Francis Ford Coppola pays the bills with his day-job: making wine. Photo via Grazia Magazine

In a recent interview, auteur film director Francis Ford Coppola alludes to a future where the  intersection of art and commerce resembles our past more than it does the present.

Interviewer Ariston Anderson asked, “How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?”

We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to  make money?
- Francis Ford Coppola

“Is it important to veer away from the masters to develop one’s own style?”

I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep,  he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.

And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don’t worry about whether it’s appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that’s only the first step and you have to take the first step.

We love Death Cab for Cutie at BlackSwanSongs.com. Probably seen them play live about 8-10 times. Following their history for so long is how we’ve noticed their fandom and marketing move from indie rockers, to teens during their The O.C. plot point days, to Adult Contemporary radio format-listening VH1 Storytellers viewers.

And for y’all aging hipsters who will be at home attending to newborns and young children this evening, tune in to VH1 at 10 p.m. central time zone.

And don’t get it twisted. We realize that Death Cab are aging into adults quite gracefully. After all, we can’t all rock-out with the verve of adolescence well into our 60s like The Rolling Stones.

We had some down time this weekend. The new WordPress 3.1 install didn’t sit pretty with my servers…until today.

Anyways, your favorite writer that spends more time playing music than writing – that would be me for the uninitiated – is back up in it.

Probably the third interpretation of Down for A Day includes the fact that I was so sick during South by Southwest Music Conference, I only purposefully got to see 2 bands play: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Kanye West (and friends).

You can read my Kanye review in the Austin American-Statesman.

And I shot a little video of the Pains… instore at Waterloo Records. You can check that below:

I’ve really been slacking in recent updates, but reading about Clyde Stubblefield today made me realize that it was time to get writing again.

You know Clyde Stubblefield. You are already familiar with his essence. His drum beat from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” alone has been sampled more than 200 times in popular songs. The syncopation between his left hand snare hits and his kick drum pioneered the sound that would become known as funk. Stubblefield’s drumming style is the prototype for both funk and hip-hop.

And because the music business sucks, Clyde never saw a penny from his sampled beat. While that is a whole other discussion, it’s pertinent now because Clyde is sick, and anyone that loves music and/or anyone that has ever felt transcendental freedom from his funky-ass beats should come together to help Clyde out with his medical bills.

In July 2009, Stubblefield suffered kidney failure and began weekly dialysis treatment.

Stubblefield is still working playing every Monday evening in Madison, WI, but his medical bills are ridiculous.

He has provided the beat to the soundtrack of our lives. It’s time for us all to say thank you.

You can donate through ChipIn and you can see Stubblefield in action below:

You can hear an acoustic version below of a beautiful track from the upcoming album entitled “Yesterday Has Gone Forever.” The melancholy lyrics and atypical pop song structure are just the type of soul-penetrating solipsistic poesy that make rainy days feel that much more lonesome. As Mick Jagger once said to John Lennon, “It’s a blues, John. It’s a blues.”

And if you can’t wait until June 29, 2010 to listen, you can hear a sample of the entire album right now on Amazon.com.

Superchunk – Majesty Shredding from Merge Records on Vimeo.

Get ready to pull up the calendar section on your iPhone/smartphone. On September 14, one of BlackSwanSongs’ favorite bands, Superchunk,  will release Majesty Shredding on CD, LP and digital download. The band have announced summer festival dates and September east coast dates with west coast dates to be announced soon. Superchunk will also perform on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on Monday, September 20, their first television appearance since 1994. (Let’s pray they announce an Austin show!)

The press release on the Merge Records site reveals:

Having cleared the deck of odds and sods with last year’s Leaves in the Gutter EP, Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan set about to write a batch of songs that would capture the spirit of the band’s live shows. From 1997’s Indoor Living through 2001’s Here’s to Shutting Up, Superchunk had written most of their records together, building their songs through collaborative writing and rehearsal. But, in an effort not to overthink their new material (and because drummer Jon Wurster lives a couple hundred miles away from the rest of the band), Superchunk approached Majesty Shredding the same way they approached their early records: McCaughan provided skeletal demos to his bandmates, who in turn fleshed out the songs during a brief period of rehearsal and recording.

This sense of purpose is enhanced by the presence of Scott Solter, an engineer and producer (The Mountain Goats, John Vanderslice, St. Vincent) known for coaxing exceptional performances out of the artists he works with. Majesty Shredding is a powerful document of Superchunk as a band, augmented as needed with well-placed harmonies, keyboards, and guitar overdubs (and some backing vocals courtesy of the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle).

Since releasing their first 7-inch in 1989, Superchunk has run the gamut of milestone albums: early punk rock stompers, polished mid-career masterpieces, and lush, adventurous curveballs. Conventional wisdom holds that a band two decades into its career can only rehash or reinvent, but with Majesty Shredding, Superchunk has done something entirely different. Neither a return nor a departure, Majesty Shredding telescopes two decades into 41 indelible, action-packed minutes. It is the sound of youthful exuberance fine-tuned with grown-up confidence. And it may very well be Superchunk’s best record yet.

Superchunk also recently drank the social media Kool-Aid too; check out their twitter.

Track Listing:
1. Digging for Something
2. My Gap Feels Weird
3. Rosemarie
4. Crossed Wires
5. Slow Drip
6. Fractures in Plaster
7. Learned to Surf
8. Winter Games
9. Rope Light
10. Hot Tubes
11. Everything at Once

Superchunk tour dates:
6/19  Denver, CO – Westword Music Festival
6/20  Chicago, IL – Taste of Randolph Street Festival w/The Love Language
7/24  Omaha, NE – MAHA Music Festival
9/17  Washington, DC- 930 Club
9/18  New York, NY – Bowery Ballroom
9/19  Brooklyn, NY- Music Hall of Williamsburg
9/20  New York, NY – Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
9/21  Boston, MA- Royale
9/22  Philadelphia, PA- Trocadero

BlackSwanSongs.com had the extreme honor of attending two Sixteen Deluxe reunion shows, as well as interviewing them for a short feature in the Austin American-Statesman. Easily the best band to emerge from Austin during the 1990s, Sixteen Deluxe had the potential to be a label’s prestige act. Warner Brothers signed them after a small bidding war. But I personally didn’t feel like Warner Brothers properly promoted the release, “Emits Showers of Sparks” during those dark days just prior to mass Internet adoption.

If you enjoy My Bloody Valentine, The Flaming Lips, Swervedriver and other noise pop/space rock bands, please seek out Sixteen Deluxe and their music. Then convince your friends that are music supervisors to use their music in films.

Yes!

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