Record Store Day 2012: The Do’s and Don’ts →

The Best chance to revisit the glory days of this past January: Lana Del Rey, Born To Die (Damon Albarn Remix) / Blue Jeans (Penguin Prison Remix)

It was a simpler time. Youth was in the air, and the promise of a new day blossomed before us like a beautiful field of wildflowers. Then Lana Del Rey was kinda mediocre on SNL, and a thousand bloggers wrote a thousand blog posts about how they hated her, or loved her, or hated that you loved her, or hated that you hated her, or loved that you hated her, and it all got so overwhelming that by February, an unspoken agreement had been brokered that we would all forget that Lana Del Rey had even existed until at least this summer. But here is a quick reminder: her first two singles have been remixed by a Grand Ol’ Mensch of indie rock and an Up-And-Comer who can help you revisit Lana Del Rey in a way that will hopefully not require nearly as much blogging.

This year’s Record Store Day exclusives are kind of not so great*! (Who hasn’t wanted the chance to own a 7” copy of Jimmy Fallon’s already-expired “Tebowie” joke?) Still, I sifted through the list for the gems and the trash and made fun of them all for MTV Hive.

*”Not so great” meaning I only have 16 things on my list. Including the Empire Recordssoundtrack, the Lana Del Rey single, and, sure, “Tebowie.”

Notes From the First At the Drive-In Show in 11 Years →

There’s an old line about the Velvet Underground, about how only 500 people bought their first album when it came out, but every one of them started a band. With At the Drive-In, there were only a handful of people who got to see them before their heartbreaking “make-a-genre-defining-record/start-to-blow-up/break-up-almost-immediately” cycle began. But you can’t overstate the band’s importance, especially in its home state: As a multiracial group of five guys from the depressed border town of El Paso, they inspired an entire generation of kids in hopeless-seeming places like Laredo, McAllen, Abilene – they were living proof that their rock and roll dreams could come true, that it wasn’t just for white dudes in big cities. For Latino and Latina kids in shitty Texas towns, they weren’t just the Velvet Underground – they were Jackie Robinson.

My write-up from the At The Drive-In show at Red 7 last night is up now at MTV Hive.

Living Room to Stage: The DIY House Circuit →

Here’s a story I was really, really excited about when my editor at MTV Hive decided to take a chance on it. A lot of the more significant times of my life over the past decade came at shows that people (including me sometimes, but not always) played in living rooms. Some of the people I would see in living rooms went on to get Indie Rock Famous, and play Bonnarroo or on Letterman or wherever. A lot of them didn’t.

The ones who got famous — like Sharon Van Etten, or John McCauley, who leads the band Deer Tick — always made me really happy. The ones who haven’t — like Brendon Massei, who appears in the story and plays music under the name Viking Moses, or like Tony Presley, who plays as Real Live Tigers (and, yeah, is a good friend of mine) — have been an inspiration to me for a long time, because I’ve always valued doing things for rewards that don’t appear obvious.

It still amazes me sometimes that some of the people I knew from playing in houses didn’t get successful with their music the way that Sharon and John McCauley did. I can find myself astonished that Annie Palmer or Dustin and the Furniture or Kelli Shay Hicks or David Israel aren’t at least kinda famous now. It all feels very random in some ways, which takes nothing away from how hard Sharon and John worked or how talented they are — there just isn’t room for everyone who works hard and is talented to get there.

Which is one of the points I wanted to make with the article, though I’m not sure it quite comes through. Jeffrey Lewis, who is somewhere between Viking Moses and Deer Tick, in terms of how successful he is, once described to me the feeling of watching people succeed like this: If it takes a million monkeys on a million typewriters to produce the complete works of Shakespeare, then it doesn’t really matter which monkey typed what — what matters is that, at the end of the process, that work exists, and it’s been created. It’s a nice way of thinking about it, and when I talked to Brendon Massei for the story, he agreed. The success that Deer Tick has, or the success that Sharon has, is really something that everyone who came up playing the same shows that they did can take pride in — it’s a validation of an entire community of artists who wanted to find a way to play music for people without having to follow rules for how to break in.

Anyway, this story means a lot to me, and I’m glad that it got to run today. Do me a favor and read it, will you?

Hive Five: Snooptastic Collaborations →

In which I shamelessly make my initial bid to insert the term “Snooptastic” into the vernacular.

Noise Barriers: A Look at Austin’s Biggest Battle →

This was one of those “close to my heart” stories that made me think MTV was going to be a pretty good fit for what I wanted to do. Because Austin becomes a big playground for coastal media people this week each year — and that’s cool, because I like having them here, and I like to have fun in that playground. But it’s also a city, with issues that are sometimes related directly to what makes it so fun. And there are some serious issues at play in the relationship between Austin’s music industry and Austin’s rapid development. A 35% boom in population over ten years coupled with the city weathering a bad economy well, combined with the exponential growth of SXSW and ACL and other nationally-prominent music events makes Austin a very complicated place to be right now. We had a mayor who was determined to see downtown population growth hit 120% during his term — we also defined our main attraction as live music. So what happens when all of those people who moved here want to go to bed, and it’s too loud?

It’s a tough question. James Moody, who owns Mohawk, one of our best venues, gives some thoughtful answers in the article. So does Freddy Fletcher, the sort of old-school Austinite who remembers watching Willie and Waylon toss out whole sheets of acid into the crowd from whatever dive bar they were playing in. (note: possibly apocryphal?)

(Note: Also, if you’re interested in the subject, watch the documentary Echotone. It explores this issue — and more — in a very in-depth way. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and the scenes of indie-blues darling Black Joe Lewis driving his fish truck around Austin even though he’s “made it” says more about the state of things than my article could hope to.)

MTV Hive →

I haven’t had many stories run anywhere in the past month (though I’ll happily plug my Texas Observer war resistance story once more, if you haven’t read it) because I’ve been working on pre-launch content for this new site from MTV that I haven’t been allowed to talk about.

That site launched today! And it looks pretty great. It’s weird being on this side of things — I’ve been working for MTV for a few months, but I’m still a freelancer who has no direct involvement in the way things turn out, so it’s a really exciting moment when I get to see — okay, this is the way it’s put together, this is the other content, these are the other writers, and it all looks pretty great. MTV has some resources, so you’d expect that it’d look good — and it does, so that’s exciting.

Working on the site, so far, has been an outstanding experience. Responsive, receptive editors; a host of opportunities that have been exciting and interesting; the chance to write about things that I’m really interested in, that maybe take a look at music and pop culture from a slightly different angle — I’m having a good time with it, and I’m proud of the site. Since I live in Austin and it’s a SXSW launch, a lot of the content up right now is from me — go ahead and take a look, if you’re interested. We look at Austin’s noise ordinances and the way that development is butting heads with our live music industry; we handicap the odds that anyone will still care about various SXSW buzz bands; I plug five Austin bands who are playing SXSW that you shouldn’t sleep on; and I talk to The Dodos about working with Neko Case and their love of Billy Corgan. I’ve been working hard on it, and I like the way it looks.