How to measure loyalty, commitment, devotion? In the case of David Jensen, of Sunset Alliance Records and guiding light behind Before Braille, Art for Starters, and now Loyal Wife, his dedication to music can be physically measured in the form of actual compact disc inventory, shrink-wrapped and stacked up, in…
Anytime a huge band takes a hiatus, bands of a similar stripe get an opportunity to move in quickly and make Huge Band’s audience its own before Huge Band returns. It happened in the ’80s, when the Police took progressively longer to follow up their albums — we got all…
Admit it, you saw the words “yoga” and “rave” and thought they were two mutually exclusive propositions. One involves healthy living and the other…uh, drugs and baby pacifiers is the first thing that springs to mind there. That thought has certainly crossed the mind of enterprising local rapper Will Glass…
Although it’s admittedly kinda fun putting Lilith Fair and FoxVag Fest in the same sentence, the two music expos couldn’t be more dissimilar once you remove the female-heavy rosters. Lilith Fair was started in 1997 by Canadian adult-alternative chanteuse Sarah McLachlan as a response to the commercial radio dial —…
See also: 2012 RPM Challenge: Five Valley Artists (And Yours Truly) Attempt to Record an Album in One Month With the extra day provided by leap year, four of the seven Valley artists we tracked for this year’s RPM Challenge were able to record an entire album from start to…
In 1998, after grunge ground down and MTV flirtedwith electronica before getting completely in bed with reality TV, David Bash founded the International Pop Overthrow Festival to give support to a fractured pop scene that had probably given up all hopes of being signed to a major label since The…
Of all the estimated 80 million people who saw The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 to catch a first glimpse of The Beatles, maybe 10,000 of them formed groups. Maybe 1,000 of them made charting singles. Only one of them was a performer on the Sullivan stage that…
Now that we all know most record companies are the loss leaders for their conglomerate parent company we always believed they were, you kinda wish just once someone at the label would say “I don’t know how to do my job” instead of “We don’t have a way of marketing…
Some musicians get into the game for the instant gratification of sex, drugs, and money. The RPM Challenge is clearly not for those kind of musicians. You actually have to love doing the work so much that you are willing to record a whole album from start to finish, in…
This scene invariably has played out in every musician’s life — the point when one band member informs another he just proposed to his girlfriend. Following a stretch of confused ground inspection before resuming eye contact, instead of offering congratulations, his friend says something along the lines of, “Well, I…
Seeing Parenthetical Girls for the first time, via their Bergman-esque video for “A Song for Ellie Greenwich,” induced the same chills I got when I saw Devo’s TV debut on SNL — a smart, robotic band of art students is taking familiar pop music motifs, running them through a shredder,…
Given the strict observance of “punk rock rules” that define the genre now, it’s hard to believe that the original CBGB bands had more in common with hippies than anyone you might see on Epitaph’s roster. That’s right, punk used to all be about personal expression and fashion code, minor…
By any yardstick you wish to measure it, you probably owe Nico Holthaus a drink. If nothing else. Mill Avenue Inc, his 2008 documentary chronicling the corporate invasion of Tempe, is a talking history time capsule of the faces and places that made the Tempe music boom of the ’90s…
When you or I get hit up to finance someone’s 12-vinyl disc, pearl handled, hand-carved boxed sets, it will be officially time to pronounce the fan-funding phenomenon dead. Jason Woodbury profiled Kickstarter a few weeks ago, and here we can see it working rather successfully for Loyal Wife, a brand…
The year 2011 may go down in history as the first year we paid more attention to where music will be stored and what delivery system it will stream from than we did to actual music (which continues its steadily declining devaluation in the marketplace, thank you). One hallowed time,…
You are one paycheck away from being homeless. Me likewise. Our tomorrows hang on tinder hooks but The Love Me Nots’ future in this business of show is for certain. Why? Because no one else can do what they do when they do what they do it to you, that’s…
The Compound Grill, the Phoenix venue and eatery has hosted its share of touring classic rock veterans like Mickey Hart and Timothy B. Schmit. “I’ve heard of them,” you say, “but this Paul Gurvitz and the New Army has me scratching my recognition meter.” Well, with his brother Adrian Gurvitz,…
Nobody does TV specials like this for Christmas anymore, and after reading this yuleblog you’ll know why. It’s a lot of head-snapping work, flashing back and then flashing ahead forward to the present again, then flashing back, each time having to remember to bring the holiday magic and the vidcam…
Oh, to be the highway patrolman who pulls over this band’s Econoline! “What’s with all the sinister masks, fellas? You’re not one of those 99 percenters, are ya?” He’d most certainly demand to see their registration, and in the course of his interrogation, he’d come to learn that they are…
If you’ve never heard World Class Thugs’ heady mix of Americana, psychedelia, Kurt Weill and just plain ol’ weird, might I suggest imagining what it might sound like if Scout, Jem and Dill of To Kill a Mockingbird making up songs about the creepy adults of that hot summer, truthful…
People — maybe not the kind you want to associate with, but people nonetheless — will pay good money to be peed and shit upon, because, for them, it’s all about the way humiliation makes them feel, I dunno, giddy. On the other side of the uncomfortable spectrum, you have…
Although no one in the music industry with a whiff of official about them is on record as saying so, it’s been widely reported throughout the blogosphere that the remaining three major record labels will cease manufacturing CDs before the end of 2012. For those who came of age during…
