is positively ebullient, grinning ear to ear like he can’t believe he stumbled into this group of musicians. He prances around the stage, his odd brown ’fro and unbuttoned collared shirt looking slightly familiar, though you can’t quite place why or where. 2) Sure, he digs into his catalog, but it’s mostly a night for new songs. Ritter just finished recording his latest album, due sometime around April, so he presents them mostly in their young form. “These […]
WEEKLY UPDATE: Scrapple TV News
All the news that shits. With your host, AP Ticker. Enjoy.
TICKET GIVEAWAY: A Man Called Josh
UPDATE: Phawker has two tickets to give away to the first reader to email us at feed@phawker.com. Please include a daytime phone number. Good luck! Five and a half years ago, before he was the darling of NPR, Josh Ritter walked onstage as opener to Erin McKeown at the TLA, and he did it unplugged. Not just acoustic, but completely unelectrified—so the always-rowdy bar crowd was miraculously hushed into silence to hear Ritter’s uncommonly beautiful Americana. From there, the room was hooked, many of them learning his soft lyrical twists and plaintive melodies for the first time. Since then, thousands […]
CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG + BECK: Heaven Can Wait
Charlotte Gainsbourg – Heaven Can Wait from Charlotte Gainsbourg on Vimeo.
WORTH REPEATING: The Death of ‘Uncool’
BRIAN ENO: We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localized stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness. I think this is good news. MORE
ALBUM REVIEW: Weezer Raditude
BY JAMIE DAVIS Weezer are a great band. Everyone knows it, and has ever since they heard “The Sweater Song” for the first time. Back then Weezer was good and nerdy, with awkward haircuts, blocky glasses, and just a general sense of being on the same side as your average teenage outcast. However, on their second-to-latest album The Red Album they abandoned their old geekdom completely, with songs like “The Greatest Man on Earth” and “Troublemaker” which may have been amazingly subtle skewering of hip-hop’s self-congratulatory lyric style, but I’m pretty sure they were just about how great frontman Rivers […]
TONITE: Get Your Freak Folk On
[Artwork by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA It all started, for me anyway, at Brooke Sietinsons‘ walk-up loft/hobbit hole on Second Street, somewhere in that OK Corral-esque strip between the Standard Tap and the 700 Club. Even though she no longer lives there, the exact location will have to remain a secret because, technically speaking, L&I could still fine her for dispensing the Morning Glory seeds of Philly freak-folkdom without a permit. But the select initiates invited to these hash-pipe hootenannies — culled from some of the most remote and impenetrable redoubts of local bohemia — know where I’m talking […]
GLITTER AND DOOM: Phawker Photographer’s Work Included In The New Tom Waits Live Album
Yesterday, TOM WAITS released Glitter and Doom Live, a collection of outstanding live tracks from his 2008 sold out US and European tour. The two CD set contains 17 live recordings from ten nights along the tour including, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Tulsa, Knoxville, Atlanta, Paris, Milan, Jacksonville, Dublin and Columbus. The second CD entitled Tom Tales holds nearly 40 minutes of Waits quixotic ruminations on topics ranging from romantic spiders to injured vultures. The CD will also come with a booklet of live photos. One of those photos was snapped by Phawker contributing photographer Michael T. Regan, who we sent, along […]
CINEMA: Rock The Boat
BY JAMIE DAVIS Pirate Radio is basically a coming of age story for young Carl (Tom Sturridge), who is sent to supposedly get on the straight and narrow by living on board his aging hipster godfather’s pirate radio ship anchored off the shore of Britain some time in the mid-1960s. It’s also a story of the rockers vs the squares. You see, in the 1960’s the British government controlled all broadcasting, and refused to play more than 45 minutes of rock n’ roll music a day. But the young folks needed to get their fix somehow, so these pirate radio […]
TONITE: Stay Golden, Ponyboy
[Video: Goldspot – Time Bomb] BY PHILLYGRRL “Today is Friday, it is my day to do what I want” is the opening line in the song “Friday,” sung by Goldspot, a Los Angeles-based band founded by singer/songwriter (and UPenn alum) Siddhartha Khosla. I’ve played that song every Friday since I first heard it back in August and today is no exception (He also does a Hindi version, if you’re so inclined.) And what do you know? Today is a Friday and all I want to do is go down to World Café Live tonight and watch Goldspot perform songs from […]