Story Archives of 'Music'

Singer and songwriter Shelley Short is 29 years old. She’s from Portland, Oregon, and has just released her third album, a dreamy collection of plaintive folk songs called A Cave, A Canoo. We caught her earlier this week while she was in Germany on her first European tour.

Daytrotter Session: Innocence Need Not Fade

(Photo courtesy of Laurent Orseau)

Call us nostalgic, sentimental, or maybe just old, but there’s just something about the thoughtfully crafted mix tape. Jason Bitner, co-creator of Found Magazine, gets this. He helped create an online space to share the songs and the stories behind the cassettes that have been hiding in a shoebox all these years. CassetteFromMyEx.com is the place to revisit your magnetic tape memories. Some of the stories collected there are now compiled in a book -- Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves.

Jason Bitner joins us to explain the project, and then we hear Bitner and others from the site break down the anatomy of the mix tape. Chicago Public radio producer Joe DeCeault spoke with some of the contributors and put together this piece, which weaves together the soundtracks and memories of lost love.

(Photo by leah lockhart via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Twenty-three-year old Nathan Williams has had a stressful year. The singer and guitarist records under the name Wavves. And in the past eleven months or so, he’s seen the kind of rise and fall that provided the arc of the “behind the music” series for years: gritty-beginnings, rocketing rise, drug-induced crash and burn ending in rehab, Holiday Inn lounge circuit, or reality show.

At first, music blogs and established rock magazines alike embraced Wavves’ lo-fi, punk aesthetic, and hundreds of people showed up at his very first show. Nathan was on top of the world. But at Spain's Primavera music festival in May, things took a drastic tumble. He was disjointed, he couldn’t play worth a lick, and angry fans hurled bottles and shoes at him. The blogs documented his self-destructive episode, and reader responses turned rancid.

Washington Post pop music critic Chris Richards has seen the same backlash happen to bands like Vampire Weekend and Black Kids, and hip-hop performers like Charles Hamilton. Richards believes that as music blogs take up a bigger role in promoting and distributing the newest bands, more aspiring young stars will be thrust into the spotlight well before they’re ready. Chris Richards joins us from the studios at the Washington Post.

The Washington Post: Indie-Rock Success So Sudden, It Actually Hurts

(Photo by The Accent via Flickr/Creative Commons)