Odds & ends

On this lovely slow Saturday I am making up a big pot of Dill Turkey Chowder (recipe pretty much like this except I use garlic pepper) and the simmering smells are already fantastic. It’s been a week like that — a lot of interesting thoughts simmering in the back of my mind with no real time to write about them or enjoy. So since it’s Saturday, here’s what I’ve been noticing lately:

Ûž Nil Lara. I still get more comments on this guy, on the single post I wrote back for a previous World Music Wednesday, than almost any other ongoing topic. People across the world love this guy, miss his music, and wonder what he’s been up to. He’s been playing a series of monthly shows down in Florida, much to the joy of many fans, but the great news is that the Yanks get 2 doses of him next month!

Nil Lara has just announced two shows in New York City at The Bitter End in Greenwich Village, Nov 17th @ 8pm and Nov 19th @ 7:30pm. I’d love to see this guy; I’ll be in NYC a few weeks before that for the last weekend in October to see some best girlfriends, but I’ll miss this show unfortunately.

Ûž There’s a new audio interview with Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready from Tacoma, Washington’s News Tribune.

Listen to Mike talk about his reaction to the AT&T censoring of the Lollapalooza webcast, Italian fans and the new DVD, director Danny Clinch, and even some on The Scorpions & Iron Maiden. Rock on.

Ûž The Onion made me laugh with this fantastic “news brief”:

Google Launches ‘The Google’ For Older Adults
September 26, 2007
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—The popular search engine Google announced plans Friday to launch a new site, TheGoogle.com, to appeal to older adults not able to navigate the original website’s single text field and two clearly marked buttons.

Read the rest

Ûž The new Counting Crows album, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, will be delayed in its release until 2008. According to Adam Duritz’s blog:

Update 9/27/07 – “Town Hall, Old Memories, and New Delays”
Greenwich Village, New York City, 10am

. . . This will frustrate some of you I’m sure, and I apologize for that, but we’ve gone to Geffen and asked to push back the release date of Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings until sometime after the New Year.

It was just a crazy busy summer. Between all the touring and the traveling and the mixing and mastering of the new album and putting the together the package and writing all the essays for the August… reissue, we just let some little things fall through the cracks. The record itself is finished but we just did the photo shoot a few weeks ago, the art and packaging deadlines were last week, and, even putting in 20 hr days, it was just impossible to get it all done. There are videos and singles and so many things to decide on and finish and it’s just not the time in our career to be rushing important decisions. Actually, in my opinion, it’s never the right time to rush important decisions. We really try to make records that last forever. I don’t see the point in putting all the work in to do that and then not having the right cover or picking the wrong single or making the wrong video. They’re small things, I guess, but they matter to me and they’re just a few of many.

It’s a tough pill for our record company to swallow. Especially in this day and age, it’s not easy to ask them to postpone a Counting Crows album that would have been on sale for fall and through the Xmas season. Someone somewhere will not be happy with them. Luckily for us, the people we deal with at our label ARE music people and they know that our partnership with Geffen has been a marathon, not a sprint. We haven’t been around together all these years because we were worried about a few months.

Anyway, that’s THAT bit of news. I know it’s a bit of a disappointment but, like I said to all of you the other day, “Remind me never to put out two albums at the same time again.”

I recommend streaming the song that Adam has posted on his MySpace, called “Bleed.” Best as I can tell, it is a song written by Stew/The Negro Problem, and this is a live collaboration with Adam. The lyrics are pretty rich. I’d post it here, but . . . well, you know.

Ûž Finally, the Ike Reilly Assassination show was as mindblowing as I had hoped on Thursday night at the Larimer Lounge.

I voraciously dig the blistering rock songs with a punkish-retro edge, with some of the finest attention to lyrical detail and “flow” of any modern songwriter today. Johnny Hickman (founding member of Cracker) joined Ike for the gig, as Johnny is a local Coloradan now, and they were clearly enjoying themselves. I was particularly riveted by the performance of “The Mixture” (off 2005′s Junkie Faithful) — an incredible, soulful, brutal, unflinchingly introspective, raw tune that I am listening to on repeat these last two days. It goes deeper each time I hear it.

“Girl don’t like the mixture in me,
the liquid in me, the fiction it frees
the liquor in me, the Mick in me,
the fried-out lies for eyes she sees

Where were you?”

The Mixture – Ike Reilly Assassination

The picture above is by Denver photographer Doug Beam from his fine set taken at the show. Quite an unforgettable night.