Posts Tagged Twitter
Jennifer Haase on No More Invitations
Jennifer Haase
My musical realm of knowledge continually grows thanks to social networking. Singer/songwriter Jennifer Haase is the latest example, having been introduced to her music via her Twitter account. This September will mark the release of Haase’s latest album, No More Invitations. It was interesting to talk to an artist like Haase, given that she recently walked away from Corporate America to commit fully to her musical career. We discuss that transition, as well as the fundraising effort for her upcoming release and her overall approach to her music.
Tim O’Shea: How long has your upcoming album been in the works?
Jennifer Haase: It was spring 2006 when my record producer Mike Leslie and I shook hands with a plan to start this record together. If we’d known then what we know now, ha! It’s been 4 amazing, enlightening, tumultuous music-making years with him and my recording engineer Robert L. Smith. I told Mike recently that I feel like this project has weaved itself into the fabric of our lives.
O’Shea: Which has been harder, raising the funds to make the album or recording the album itself?
Haase: Making the album has been much harder on me than the fundraiser. The Boys (Mike & Robert) can confirm that I’m sometimes prone to impatience and bouts of self-doubt. With perhaps a teensy hair-thin sliver of perfectionism when it comes to my singing voice. Barely detectable beneath my joyous song-recording rapture, of course. A-hem.
Ideas I Respect: Blue Star Museums
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on July 6, 2010
Blue Star Museums
Many folks may have already heard about the Blue Star Museums concept, given it has been in effect since Memorial Day, but I just found out about it myself, thanks to a tweet from MOMA.
As noted at its site, the Blue Star Museums is ”a partnership among Blue Star Families, the National Endowment for the Arts, and more than 850 museums in all 50 states to offer free admission to military personnel and their families from Memorial Day, May 31, 2010, through Labor Day, September 6, 2010.”
In addition to the initiative’s main site (which features an interactive map allowing folks to see which museums in the 50 states are participating), there is a blog providing even more in-depth information and museum advice.
In these tight economic times, I’m glad to see folks coming up with ways to support the families of the military in such a positive as well as culturally enriching manner.
Tweaks to the Blog
Posted by admin in pop culture on June 19, 2010
I’ve added my Twitter RSS feed on the right hand side. I’ve also added a recent posts widget, as well as the means to highlight recent comments.
Are there improvements you would like to see added to the site? I’m always open to suggestions on any front, so please let me know. Post a comment here or drop me a line via email (editor AT talkingwithtim.com)
Chelsea Crowell on Solo Music, Jane Only
I broaden my musical knowledge in various ways. In the case of Chelsea Crowell, I found out about her music via Twitter. I recently e-mail interviewed Crowell on the eve of her entering the studio to record her second solo effort (she entered the studio on June 8). Her first solo effort, Chelsea Crowell (also available from Amazon and on iTunes), was released last year, while her earlier collaborative band effort, Jane Only (also available from Amazon and on iTunes), was released last month (both from Cleft Music). Before jumping into the interview, here are snippets from her bio: “Chelsea Crowell is an American songwriter, singer, artist and author. She has lived in New York, Baltimore, Memphis, Charleston, Colorado and Nashville. Having grown up in a musical family, she began writing and playing guitar as a teenager … Her real start in music began when she moved back to Nashville in 2004 with guitarist, Stephen Braren. They lived together on the top floor of a now bulldozed, pre war walk up apartment building on 31st Ave called Maberta. It had a clear view of the Nashville skyline at the time. It was there they would shoot fireworks from the window towards the Parthenon but always hitting the neighbors across the street. The two eventually formed the band “Jane Only” with Lincoln Kaufman. The group became Stephen, Chelsea, Marty Linville and Fletcher Bangs Watson the Sixth … In ’08, Chelsea began her first solo project with producer and fellow generational conduit, Loney John Hutchins. … Originally meant to be an experiment while band mate Braren was on tour with band, Cheap Time, by early ’09 a full length record had taken form. It is being released on vinyl, cd, and online through Hutchins’ Cleft Music imprint … She is currently working on an opera as well as her sophomore record.” My thanks to Cleft Music‘s Hutchins for putting me in contact with Crowell, and to Crowell, most importantly, for her valuable time and thoughts.
Tim O’Shea: What was the inspiration for “Where the Hell is Robert E. Lee” (Cut 10 from your solo release)?
Chelsea Crowell: Aside from being from the south and having a bit of an American civil war history fetish, I wanted to write a song that was historically accurate. Aside from the line in the song about Sal T, who was my ancestor Sal Taylor Willoughby, the song can be fact checked. I have a note book of biography songs I wrote that I hope to make an entire record of when I am done with the projects I am working on now. For the sake of my first debut album, there was plenty of love-lorn-lost and low down emotion, so it was between ‘Robert E Lee’ or a song about ‘typhoid Mary’ just to throw off the singular heartbreak. The civil war was a different sort of heartbreak.
Peter Bradley Adams on His Music
Posted by admin in Music, Uncategorized on May 19, 2010
I first became aware of Peter Bradley Adams‘ musical acumen back in 2005 when he was one-half of the musical duo, Eastmountainsouth, and one of the duo’s songs was featured on the Elizabethtown soundtrack. More recently, Adams has pursued his solo interests, including (as detailed at his website) “Gather Up, Leavetaking, and his most recent, Traces, in October 2009 on Sarathan Records“. If you’re looking to get a taste of Adams music for free, you’re in luck as currently Amazon is offering a sampler of three of his songs here. He’s currently back in the studio, recording his next release–and has established a Kickstarter page to collect funds for it. Before getting into the interview, one last tip–Adams will perform live on WUMB (Boston, MA) next Wednesday, May 26, at 2pm. My thanks to Adams for his time and Sarathan’s Marc Ratner for helping to arrange the email interview.
Tim O’Shea: Over the past several months, your songs have appeared on CBS’s The Mentalist, WB’s One Tree Hill and ABC’s Brothers and Sisters. What do you think it is about your music and/or lyrics that makes it so clearly appealing to TV producers?
Peter Bradley Adams: I think the producers for those shows are just looking for the right mood from a song. And of course lyrics that fit but don’t describe the scene too literally. And I just happened to have a few songs which fit the bill and got in their hands at the right time. I’m lucky.
Johnny Bacardi on His Pop Culture Perspective
Posted by admin in Music, comics, episodic TV, pop culture on April 21, 2010
A sample from one of Johnny Bacardi's many pop culture outlets
In terms of pop culture insight, I wish I was as informed and diverse in my knowledge as Johnny Bacardi. Bacardi and I have similar tastes on several fronts, but his knowledge is amazing. How amazing? I had to interview him in hopes of learning a fraction of what he knows. You’ll note I did not link to his website in this introduction, but only because I could not pick one distinct site. We discuss many of his sites in the course of this email interview, so please follow the links there. And thanks to Bacardi for his time. Did I mention I’m amazed there was any such thing as cable in the 1960s (as he briefly mentions)?
Tim O’Shea: You have a diverse appreciation covering almost every aspect of pop culture, can you recall what your first form of media (TV, film, music, comics or what) that first caught your attention as a kid?
Johnny Bacardi: Hm. Probably a children’s book of some sort, most likely a Little Golden. I remember having an illustrated version of The Night Before Christmas, and another about Beany and Cecil, who were on TV when I was small. My folks subscribed to several magazines, as well as Reader’s Digest. Of course, not long after came comics and music and TV (our small town had cable very early on, in the early-mid 60s- 12 channels, but still!), all at sort of the same time, around 1963 or 64. You see, I could read before I started preschool, as early as age 3. Don’t ask me how, I have no recollection of actually “learning”. I blame comics, with the picture/word association thing going on. This led to a lot of heightened expectations for me, which, sorry to say, I spent most of my formative years failing to live up to.
Tori Sparks on Her Music
Posted by admin in Music, Uncategorized on March 31, 2010
Tori Sparks
The way I discovered Tori Sparks‘ music was a fortunate fluke. One late night/early morning on the Cayamo cruise, after most of the music had ended for the evening–I went looking for where any jam sessions might have been happening. And that’s when I discovered Sparks performing an impromptu show in the ship’s library. I so enjoyed her witty storytelling and performance skills, I decided to get an email interview with her. We got to discuss last year’s release, as detailed here: “Tori’s third album, The Scorpion in the Story, was co-produced with indie rock veteran David Henry (R.E.M., Ben Folds, Josh Rouse, Widespread Panic, Cowboy Junkies) , and features players such as Steve Bowman (Counting Crows), Will Kimbrough (Rodney Crowell), Viktor Krauss (Lyle Lovett, Mindy Smith, Allison Krauss), Fats Kaplin (Mark Knopfler, Kevin Welch), and Barry Walsh (Gretchen Peters) … The Scorpion in the Story is a tale in thirteen chapters, a tour diary in the form of a concept album . Each song was written about one of the many colorful individuals Tori met while touring across the U.S. last year. The album includes a French version of the song ‘Merry Go-Round,’ (‘Le Manege’), and was released on Glass Mountain Records in June 2009.” As evidenced by some of our discourse, in addition to her musical talents, she’s also quite effective in terms of marketing. My thanks to Sparks for her time.
Tim O’Shea: How did the duet with Shawn Mullins on Letter to a Wretch #2 come about–what is it about Mullins’ voice (and how it interacts/plays off/compliments yours) that motivated you to want to duet with him?
Tori Sparks: I contacted Shawn and asked him if he’d be willing to sing on the song, and was very happy when he said yes. He’s a very gracious guy, and extremely supportive of independent music too – he worked on his own for about ten years before ever signing a record deal, so he knows what it’s like to have to be out there working for it. I’ve always loved the range and the timbre of his voice, and of course his songs as well. Both always ring true to my ears. He sings and writes from the heart.
Deborah Beale on Using Twitter to Preview Tad Williams’ Shadowrise
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on January 24, 2010
Tad Williams' Shadowrise
As damn fine a writer and editor that Deborah Beale is, I consider her equally great as a marketing genius. I’ve written before about some of her and husband/business partner/writer Tad Williams marketing ventures before in this post from last October. I recently joined Twitter (find me here as Talkingwithtim) and have started observing how folks that I respect utilize it to their advantage. This March, Volume 3 in Williams’ Shadowmarch series, Shadowrise, will be released. To whet the appetite of fans anticipating the book’s release, Beale is twittering (as MrsTad) excerpts from the book. The most recent series of tweets started on January 23. I had to ask Beale a few questions about the effort, and she was more than happy to oblige me in this mini email interview. My thanks to Beale for her time and efforts, as always.
Tim O’Shea: How did you come up with the idea to start sharing excerpts from Tad’s new novel, Shadowrise via Twitter?
Deborah Beale: It wasn’t a flash-bang moment; it just occurred to me sometime back that it would be a cool thing to do. I was waiting for a finished manuscript from Tad, and I wanted to fit in with the publishers wishes too, which means streaming something close to publication date. Now, of course, I’m wondering who else might be doing something like this. There was one fiction-experiment last year, I can’t remember the details but it didn’t end well. I’m just throwing stuff out there for our followers and mailing list (who got a free short story for Xmas.) And I’m having fun with it.
Holt & Perren on Media Industries: History, Theory and Method
Posted by admin in commerce, education, media industries, philosophy, pop culture on May 6, 2009
It seems like media industries are being redefined on a fairly frequent basis these days. So when I found out about the new textbook, Media Industries: History, Theory and Method, I was curious to see what ground the textbook covered. Fortunately, the editors of the textbook, Jennifer Holt (Assistant Professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara) and Alisa Perren (Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University) were quite willing to answer my questions. In the spirit of the collaborative way that they edited the textbook, Holt and Perren collaborated on the answers. Once you’ve read the interview, be sure to also visit Professor Perren’s media industries blog. My thanks to both Holt and Perren for the interview. And if that’s not enough for you, be sure to visit Wiley’s (the publisher’s) site to download a PDF excerpt of the textbook.
Tim O’Shea: How did the idea for the textbook first come about?
Jennifer Holt/Alisa Perren: We both teach classes about the media industries and were frustrated with the lack of course materials devoted to this subject – especially materials approaching the topic from a humanistic perspective. We also saw that the study of media industries had been growing and expanding but it had not yet been mapped as a field in an academic text. So we enlisted some of the people who have done formative work in this area as well as those doing new scholarship to help us put what we saw as the emerging field of media industries into context for our readers. (To view the book’s table of contents, click here.)
O’Shea: How did you divvy up the editorial duties on the textbook?
Holt/Perren: This was truly a collaborative effort. We worked together in recruiting contributors, editing all of the essays, and writing the introduction. And amazingly, we remained friends through it all.
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