The Morning Breaks: My Life in Music
I just released a new video from our album The Ghost of John Henry, for the song “The Morning Breaks.” It goes like this:[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOx2HokCCwg]This an intensely personal video for me, and I have to be honest it feels a little weird putting it out into the world. The earliest footage in here dates back […]
The Universe Does Not Owe You Free Music
Here’s how the last three days have gone down in the world of musical discourse: Emily White writes on the NPR All Songs Considered Blog that she has over 11,000 tracks in her music library, of which possibly 200 were acquired by paying any money whatsoever to anybody. Summary: I love, love, love music and […]
Response to (the Awesome) Roman Mars: Frozen Music
He did invite discussion and conversation, but I’ll be honest: the purpose of this post is not so much to respond to Roman — host of the 99% Invisible podcast, which I highly recommend — as to share his most recent episode, “Frozen Music.” You can listen here: For those of you who don’t know, […]
Art: What’s the Point?
Somehow, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve actually become less cynical about art. To pursue a career, or even just a paying sideline in the arts requires a tremendous amount of self-confidence because if you don’t believe in yourself, how can you, in good faith, ask someone else to believe in you and hand over cash […]
How Important is Fidelity?
When Hi8 seemed like an impossible dream I’m not talking about matrimony, here, but how well an audio or visual recording resembles the real-world phenomena it seeks to capture. High fidelity sounds and images used to be both a mark of professionalism and a barrier-to-entry for hobbyists in the temporal arts (film, video, music, etc.). […]
Regina Spektor, Orson Welles, and Fear in Creativity
My little boy wants to marry Regina Spektor. He’s five. I had to make a poster of Regina to hang on his wall so he could gaze at her as he falls asleep. It’s adorable, and I cannot tell you how pleased I am it’s not Taylor Swift he’s in love with. So the upcoming […]
Cutting a Swath Through the Self-Releasing Jungle
Years ago, people started sounding the death knell for traditional music distribution models, and now much of the doomsday scenarios have played out exactly as feared (or hoped, depending on your particular relationship to the mainstream). Unfortunate casualties have been the record store, many independent radio stations, livable advances for musicians signed to labels, and […]
Obsolete Technology Will Demand a Reckoning: The Ghost of John Henry
Our new album, The Ghost of John Henry, is available today. The folk tale about a railroad worker who raced a steam drill has stuck with me since I was a little kid, and so in a lot of ways it feels like I’ve been leading up to this record my whole life. That makes […]
Quick Album Update: The Ghost of John Henry
It’s a very exciting time for me, since the new album will be out on Tuesday and we’ll be playing our CD release show a week from tonight. We’re taking digital pre-orders here and physical CD orders here. It’s hard to quantify how much different this feels than when the first album came out in […]
Great Album Reviews: Folkways – The Original Vision
Album: Folkways: The Original VisionArtist: Woody Guthrie, Lead BellyGenre: FolkYear: 2005 When Moses Asch died, he left behind an astounding legacy of over 2,000 albums in the catalog of his Folkways Records label. For over 40 years, Asch had been releasing folk music from around the world, and his recordings of Woody Guthrie and Lead […]