shawn avery

...the 90's were a superior decade. am i the only one who feels like the 00's got off to an incredibly fucked up and tragic start? i think so. but anyway. i've decided that since i don't look old, i'm not gonna act old either. here's to my third adolescence. and here's to all the cool stuff that went down before that '99-'01 bullshit. and speaking of the 90's... i went to the first 2 coachellas. here's this year's line-up. pretty impressive, but it doesn't eclipse the first few years. but damn... prince / roger waters / aphex twin / verve / kraftwerk / death cab / rilo kiley / goldfrapp / breeders / st. vincent pretty impressive . but alas, it is not to be. i'm playing birmingham's local band version of coachella at bottletree. the 2nd annual raindrop festival - april 25-26th. ps: i love this song , and i'm not ashamed to say it. a great chorus, is a great chorus.

osama bin-laden has sold out. he has officially declared wanted Jordanian Islamist Abu Musab al- Zarqawi his “emir” in iraq. this insurgency leader has beheaded not only americans and other foreign nationals, but he is responsible for the deaths of shiite muslims. osama has recently called for election boycotts, offered a truce to western nations who withdraw, and even tried the andy griffith approach by having a little sit down chat with american citizens, urging them to vote for peace. smart guy. yes. smarter than our guy? oh yes. osama is in charge. but by aligning himself with terrorist organizations that kill muslims, he pretty much lost the moral argument, that up until now, he at least had some loosely based logic for. i'm heading an hour north tonight to do one more night of rehearsals with judah and gainer's drummer for some stars below sessions at synchromesh studios next week. later on tonight i'll be returning to bham to begin "final" vocal tracking in...

he's apparently the most important dj in music. hmmm. he's described as also being the warhol of the west. that kinda makes sense. celebrities flock to him, and visa versa. he's quiet small, and get's more play than kobe. it's a fascinating movie about fame, the loss of fame, and people who love music. rent it ...

i read today that john peel, the famous british dj has died. rock afficianados are familiar w/ the john peel sessions, and other historic recordings. he was a champion of rock, early punk, hip-hop, various emerging scenes in the us, ireland and britain... a very important figure in popular music. he died in an ancient city on vacation in south america of a heart attack. weird. on saturday night, just minutes after watching the pathetic corporate robot known publicly as ashley simpson perform on s.n.l., i changed the channel over to c-span and watched about an hour of jon stewart from the daily show talk about the media... to the media... and watched about an hour of a conversation w/ the governator - arnold. he was at the pinetta institute talking about public policy, immigration, tax reform, pro-business policies, the environment, california's ailing infrastructure, the state's massive debt, special interest groups like the tribal gaming pac, border patrol, undocumented worke...

i started the weekend in earnest by going to the surprisingly long concert : co-headlining jay-z + r. kelly. jay z is simply the best rapper/hip hop artist alive. well, maybe not better than mos def , but close. he was so good, it's scary. we had seats eye level with the stage, in the 4th row. jay-z could have touched us if he wanted to. but, alas he didn't. and then there's r. kelly. we thought that each artist would do a set by themselves. nope. they went back and for for over 2 1/2 hours, each doing 20-30 minute sets. they opened and closed the show together. we ran into judah and his brother, on the way into the arena, and everyone, including them, seemed to have to go on a smoke break whenever the r. kelly set came around. it was so strange to go to a show where you completely respect and identify with one artist, and you totally loath the other one. i'd never gone to an arena show specifically to see a major hip hop act before. for instance, in the past i had seen...

this morning on salon, i read this article about world sentiment toward the american people vs. bush's presidency. turns out that they actually like us - probably because we make all of the big movies - but they hate bush. if we re-elect him, will the planet still show the love? i dunno - here it is . somehow i have found myself, by way of people cooler and more hip than i - going to the jay-z concert tonight. that should rock quite hard. i ended up not watching ambulance ltd. last night. i was all ready to go, but the prospect of watching eternal sunshine of the spotless mind w/ jim carry was too compelling not to watch - one of the best movies i've seen in years. what an incredible, impossibly hard-to-write script.

i think my body is starting to reject the 2004 election. i happened about 1:15 this afternoon... i decided to do some more reading on the election... electoral analysis... speeches, more polls... then i read the jon stewart vs. cnn/crossfire transcript. naturally i wanted some video of the argument on the crossfire episode - so i googled for a while. after a few minutes of not finding the clip i wanted, i got all anxious-like. then my tummy felt strange. it's around this time that i suspect my liver began to fail. it's a cliche, but it holds true for politics as well... everything is fine in moderation. i'm taking a break from the election for about 24 hours. so here's one last link about the election for a while. it's a big one. an empirical study that concludes that bush supporters have about as much of a command of "real facts" as bush has of the english language... "bush supporters still believe iraq had w.m.d." so anyway - tonight... i'm...

i went online this morning to get my stack of new cd's for the fall and noticed that the album cover i did for stateside has different looking text on amazon.com than the copy that i have. speaking of album covers... i guess ashby has decided that our new album will be titled wiseblood. i agree. very short and direct. southern. for the entire year so far, we had been considering ...and then we shall walk in endless light as the title. pretty longwinded. we shouldn't have that problem with the new title. i got the jeff buckley re-issue of grace. damn. that boy was good. probably too good. the included documentary was very well done. jeff was kind of a space cadet.the new u2 song being played all over the planet has some interesting lyrics, but the riff is kinda lame. it sounds a little too forced. although i love it when they rock out, this seems a bit to mainstream rock to me. the name of the album however, how to dismantle an atomic bomb is genius. and finally... jesse payne...

still no skybucket complilation of the local rock scene... i bought the (newly reformed) tears for fears cd. i've been a huge fan of tff leader roland orzabal since highschool, although i liked (like everyone else in america) the song everybody wants to rule the world way back in '85. curt (the cute one) left in '92 and roland continued on without him, releasing one of my favorite albums ever - elemental, followed by raoul and the kings of spain, and a b-sides collection. he decided to hang it up in 2001 and released a solo album. unfortunately he had distribution problems (don't we all?) and it was released during the 9/11 north american consumer black hole. well, curt and roland got back together and have essentially recorded the follow-up album to 1989's seminal pop masterpiece, the seeds of love -which it took 4 years and almost $1 million to produce. they put the "big" in "'80s". in the past decade, after both guys ventured off into lush...

i went to laser's edge to get the new tears for fears cd and ended up getting a ton of local stuff. for some reason our ep is priced at $9.98. hmmm. ran into george, the guitarist for all tomorrows parties . apparently they kicked him out. i personally think he rocks. hell of a nice guy. that's probably why he got the boot. we talked about the new compilation, and a band he was helping promote called sniffle. kooky stuff. i'm really looking forward to the new skybucket compilation, whenever it finally comes out. much better bands on it than this first set of bands. i'm anxious this week. too much to do, and not enough time to do it. i need to be putting in more hours editing. something has to go.

what can i say? i've been to hundreds of concerts over the past 15 years and apparently they were all preparing me for last night. wilco is simply the best band out there, at least for my musical sensibilities.they rocked harder, sung softer, phreaked out noisier and seemed generally happier than i could have guessed. and they were at the fox theatre in atlanta, which is easily one of the top 5 venues in the south. it might be the best. even tweedy seemed amazed to be chatting about how stupid "dubya" is, in front of 4,200 folks in a place like this. according to him, there aren't a lot of "good republican bands." i must give the ultimate props to ashby for thinking tickets to see wilco would be a decent birthday gift. to pay him back properly, i'm going to have to schedule him a marine expedition to the titanic. i'm more than a little inspired. they are the frank sinatra of "modern americana indie rock."

so we've finished tracking and we are now in the "editing phase." wonderful... so let me get this straight; no more rehearsals or live shows or spontaneous jamming to keep us well greased? at least not for the rest of the year. no more guitars or drums blasting to keep the happy accidents coming in great numbers? not until at least december. no more small groups of people recording, drinking, eating, watching political conventions, etc... nope. just me and the occasional collaborator in front of a powerbook g4. sign me up. 'cause that just sounds too exciting. luckily we do have to replace some of the "fake" scratch pianos with a real baby grand. i'll more than likely replace some electric and acoustic guitar parts. we still have to do all of the vocals for the album. again. the first time around was just for guidance during tracking. ashby wants to do them all within a few days for vocal continuity. i can dig that. we are also thinking a...