Are Friends Acoustic?: Gary Numan Doesn't Care About Electronic Music

Take it away, NME:

Numan admitted in an interview with Bang Showbiz that the technology of modern electronic music still fascinates him, but emphasized that he's largely doing his own thing these days, and doesn't really relate to the modern style. The 'Cars' and 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' man said: "I don't really care [about Electronic music] to be honest. I just look after myself. I do my own thing and make sure I am doing what I want to do and the rest of it does what it likes. I'm not a flag waving champion for electronic music.'' 

 I'd really like to see him take up folk music, personally. Or maybe dixieland.

Danzig Covers the Everly Brothers, ZZ Top, and Others

This is really my kind of thing, let me tell you:

Glenn Danzig will dig up his musical influences on a new covers album titled Skeletons, which features the former Misfits singer putting his mark on tracks by Elvis Presley, Black Sabbath, ZZ Top and Aerosmith. The covers LP, Danzig's first album since 2010's Deth Red Saboath, will arrive on November 27th. Pre-order Skeletons now through the Nuclear Blast America site.

"These are my skeletons," Danzig said in a statement. "You may or may not know that I dig these songs. You could say that some of this music is the actual basis and skeleton of what I listened to growing up – ultimately informing the kind of music I like. It's the foundation. If you took Elvis and Sabbath out of my life, I probably wouldn't be the Glenn Danzig you know! I'm glad both sides are represented on this record."

It's always interesting to know what influenced artists whose output is pretty narrowly defined within a genre. When you first hear someone like Danzig and you're, say, 12, it's hard to imagine him sitting around listening to Fleetwood Mac or Leo Sayer, but when you get older you realize he probably knows at least the first verse of "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing."

Anyway, my favorite choices on this record are "Crying in the Rain" by the Everly Brothers and, even better, "Rough Boy" by ZZ Top. The album cover is pretty awesome, too (see below).

Terrence Trent D'Arby/Sananda Maitreya Talks About Dying at 27

Great interview at the New Statesman. Here are some good bits:

“Oh my God, I can’t believe you thought I was a socialist,” he says now. “I was nothing more than an opportunist. Any socialist tendencies I may have had were cured when I got my first tax bill. All artists are socialists until they see another artist with a bigger house than theirs.”

He talks about how at the time he thought the failure of his second record was to lack of support but now he says

“The good news is, most record company people are motivated by the same reason most of us are: greed,” he says. “So, no, when you look back at it, it didn’t make much sense for management not to want my second record to succeed.”

Thought he does add that Michael Jackson saw him as a threat and held "more power than the Pope." He says that Lenny Kravitz was a sort of replacement for him and says of the video of Kravitz's penis (with cock ring) coming out in a concert:

“Choreographed for sure. The only thing I could think to do with a cock ring now is keep my house keys on it.”

I recommend reading the whole thing. I'm not going to say that he is Advanced, but it's really interesting how he goes from being very realistic and pragmatic to neither (e.g., he says "angels named him Sananda" but that he needed a second name because he didn't want to "piss off" Madonna"). His new project is a concept album (double, of course), with songs like "Giraffe" (sample lyric: "Giraffe/can I have your autograph?/Please sign it to Sananda"), which was inspired by songs from Sesame Street and other children's music. Like I said, read the whole thing. Also please note what he is wearing in the photograph below.

Long hair, black leather jacket, sunglasses

Father John Misty's Overt Explanation of Overtly Taking Down His Overt Covers of Taylor Swift

Pitchfork has the story:

[T]he covers of "Blank Space" and "Welcome to New York" came together over the span of "like, an hour", when he passed by his tour manager's office and found her listening to Adams' 1989. Tillman says that he never heard Swift's originals prior to that day (although he concedes, "I’m sure I’ve been walking by a Cinnabon or something at the airport and heard it"). To record the new versions, he referred to a printout of Swift's lyrics.

After he uploaded the covers, Tillman became surprised by their immense popularity. "By the time I got back to the bus that night," he recalls, "my TM [tour manager] was like, 'It’s the top trend on Facebook! It’s on USA Today!', and I was like, 'this is ridiculous,' so I went and took them down, thinking, 'now that’s over'."

Except it wasn't. Media outlets (including this one) began reaching out asking why he took down the covers. Even Taylor Swift's camp got in touch to ask why they came down and encouraged him to put them back up.

So Tillman decided to troll everyone by issuing a statement that Lou Reed came to him in a dream and asked him to take down the covers. "I was annoyed at the media," he explained. "I was like, 'these people will print anything', so I went and gave them the most fraudulent, the most blatantly absurd, unprintable piece of surrealistic nonsense – and they printed it!"

I guess he thinks the people who printed that thought it was something other than surrealistic nonsense but I can assure him that was not the case. It must be interesting to live in a world where you assume people are so dumb. Anyway, this is pure Overtness all around: capitalizes on someone else's really good idea, gets embarrassed about it, tries to be clever/weird, and then finally can't just let that be the last of it because he's worried people might have thought he was serious, which really would have been better than recanting. Poor form, sir!

I'm so weird! You're so dumb!

The Best Version of Walk on the Wild Side: Gerty Molzen

It's by this lady, Gerty Molzen:

Don't  know why I thought of it today, but I learned about it on Dave, long ago...

And the whole thing goes like this...

Dappity doh, dappity doh...

Billy Corgan Says No to Twitter, Yes to People and Their Cars

From Consequence of Sound:

[Corgan's] latest left-field venture comes in the form of People and Their Cars, a new website filled with faded, vintage images of — you guessed it — people and their cars, along with additional pics of old bridges, ships, and bedrooms. It’s like a hipster’s Instagram account, but like, filled with the the real deal. The photography project is so near and dear to Corgan’s heart, that he’s even quit Twitter to focus on it more, per his very final tweet on Monday.

For those interested in keeping up with Corgan and his Cars (that sounds like a good idea for a weird documentary, no?), there’s a “Red Border Club” email list that folks can partake in. Club members will “not only the chance to receive additional images, but to be ‘first-in-line’ for updates on new merchandise and forthcoming People And Their Cars/Hexestential books. An it’s all for FREE: with no catch, fees, or obligation to buy.”

I really, really wish his early music were better because he just seems so damn Advanced sometimes.

People and Their Cars

Jeff Lynne Knows a Thing or Two About Commitment to a Look

Grace Jones Is Not Advanced

I love Grace Jones, and she displays many Advanced qualities. But I'm having a hard time with her recent criticisms of current stars like Kanye West and Miley Cyrus. And now there's this:

In another interview on SiriusXM, Jones recalls the first time she met Gaga in the flesh: "Gaga came to me, and I just could not find a soul. I come from Church — maybe that has something to do with it. I like to get to the soul of a person. I just didn’t feel a soul." Though Jones adds that Gaga "might have been freaked out with meeting me," their interactions never got any better. Jones says she met with Gaga through designer Philip Treacy three more times, each occurrence leaving a sour taste in her mouth. "I know Philip needed to make some money, but you know what, can you just wait until I finish my tour before you repeat what we are working on?" she says, referring to the headpieces he's created for Gaga.

The Advanced move is to partner with seemingly lesser artists, especially if your fans think they are awful, and sometimes even say they are better than you.

Bob Dylan's IBM Commercial Is Advanced Times Two

Bob Dylan has a new commercial, where he embraces technology while selling out:

Remember when you could barely understand him when he spoke? I wonder what that was all about.

Björk's Strings-Only Version Of Vulnicura Is Okay, But No Thrillington

Stereogum, take it away:

Björk’s been messing with her latest creation in interesting ways since its release, first through a three part remix project, and now through a special “strings-only” version of the record. The website’s also dubbing it the “acoustic” cut of the album, which I guess is technically true, but these songs sound just as grand with only the strings, her voice, and the viola organista in play.

That's pretty cool, I guess. But Paul McCartney beat this a long time ago with Thrillington:

In 1977, EMI released what has become Paul McCartney's most obscure and least known album of his career - Thrillington. The album, an instrumental, orchestrated version of his Ram LP, was hardly noticed by the press or the rest of the music world. Hardly surprising, considering the almost complete absence of Paul's name anywhere on the album. Even the artist was listed as someone else - somebody named Percy "Thrills" Thrillington.

Time has revealed that the man behind Percy was none other than Paul McCartney. As chronicled in the Spring 1995 issue of Club Sandwich, McCartney's official fan club newsletter, Paul and Linda dreamed up the idea of the fictional socialite, going as far as placing ads in British newspapers detailing his whereabouts and announcing his upcoming activities (there were, of course, none). But as much as Paul was behind the Thrillington persona, as well as being the source of the songs appearing on the album (which he also produced), there was another man who was as much responsible for what became Thrillington, arranger Richard Hewson.

The story of Thrillington begins nearly a decade before with the beginning of Apple Records. In the mid-60's, Richard Hewson was attending college at the Guild Hall in London. Though studying classical music, he had a strong interest in jazz. "We had a little band; there was only three of us," recalls Hewson. "I played guitar in those days. We had a drummer called Nigel Anthony, who's now an actor." The bass player was another friend of Hewson's, former Peter and Gordon member Peter Asher, who played upright bass in the combo. "We used to go around to his basement in Wimpole Street and practice. At the time, Paul was going out with Peter's sister, Jane, so I got to know him then."

Read the rest of the story and then kick back to listen...

Taylor Swift Inspired John Fogerty to Play Vegas

Vegas is big in the world of Advancement, and a lot of people just love it for some reason. Not me, but I guess that's just Overtness. Anyway, I still found it surprising that John Fogerty is taking his act there:

Fogerty is indeed going to Vegas, and bringing a new show with him. The 70-year-old rock icon describes Peace, Love and Creedence — set for eight performances at the Venetian Theatre, inside the Venetian Las Vegas, between Jan. 8 and Jan. 23 — as an extension of the "1969" tour he launched in 2014 to commemorate the year Creedence released the albums Bayou Country, Green River and Willy and the Poor Boys. "The production we've been doing certainly had extra elements, a lot of visual elements," says Fogerty, who plans to perform other band and solo favorites, from Have You Ever Seen the Rain? to Centerfield. "We're going to use that as a frame of reference, and see if we shake it up a little bit." Fogerty has taken daughter Kelsy "to see Taylor Swift, who I really love"

Even more surprising is how unsurprising it is that, like everyone, he loves Taylor Swift. Hates his old band, loves Taylor Swift. Really, he wasn't inspired to play Vegas because of his love for Swift, he was just commenting on all the choreography in her show and how his show would likely not live up to that, but it's still fun that he loves her.