Photo by CHRISTIAN LANTRY BY JONATHAN VALANIA Aimee Mann and Ted Leo started out as friends a decade ago, and then more recently they became tour mates. One day on tour Mann walked into Leo’s hotel room and heard him playing “Honesty Is No Excuse.” They got to talking about sounds and songwriting, and they quickly worked up a cover version they began performing on tour. This led to them discussing the prospect of pursuing a long-distance collaborative effort (she lives in L.A., he lives in Brooklyn) when they got back home. “We were just like ‘Fuck it, let’s push […]
VIA CHICAGO: Q&A w/ Wilco Guitarist Nels Cline
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Wizardly Wilco axeman Nels Cline plays Johnny Brenda’s on Friday (May 2nd) with The Nels Cline Singers in support of the new Macroscope, as part of an Ars Nova joint. Widely regarded as one of the 100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time, Cline has performed on more than 70 albums — with the Geraldine Fibbers, with Wilco, with the Nels Cline Singers and a host of collaborators, including Thurston Moore, Mike Watt, Willie Nelson and drummer Alex Cline, his identical twin brother — over the course of an auspicious 34-year career. Last week we got him […]
BEING THERE: M.I.A. @ The Tower
Photo NOAH SILVESTRY It’s still hard out there for a pimp, and these days everybody’s a pimpin’ somethin’. (That’s right, I’m droppin’ my ‘g’s like Obama at the NAACP. Peace out. [I’m bringing it back, OK?]) These are especially hard days for Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A. Dissed routinely by ex-BF/collaborator Diplo, litigiously uncoupled from her billionaire baby-daddy Benjamin Bronfman, publicly scourged by Lynn Hirschberg in a New York Times Sunday Magazine takedown for ordering truffle-flavored French fries while talking radical chic, and sued by the NFL for a cool $16.6 million for flipping America the bird at half time […]
LONDON CALLING: Q&A With M.I.A.
BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of her show at the Tower on Friday April, 25th in support of her latest album, Matangi, we got Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam (aka M.I.A.) on the horn from her home in London — and given that she undoubtedly is on the NSA’s watch/listen list given her father’s well-publicized Tamil Tiger affiliation combined with the fact that any U.S. citizen who calls a foreigner on the NSA watch list is then also added to The List, well, that’s a pretty high price to pay for plugging a friggin’ rapper/EDM artist’s Tower Theater show. But we’ve […]
BEING THERE: Mac DeMarco @ Underground Arts
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ The unfinished basement of a venue that is Underground Arts is the perfect venue to see psych-pop prankster Mac DeMarco, an unfinished basement of a man. Friday night, I found myself packed into a sold-out UA crowd of towering 6ft.-something fan boys and drunken kissy-faced couples. Both seem to be his core demographic. Not that I was really surprised given that DeMarco’s songs are almost entirely about life as a grizzly dude, or about loving his sweetie. Sometimes they are about both at the same time. Looking unkempt as ever with a mane of scraggly, […]
Win Tix To See Cloud Cult @ The Prince Friday!
We have a pair of tix to see panoramic sunny pop experimentalists Cloud Cult — think Arcade Fire, but less disco and Grammy-winning and more Eno Another Green World/Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy and Midwestern Burning Man pagan-folk-baroque — at the Prince Music Theater on Friday April 18th. To qualify, all you have to do is sign up for our mailing list (see right, below the masthead). Trust us, this is something you want to do. In addition to breaking news alerts and Phawker updates, you also get advanced warning about groovy concert ticket giveaways and other free swag […]
CHILDREN BY THE MILLION: Talking Alex Chilton Blues With Rock Biographer Holly George-Warren
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Alex Chilton remains a forbidding totem of American music with a formidable pedigree: white soul prodigy, progenitor of power-pop purity, pill-addled punk, swampy garage blooze and, in the final decades of his life, indie’s aging princeling of noble white failure. He was a musician’s musician, and each entry on his resume has spun off countless imitators and innovators. Forever to be known as the guiding light in Big Star’s twinkling constellation of pure pop, Alex Chilton would probably have it any other way. Even during the reunion/reactivation of Big Star in the last two decades of […]
INCOMING: A Man Called Destruction
Putting the finishing touches on an in-depth Q&A with veteran music writer/friend of Phawker Holly George-Warren’s just-published Alex Chilton biography A MAN CALLED DESTRUCTION. If you don’t know from Alex Chilton, dig in below. Otherwise look for it tomorrow on a Phawker near you! ROCK SNOB ENCYCLOPEDIA: It has been said that the genre of power pop -– frail, white man-boys with cherry guitars reinvigorating the harmonic convergence of the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Byrds with the caffeinated rush of youth –- is the revenge of the nerds. Big Star pretty much invented the form, which explains […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To RISK! @ Underground Arts
Shocking! Shameful! Outrageous! Scandalous! Possibly even against the law in some countries! On Friday, host Kevin Allison of MTV’s The State, Reno 911, and Flight of the Concords, brings together a cast of leading storytellers — Thomas Dixon, Kitty Hailey, Alex Kacala, and Teresa Marquard — to tell jaw-dropping stories in the nude they never thought they’d dare share in public on the theme of “Revelation” at Underground Arts. Phindie called it “The undisputed G-spot of the First Person Arts Festival.” We’d argue that it’s the undisputed wet spot of the First Person Arts Festival and somebody’s gotta sleep […]
EXCERPT: The Boys Are Back In Town
After a decade of cheap beer, positive jams and killer parties, there’s ‘blood on the carpet, mud on the mattress.’ MAGNET (well, just me, actually) goes to Brooklandia to watch The Hold Steady sleep it off and wake up with that American Sadness. I’m still hungover. As promised, here’s that meaty, beaty, big and bouncy excerpt. Enjoy: BY JONATHAN VALANIA When Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn was growing up in suburban Minneapolis in the shag-carpeted ’70s, there was nothing musical about the family Finn, nothing at all. Nobody played an instrument. Nobody played records on the stereo. They did not […]
LISTEN: The Flaming Side Of The Moon
THE FLAMING LIPS new digital release, FLAMING SIDE OF THE MOON is live now in digital form. Designed as an immersive companion piece to the original 1973 album, DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, listeners are encouraged to listen to the new LIPS album while listening to DARK SIDE at the same time. FLAMING SIDE OF THE MOON was also carefully crafted to sync up perfectly with the 1939 film, THE WIZARD OF OZ. For ideal listening conditions, fans are encouraged to seek out the original Alan Parsons’ engineered quadraphonic LP mix of DARK SIDE, but it will work with the album on any format. Available now through all participating digital outlets. […]
Win Tix To See Bradley Manning Ryan Hamilton
No that’s not Bradley Manning. Bradley Manning can’t come out to play — he shared his father’s dirty pictures with the other kids and now he’s grounded for 30 years. Nor is that Kenneth Parcell, beloved bumpkin/NBC page of 30 Rock fame. His name is Ryan Hamilton and he is a master of the dying art of being funny without ‘working blue,’ as we used to say back in the Vaudeville days. See above for absolute proof that even a hot air balloon ride can be funny as shit, even without f-bombs or dick jokes. Which in part explains why, […]
BEING THERE: Gary Numan @ The Trocadero
Photo by PETE TROSHAK Gary Numan will always be best known for his 1979 hit “Cars,” but his blazing, 19-song set of electro-rock heaviosity at the Trocadero on Sunday night made it abundantly clear that he is not living in the past. Last year, Numan released Splinter, his 20th album and one of his best-received to date, and he is currently touring support of it following a buzz-generating performance at the SXSW 2014. The irony of a man best-known for pioneering electronic music strapping on a Les Paul — in a hail of blinding strobes and industrial bleeps and blips […]