Queen Is Dead, Long Live Queen
Shelley Short
O Captain My Captain
Coming here was a very intense time,” Shelley Short says about uprooting her life from Portland to Chicago in September 2004. “I moved here with a friend and another close friend lives here that I’ve known since high school, so I wasn’t all alone, but I left a lot of people behind.” Her cell phone still has a Portland number, “So I can talk to my family for free,” she says.
Belle And Sebastian
Everybody’s Talkin’
“We’ve been around for 10 years, but I don’t really feel like we’re an old band. At the moment, we feel quite new and current. And I think we are reaching a lot more people. I think, to a lot of people, we are a new group.” — guitarist Stevie Jackson.
Rhett Miller
Couldn’t Leave If He Tried
Chicago’s Low Skies aren’t in line to win any Kid’s Choice awards, nor will they ever with the musical path they’ve chosen. Swirling around Chris Salveter’s tangled-in-the-sheets headgames, the new All The Love I Could Find (Flameshovel) skulks like a fog, limiting vision to a sea of minute reflections forlornly repressing pathologies too shocking to acknowledge. Or at least when Salveter has the microphone.
When Chicago’s ever-eager Longshot was getting ready to record his third album last year, this MC/poet (legally known as Chad Heslup) made a decision most hip-hop acts would write off as flat-out ludicrous: He put his own album on the backburner to help out his fellow Chicago hip-hoppers. Even while under contract — at the time — to record this solo album; the choice was easy for ‘Shot.
Shelton Hank Williams, or Hank III as he’s better known, will be excited to see his new record, Straight To Hell (Curb), on store shelves, but excuse him if he won’t allow himself to become too enthusiastic.
“Yeah,” he says with a thick Southern drawl, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Hello, My Name Is Blackie
IE: If you were to release “Animal (Fuck Like A Beast)” today, would it be met with more or less controversy?
Blackie Lawless: That’s difficult to say because the first impression has obviously already been established. That’s impossible for me to say, but I don’t think things have changed that much regardless of what people may say. I think if it’s a profound statement like that [”Animal”] was, there is always going to be a place where it will put a jolt into people’s systems.
MR. FORSTNEGER GOES TO AUSTIN
If you get bored from the 15th through the 19th, head on down to Austin, TX, for South By Southwest. You won’t be lonely, all of the following Chicago bands will be there: Office, The M’s, Owen, Puerto Muerto, Chris Mills, a Flameshovel Records showcase featuring Bound Stems, Lying In States, Russian Circles, and Low Skies, Baby Teeth, The Detholz!, The Changes, The Jai-Alai Savant, The Reputation, Healthy White Baby, Bible Of The Devil, Headlights, Chin Up Chin Up, Steve Dawson, Palaxy Tracks, The Fold, Caural, Volcano!, Bottomless Pit, OK Go, Allister, Psalm One, Head Of Femur, Devil In A Woodpile, Ambulette, June, Debris Inc., Tight Phantomz, Sybris, Waco Brothers, Marty Casey & Lovehammers, Andre Williams, Magnolia Electric Co., Catfish Haven, Busy Signals, Jon Langford, Zombi, Backyard Tire Fire, and The Thin Man.
The Constant Gardener
Universal
Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering The Fisk University-Library Of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942 is an important book. Edited by writers Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, it introduces an unpublished manuscript by Fisk University professor, composer, and musicologist John Wesley Work III, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and graduate student Samuel Adams. The three Fisk scholars had teamed up with folklorist Alan Lomax, who ran the Archive Of American Song at the Library Of Congress. Their aim was to document the disappearing tradition of folklore in the Delta as it moved from a less rural, more urban environment. Missing for six decades, the manuscript was found by Gordon, stuffed in the back of a file cabinet in the Alan Lomax Archive at New York’s Hunter College.
At ARS STUDIO in Alsip, Larry Schara mastered the latest project for Tee & Company, Live From Joliet 2, and continued tracking with #Jock Hardy# for his latest Disney project . . . Schara also tracked choir vocals for Vishawn Mitchell’s upcoming CD . . . Jennifer Highland tracked, mixed, and mastered for the Charles Walker Blues Band’s latest release, Hotel Room Blues . . . Andy Padayao tracked and mixed with Nick Sintos And The Flips.
Like “Soul Train,” the band Chicago, and the writers of the Broadway hit “Urinetown,” Ira Glass and his innovative public radio show “This American Life” are packing up and leaving town for greener pastures.
M-AUDIO
Sputnik Microphone
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