swvlswvl

16 May

Kanye West Brings Out New Material at Surprise New York Show

Sometimes it’s a random weekday and you hear that Kanye is about to play a secret corporate gig two blocks from your office. If you’re lucky, you get in. Notes on a weird, fun night.

14 May

I talked to Four Tet on the 10th anniversary of 'Rounds.'

Such a great record, all these years later. I was surprised/amazed to learn that he made the entire thing by collaging samples on a clunky old desktop PC. My other favorite revelation:

“Rodney Jerkins actually was the most influential for me,” he says, citing the producer’s work on Whitney Houston’s “It’s Not Right, But It’s Okay” and Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine.” “The fact that one was led by a thumb piano and one was led by a harp, and he combined those things with very crisp electronic rhythms – at the time, I thought of him alongside Aphex Twin as being on the cutting edge of electronic music.”

8 May

My Rolling Stone feature on Macklemore from this spring is now online.

My favorite thing I’ve written this year, now available for your Internet reading pleasure.

28 Apr

Atoms For Peace - Magic Beanz (Radio Rip)

plays: 53,999

New Atoms for Peace! “The Z is v important,” says Thom. Clearly.

(Source: tkol2)

I wrote a short profile of Vampire Weekend for the new issue of RS (Bruno Mars is on the cover). Pick it up on stands this Friday for many entertaining exchanges with Ezra Koenig and Rostam Batmanglij, plus a special guest appearance from Ezra’s BFF Lena Dunham.

(Source: fullmetalparka, via teamvampireweekend)

24 Apr

I know the Internet loves Thom Yorke, but even so I was pleasantly surprised by how much pickup my interview with him and Nigel Godrich got yesterday. Thanks to everyone who linked to it! A few of my favorites are after the jump.

23 Apr

A conversation with Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich

Last month, I spent an hour chatting with Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich. How wild is that? I met them at a downtown hotel, the day before they played Le Poisson Rouge. It was one of the most fun interviews I’ve ever done – the kind where I barely even had to ask questions, because they were both in such chatty moods. Radiohead was my absolute favorite band throughout my formative years as a music nerd, so, yeah, to say I was psyched about this experience would be an understatement.

My looooong Q&A with Yorke and Godrich is online now. (Another piece of the interview ran online last month, and there’s also a short item in the new issue of RS.) If you’re like me, you’ve probably already clicked through to devour all 3,000 words, but just in case you’re still on this page, here are some of my favorite tidbits:

Thom Yorke on being beaten on the Billboard charts by Bruno Mars: “Who the fuck is Bruno Mars?”
Thom Yorke on Top 40 EDM stars like David Guetta and Calvin Harris: “They wash the surface off and they’ve cleaned it up and Auto-Tuned it. It’s like, ‘Fuck you!’”
Thom Yorke on DJ culture: “If I’m brutally honest, 90 percent of that whole culture, I don’t get on with. I find it really bonkers when, you know, like, a promoter in Ibiza is emailing us, saying, ‘Do you want to go?’ And I’m like, ‘No!’”
Thom Yorke on when Radiohead will make another record: “I don’t know. I really haven’t got a clue, which I quite like.”
Thom Yorke on the name of his new Tumblr: “It’s a quote from The Simpsons.”
Thom Yorke on the Oscars: “I watch a shitload of movies. Lincoln was all right. I didn’t really understand [Argo]. Better things than that.”

22 Apr

UNCOOL #1!

uncoolmag:

We made you a zine.

UNCOOL #1: Guiltless Pleasures is a 43-page .pdf about the ways music makes us feel bad — and sometimes, proud. It was designed by Traci Larson. Sam Alden did the cover art. Here’s what you’ll find inside:

* Punk Rock Princesses: A Case for Something Corporate by Devon Maloney
* Dangerously in Love: My Decade with Beyonce by Jamieson Cox
* Repeat Offenders: Pressing Play, Over and Over Again by Harley Brown
* Guiltless Pleasures: Imagining a Post-Snob World by David Greenwald, Simon Vozick-Levinson and Lindsay Zoladz
* Miss You Like Crazy: Canada’s Lost Boy Bands by Melody Lau
* He Ain’t Even Know It: On Rick Ross, Rap, and Responsibility by Henry Adaso
* I Don’t Wanna Come Back Down From This (Sound)Cloud by Taleen Kalenderian
* Why Bother? Talking To Myself About Weezer by Jillian Mapes

With the help of its readers, UNCOOL is a publication that pays its contributors. Thanks in advance for your support.

DOWNLOAD UNCOOL #1: GUILTLESS PLEASURES.

Participating in the “Guiltless Pleasures” panel with Dave and Lindsay was one of the most fun things I did at SXSW. I’m proud to see that conversation continue in this awesome zine, alongside some of my favorite young writers. For $3.99, you can buy this or, like, a tall frappuccino. Choose this!

Update: Read an excerpt from the panel now.

19 Apr

The Snoop Lion album is actually kind of great

I think we could all use some positive vibes after this week. Here comes Snoop Lion, just when we need him most! Stream the album now, and click for my review.

Like Willie Nelson before him, Snoop Dogg finally got so high he made a reggae album. Go ahead, laugh. It really is hilarious to hear him preaching Rastafarian gospel in a fake patois. But here’s the thing: For all the easy jokes, Reincarnated is Snoop’s most consistently enjoyable record in years…

17 Apr

April short takes

Fall Out Boy’s ridiculous but fun Save Rock and Roll, Tyler, the Creator’s maddening Wolf, and Iron & Wine’s pleasant Ghost on Ghost. Click for words!

17 Apr

I get email! Note the sender’s address.

(Context)

12 Apr

Something slightly crazy and awesome happened to me at lunch today: The friendly woman who runs my favorite Indian food truck insisted on giving me my kati roll for free because she had seen me on Good Morning America. I thanked her repeatedly. Anyway, here is that clip, in which I give Jay-Z his due as “one of the great poets of our age,” along with a few more recent media appearances after the jump. Click through if you enjoy seeing me talk about stuff!

Good Morning America

10 Apr

Anonymous asked: Hi, I am an aspiring music journalist, and I am wondering what kind of schooling and experience led you to be able to make a career out of music journalism. I would really appreciate your response! Thank you, Carly

Hi Carly! My school didn’t offer a journalism major, but I wrote for my college newspaper, which taught me a lot about how a daily publication works. I wrote about lots of things at first, but after a while I realized that writing about music was by far the most fun. In my junior year, I worked up the courage to start pitching an editor at my local alt-weekly, the Boston Phoenix. In time I convinced him to start giving me assignments – short concert and album reviews at first, longer interviews and features later on. By the time I graduated, I had enough clips to land a summer internship at Entertainment Weekly, which eventually turned into my first real job. That internship was when it first occurred to me that I might actually be able to make a career out of this, and I haven’t looked back since.

Good luck with your work, wherever it takes you. My biggest advice is to listen to as much music as you can and write constantly about what it makes you think and how it makes you feel – on Tumblr, in emails to your friends, in a notebook, wherever. The more you do it, the better you’ll get.

P.S. Thanks for reading this blog and writing in! I love getting reader email.

10 Apr

Made In America

Roc Nation invited me to participate in a live Google hangout this afternoon to announce the lineup for the second annual Made in America Festival, coming to Philadelphia over Labor Day weekend. Others on the all-star panel included Fuse News’ John Norris, Hot 97’s Angie Martinez, XXL’s Shaheem Reid, GQ’s Nate Erickson and Philly radio host Shamara Afia. We spent an hour talking about the great acts on tap this year – both Knowles sisters, Phoenix, the entire Black Hippy crew, Public Enemy and tons more. This was fun! Check out our archived discussion below.

4 Apr

“Dark Side of the ‘Mad Men’”

I’ve probably said this before, but getting to work with Rob Sheffield on a regular basis is pretty much the coolest part of my job. Even cooler than the parts where I hang out with actual rock stars, maybe. Rob’s latest work of genius is a column in which he discovers that Dark Side of the Moon totally syncs up with the Roger Sterling acid trip episode of Mad Men. You have to read this.

Above: Collage by Tracy Allison