Tag Archives: Music

Political News: Joe Biden Wins Michigan Primary On March 10 (The Telegraph)

Joe Biden won Michigan’s Democratic primary on Tuesday, extending his lead over main rival Senator Bernie Sanders. Michigan is a key general election battleground, and one which Sanders narrowly won in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.

In 2020, the state emerged as a battleground for black and white blue-collar voters as well as suburban moderates. The Democratic contest has effectively become a two-horse race between Biden and Sanders The former vice president’s victory in Michigan, as well as Missouri and Mississippi, dealt a serious blow to Sanders, who is urgently seeking to jump-start his flagging campaign.

Music Profiles: 76-Year Old Musician Robbie Robertson Talks About “Building The Band” (PBS)

The documentary “Once Were Brothers” chronicles the highs and lows of a famous rock group. Lead guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson began touring as a teenager and played for Bob Dylan before joining forces with four other musicians to become The Band. Jeffrey Brown reports.

Interviews: 71-Year Old Singer James Taylor On His Audiobook “Break Shot”

NPR Weekend Edition Sunday logoJames Taylor has been a household name for a long time now. Taylor was just 20-years-old when he released his self-titled debut in 1968; in the half century since then, he has sold over 100 million albums and cemented his status as one of the most successful American singer-songwriters.

But in Break Shot: My First 21 Years, his audio memoir on Audible, Taylor narrates his life before fame — including details of his struggle with drugs, alcohol addiction and time in psychiatric institutions. Taylor is also looking back with American Standard, a new album that revives the American Songbook tunes of his childhood.

NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro spoke with Taylor about revisiting his fraught early memories, dealing with fame at an early age and his connection to The Beatles. Listen to their conversation in the player above and read on for highlights from the interview — including a few audio excerpts from Break Shot.

Politics: David Brooks And Ruth Marcus On The Latest In Washington (PBS)

New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s political news, including the Senate’s decision not to call witnesses in President Trump’s impeachment trial, Republicans’ varying defenses of Trump’s conduct around Ukraine and what recent polling trends among 2020 Democrats suggest about Monday’s Iowa caucuses.

Profiles: 76-Year Old Country Singer Terry Allen Releases New Album “Just Like Moby Dick”

The connections to Melville’s masterpiece are metaphorical and allusive, as elusive as the White Whale. The masterly spiritual successor to Lubbock (on everything)Just Like Moby Dick casts its net wide for wild stories, depicting, among other monstrous things, Houdini in existential crisis, the death of the last stripper in town, bloodthirsty pirates (in a pseudo-sequel to Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the “American Childhood” suite), a vampire-infested circus, mudslides and burning mobile homes, and all manner of tragicomic disasters, abandonments, betrayals, bad memories, failures, and fare-thee-wells.

Iconic and iconoclastic Texan songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s heartbreaking, hilarious new album, his first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, features the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Blaze), Shannon McNally, and Jo Harvey Allen; mainstays Bukka AllenRichard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines; and co-writes with Joe Ely and Dave Alvin

Album Website

Terry Allen (born May 7, 1943 in Wichita, Kansas) is an American Texas country and outlaw country singer-songwriter, painter and conceptual artist from Lubbock, Texas. He currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has recorded twelve albums of original songs, including the landmark releases Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979). His song “Amarillo Highway” has been covered by Bobby Bare, Sturgill Simpson and Robert Earl Keen. Other artists who have recorded Allen’s songs include Guy Clark, Little Feat, David Byrne, Doug Sahm, Ricky Nelson, and Lucinda Williams. Rolling Stone magazine describes his catalog, reaching back to Juarez as “..uniformly eccentric and uncompromising, savage and beautiful, literate and guttural.”

From Wikipedia

Video Profiles: 69-Year Old Singer Huey Lewis Talks About Hearing Loss (CBS)

Huey Lewis and the News are in the mood to celebrate, joking about their age as they prepare for the release of what is almost certainly their last album, titled “Weather.” At 69, Lewis, who has performed in bands for most of his life, had no intention of slowing down, but his diagnosis of Meniere’s Disease – a hearing disorder which has affected his voice – has made the decision for him. John Blackstone reports.

Top New Timelapse Videos: “Reverent” – A Spectacular Fusion Of Storm Film & Music By Mike Olbinski (4K)

Filmed and Edited by: Mike Olbinski

Song by: Bullet & Cass (“The Way You Do”)

A couple years ago I made a black and white time-lapse film just for fun, and now here we are with the third installment in the series. It’s a way to play around in the winter months with something new and different, get creative and also help pass the time until spring returns!

Reverent Black and White Weather and Storm Timelapse video by Mike Olbinski January 21 2020

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with this one, and couldn’t even find the perfect song for it, until the duo Bullet & Cass emailed me about wanting to use my footage for their upcoming debut single. I get a lot of those kinds of emails, so I didn’t think much of it…until I clicked on the preview links for their two tracks…and wow, I was blown away by how much I loved “The Way You Do.” A few seconds into the song, I was immediately laying down tracks to it in my head. I listened all the way to the end and knew I had found my song. We did a straight up trade…footage for the track, and the editing began in earnest.

Reverent Black and White Weather and Storm Timelapse video by Mike Olbinski January 21 2020

 

After I finished editing back in November, I needed a title. It took me weeks. The song has a sort of folksy haunting old west vibe to it (at least to me) and I needed the perfect name to go along with it. I finally pulled up a list of old west terms and when I stumbled across Reverent…I knew it was the one. Not only did it sound and feel right, but it actually is how I feel standing out there a lot. These storms are powerful and deadly, and sometimes you are just staring out at them with this deep respect and admiration for what you are witnesses. Or perhaps, in my case, for the one who created it.

I hope you enjoy this film as much as I do. All footage in it is from 2019, with some unseen monsoon clips in there as well. Definitely felt like it was taking a risk on the song choice itself, especially as lyrics aren’t my normal deal. But I love it, love it, love it and I hope you do too! And if you do, please visit the links up top and buy the single and check out their website!

Website

Classical Music Films: “In Search Of Mozart” (Video)

Pianist Ronald Brautigam explains Beethoven unique and revolutionary ability to appeal to both the masses and the connoisseurs of his time.

Pianist Lada Valešová and historian Cliff Eisen discuss Mozart earliest composition, written when he was just five years old.

Website

Performing Arts: “The Letters Of Cole Porter” (New Yorker Review)

From a New Yorker online article review:

The Letters Of Cole Porter Yale University Press November 2019Beneath his smooth, genial, almost inhumanly productive and evasive surface, there were turbulent waters. His very name, for all its air of Ivy League ease, represents a burdened legacy. The Porters were his difficult, scapegrace father’s family; the Coles were his mother’s rich and ambitious Indiana family. He was a Porter by birth but, if his mother had anything to do with it, would be a Cole for life.

Certainly, Porter’s ghost could not ask for better care than he has been given in “The Letters of Cole Porter” (Yale), edited by Cliff Eisen, a professor of music history at King’s College London, and Dominic McHugh, a musicologist at the University of Sheffield (and the editor of Alan Jay Lerner’s letters). Laid out with a meticulous scholarly apparatus, as though this were the correspondence of Grover Cleveland, every turn in the songwriter’s story is deep-dived for exact chronology, and every name casually dropped by Porter gets a worried, explicatory footnote.

Read New Yorker Article