Prairie Pop: Girls got game
In the classic Destiny's Child song "Say My Name," the protagonist suspects that her man is cheating on her because his voice has changed: ...
Author Archives: Craig Eley
Prairie Pop: The World was a Song..Then it all Went Wrong – Review of Tom HooperR...
In 1915, American opera singer Mary Case took to the stage and sang alongside phonograph recordings of her own voice. She was Thomas Edison’s favorite singer, so the story goes, and she was par...
Prairie Pop: Radiolies? “Truth” in Sound and Storytelling
At the end of September, the podcast Radiolab went in search of “truth.” It was a daunting task, to be sure, but not wholly outside the scope of the program, which bills itself as “...
Prairie Pop: Making Music Work – David Byrne on the economics of the music industry...
I recently watched David Byrne give a Power Point lecture on the economics of the music industry. That a man with a flair for dramatic presentation, a wisp of a man who famously wore an outrageously ...
Brain Waves: MP3′s and the Science of Sound
“One of nature’s greatest wonders is the ability of the human ear to distinguish among the millions of sounds around us. Each sound has a distinctive pitch, loudness, and quality….these characteristi...
The Haps: Will Rock for Food
In February 1852, John Sullivan Dwight, a transcendentalist and graduate of Harvard Divinity School, decided to start a music magazine. In a pamphlet outlining his ideas, he wrote that his journal wo...
The Haps: Counting Down
Seemingly no one hates Counting Crows more than Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard. An oft-cited gem from his 2005 stage-banter album, Relaxation of the Asshole, goes something like this: “I wa...
The Haps: Summer Earcation
In his 1992 book A Sound Education, Canadian composer and theorist Murray Schafer made this observation about contemporary life and listening: “As people have moved to cities over the past c...
The Haps: F’n A, It’s May!
On May 1, 1965, at an annual celebration in Prague, Allen Ginsberg was crowned the King of May. The tradition of May Day and its royalty was founded back in who-knows-when for reasons of who-knows-wh...
The Haps: It's Raining Shows
In Langston Hughes' 1921 poem “April Rain Song,” the thing that everyone hates about April--its big problem--is instead turned into a point of celebration, ending with the lines, “The rain plays a li...
DeVotchKa
Saturday, April 1 – First United Methodist Church – $20 Beyond some of the common descriptors–Balearic-folk, gypsy-punk–Denver’s DeVotchKa is best understood as a theatrical b...
The Haps: Great Things, Small Packages
Architecture in Helsinki’s brilliant 2003 debut album, Fingers Crossed, kicks off with a short, Casio and drum machine instrumental called “One Heavy February.” Unlike so many ultimately forgettable ...
The Haps: January 2011
In 1953, a guy named Pat Best wrote a song for his band The Four Tunes, called “I Understand (Just How You Feel)” a Pop/R&B crossover that broke into the top 10 on both charts. The original recordin...
The Haps: Hometown Sound
In Everything But The Girl’s “25th December” (one of those great non-Christmas Christmas songs that end up on “indie xmas” mix tapes), Ben Watt sings about the quintessential winter feeling: regret. ...
The Haps: Rock
The organization Rock the Vote was founded back in 1992 with the goal of mobilizing young people to exercise their elective franchise, with a PSA campaign involving musicians like Madonna and Michael...
