My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-2-13)
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My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-12-5)
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My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-11-28)
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The new issue of Rolling Stone—the Playlist Issue—started with an idea from Roots drummer ?uestlove. We asked him to tell us his favorite songs, but he said he wanted to go deeper. “In my eyes, what defines a true artist is their filler,” he said. “I happen to like the Stevie Wonder songs that aren’t hits. I can say the same thing for Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Prince’s hits are like a red carpet that he lays out to lead you to the good stuff.”
The Playlist Issue features fifty artists sharing lists of top ten songs from artists and musical mini-genres that they know, and love, deeply. Highlights include Yoko Ono on her favorite John Lennon songs, My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way on the best glam rock tunes, Win Butler on Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith on Bob Dylan’s love songs. Over the next five weeks, RollingStone.com will post these and bonus, online-only lists, with streams of many of the songs as well as audio from interviews with some of the best-known list-makers.
This week we’re posting the following playlists:
• Bono on David Bowie
• Jack Johnson on Bob Marley
• Chris Robinson on the Rolling Stones
• Rufus Wainwright on Leonard Cohen
• ?uestlove on Prince
• Peter Wolf on R&B
• Dave Grohl on Eighties hardcore punk
• Ezra Koenig on U.K. Pop Hits
• Cee Lo on Dirty South Hip-Hop
• Annie Lennox on women with soul
• Jenny Lewis on Seventies California rock
Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn hit the BBC studio recently to record this and a couple others from Plastic Beach (2010) linked below. I particularly like the fact that the androgynous hipster doing backup vocals (not bad) has his headphones off his head so as to preserve his goofy hairdo.
Watch: Gorillaz Cover The xx - “Crystalised”
Damon Albarn and a few members of the latest Gorillaz lineup took to BBC Radio 1 airwaves recently for a 3-song set that included their new singles “Doncamatic (All Played Out)” and “On Melancholy Hill,” as well as one more treat for fans of this year’s Mercury Prize winners: a cover of The xx single “Crystalised.” SKoA grabbed videos from the performance, and though I wasn’t too keen on this rendition at first, watching closeups of Albarn’s face as he interprets these utterly heartbreaking lyrics has completely turned that around. It’s a gorgeous take.
(Source: twentyfourbit)
Gratitude post.
Seeing as how Thanksgiving has winded down along with my ability to ignore impending responsibilities (hellooo finals) I think I’ll send the last week off with a good-old gratitude list.
I am thankful for my car. Shiela wasn’t anticipating the two 6+ hour drives to and from Grosse Point, MI but she took it like a champ and unlike former voyages didn’t reach the finish line with a few new engine concerns. Thanks old girl, you haven’t let me down yet. And that brings me to my next item…
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I am thankful for missing that train. I may be the most absentminded, time management lacking, scatterbrained girl alive, but I missed that train, and it gave me an extra 4 hours that made the 12+ hour travel time entirely worth it.
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I am thankful for my cousins. I grew up isolated from my extended family in a way that has made developing relationships with them now a little awkward at times. But we’re doing it finally, now that I live close enough. I would kill for these faces.
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I am thankful for this city. To me, cities can take on a personality, an identity, soaking up the energies, heart, and life within it. And what if cities could be like soul mates? What if Chicago is mine? The place I’ve been edging towards my whole life, eying carefully, waiting patiently. It seems a little far-fetched but against all odds this is where I ended up, and now that I’m here it’s like I’m standing in a hallway of doors swung wide open.
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Lastly, I’m thankful for this last month. It hasn’t passed through me without some bitter moments. That pendulum is far from stuck. But I’m all for optimism as long as it keeps me afloat, and right now I’m sailing. And I’ve got millions of moments from this November that I just want to stuff into a box and preserve…moments that make me feel intoxicated. More than anything though, just happy.
