Bits: Music for Alabama, Mike Watt, Vic Chesnutt, Boston Spaceships, Urge Overkill, Rockhall

  • Artist from across the country have contributed to The Wind Will Carry the Voice of the People, a Bandcamp compilation to aid the tornado-ravaged areas of Alabama. All proceeds go to the Red Cross.
  • Mike Watt + the missingmen will perform Watt’s 3rd opera hyphenated-man in its entirety on KXLU on May 19 at 10 PM PST.
  • plan9films is making a documentary about the late Vic Chesnutt tentatively titled Vic Chesnutt – It Is What It Is. MusicFilmWeb reports that Michael Stipe has signed on as executive producer. The film is to be released later this year.
  • In 1986, Black Flag went on tour with Painted Willie and Gone. Painted Willie’s drummer, David Markey, filmed it. He’s now made his tour documentary Reality 86’d available to view on Vimeo.
  • Robert Pollard’s band Boston Spaceships will be release a new album, Let It Beard (how great is that title?), on August 2. Guttersnipe has a tracklisting, as well as a little commentary from Pollard.
  • Urge Overkill have released Rock & Roll Submarine, their first album in 16 years. You can check out a track, “Mason/Dixon”, at My Old Kentucky Blog.
  • Scene Magazine reports that, as promised, the next Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony will take place back in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 14 at Public Hall.

Cowboy Junkies Cover Vic Chesnutt

This past Christmas marked the one-year anniversary of the death of singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt, a legendary and singular figure on the Athens, Georgia, music scene. In the second installment of “The Nomad Series”, called Demons, the Cowboy Junkies pay tribute to Chesnutt with an album’s worth of covers of his songs.

We tried to approach Demons with the same sense of adventure that Vic undertook in all of his projects (or at least that is the way his recordings sound). We let happy accidents happen; we tried to invest his songs with the same spirit and the adventure with which they were written, at the same time investing them with our own Northern spin. Exploring his songs and delving deeper and deeper into them has been an intense, moving and joyous experience. I don’t think Vic would have wanted it any other way.

-Michael Timmins, July 2010, from the liner notes for Demons

You can download “Wrong Piano”, Chesnutt’s lament of self-doubt that turns into something like a hymn in the hands of the Cowboy Junkies.

Cowboy Junkies – Wrong Piano

Demons, which will be released on February 15, can be pre-ordered on the Cowboy Junkies website.

Bits: Infantree, Justin Townes Earle, Vic Chesnutt & Elf Power, Neil Young, A Place to Bury Strangers

  • Infantree’s first full-length album, Would Work, is out today, and you can take a preview listen at Spinner (also up: Watchmen, Black Angels and Grinderman, among others).
  • No Depression wants you to interview Justin Townes Earle, and they want to compensate you for it. Submit a question for JTE, and you could win an autographed copy of his new album, Harlem River Blues
  • Pitchfork‘s One Week Only feature is currently running a documentary of Vic Chesnutt’s 2009 European Tour with Elf Power.
  • For those excited about the new Daniel Lanois-produced Neil Young album, Le Noise, Stereogum has a preview for you in the form a video for “Angry World”.
  • A Place to Bury Strangers has a five-song EP – “I Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart”, “Girlfriend” and three remixes of “I Lived” – and you can download the Secret Machines remix from Mute. APtBS will be kicking off a fall tour with a free show at Thirteenth Floor in Massillon, Ohio, on September 24 and swinging through Cleveland on September 27 (more on that next week).

They Shoot Music Don’t They talked Oliver Ackermann of A Place to Bury Strangers, tagged “the loudest band in New York”, into going acoustic for an evening stroll in Yppenplatz, Vienna. Sweet results.

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