Month: August 2010

Categories
GUEST EDITOR

From The Desk Of Cowboy Junkies: This Will Make You Want To Visit Us

When Margo Timmins strolled up to the microphone in her low-cut black cocktail dress, wrapped in a scarlet shawl, with a rusty shock of hair draped over one eye a la Veronica Lake, even if you’d never seen Cowboy Junkies before, there was no mistaking her star power at the Villa Montalvo’s Garden Theatre in the summer of ’09. Timmins and two of her brothers, Michael on guitar and Peter on drums, along with bassist Alan Anton, have been doing the slow boil as Cowboy Junkies since 1985. As its name implies, the Toronto-based quartet specializes in quiet, ultra-slow tunes that might sound comforting to strung-out cowpokes hunkered down around a campfire after a long day rounding up stray dogies. Cowboy Junkies will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with Margo.

Alan Anton: I was listening to NPR the other day, where some dude was bongtificating about life in New Orleans—the vibe, the music, the romantic crumminess of it all—and after a pause, he summated: “It’s like very beautiful love made to a really dirty hooker.” That impressed me as being even better than the Vegas “what happens here stays here” thing, and I wondered what indecent city slogan might work for Toronto. My starting point was the squalid cleanliness and the grinding wealth that has defined this city since the hippies left Yorkville back in ’67. The big banks and insurance companies headquartered here after Quebec left Canada (ideologically anyway) in ’76, and Toronto quickly became the big money town, as monumentized in the CN Tower. Developers came and built a condo wall on the waterfront, and the lake left our daily consciousness. In their quest for wealth and World-Class City-ness, the deciders ignored what visitors really want: culture and street life. Ask someone who has visited and they’ll say, “Oh, it was really clean.” You’ll look in vain for the charming sleaziness of New Orleans or the all-you-can-succumb-to temptation package of Las Vegas. So I think we should go the other way with our city slogan. Welcome To Toronto: If You Experience An Erection Lasting More Than Four Hours, You Should Leave.

Video after the jump.

Continue reading “From The Desk Of Cowboy Junkies: This Will Make You Want To Visit Us”
Categories
VIDEOS

Film At 11: UNKLE

If you’ve got 18 minutes to kill, check out this three-part short film, Saviours And Angels, written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams. Serving as the backdrop for the trilogy are three UNKLE songs, “Caged Bird,” “The Runaway,” and “Another Night Out,” which are all off the British duo’s fourth full-length, Where Did The Night Fall, which is out now via Surrender All. Williams teamed up with UNKLE when he asked the band to score his film Cherry Tree Lane, and the band in turn asked him to direct some of its videos. The result, below, gets pretty bizarre and is extremely not safe for work.

Categories
GUEST EDITOR

From The Desk Of Cowboy Junkies: Bryston BCD-1 CD Player

When Margo Timmins strolled up to the microphone in her low-cut black cocktail dress, wrapped in a scarlet shawl, with a rusty shock of hair draped over one eye a la Veronica Lake, even if you’d never seen Cowboy Junkies before, there was no mistaking her star power at the Villa Montalvo’s Garden Theatre in the summer of ’09. Timmins and two of her brothers, Michael on guitar and Peter on drums, along with bassist Alan Anton, have been doing the slow boil as Cowboy Junkies since 1985. As its name implies, the Toronto-based quartet specializes in quiet, ultra-slow tunes that might sound comforting to strung-out cowpokes hunkered down around a campfire after a long day rounding up stray dogies. Cowboy Junkies will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with Margo.

Michael Timmins: I wouldn’t consider myself an audiophile, but there’s nothing like hearing a piece of well-recorded music on an above-average sound system. It’s like hearing it for the first time. Recently, like a lot of people, I’ve been getting back in to vinyl and really enjoying the audiophile pressings that are all the rage these days. But several weeks ago, my 20-year old CD player went down for the last time. I know that the CD is a dying format, but I have several hundred of them in my collection, so I needed a new machine. My first thought was to go to the local big-box store and find some cheap piece of crap to fulfill the need. Then I mentioned that I was looking for a new player to Peter Moore (our audio god), and he turned me on to the Bryston BCD-1. I began to hyperventilate when I saw the price. Peter got me an artist’s deal, which helped a little bit, but I figured I’m in the biz so I should be listening to recorded music as the artist intended it to be listened to. The unit arrived at my front door, I plugged it in, put on “Heart Shaped Box,” cranked it … and … holy-jittering-master-clock … suddenly vinyl almost seems lacking. The depth, intensity and detail of the sound was astounding. My CD collection suddenly has a new life. So if you want to inject some zest into your collection of silvery discs and if you aren’t in any need of your next two months’ mortgage payments, the Bryston BCD-1 is for you.

Video after the jump.

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FREE MP3s

MP3 At 3PM: Bell X1

Irish trio Bell X1 has gone into “unplugged” mode this year, with the release of an acoustic digital EP and an upcoming acoustic U.S. tour in October. The EP (listen to it here) includes a new version of “The Great Defector” (which is off last year’s album Blue Lights On The Runway), along with covers of Don Henley’s “The Boys Of Summer,” Justin Timberlake’s “Like I Love You” and Sonny Curtis’ “I Fought The Law.” The set for the tour will feature songs spanning the band’s entire career as well as some new material that will appear on its forthcoming album, set for a 2011 release.

“The Great Defector” (download):
https://magnetmagazine.com/audio/TheGreatDefector.mp3

Categories
TAKE COVER!

Take Cover! Johnny Cash Vs. Nine Inch Nails

When is a cover song better than the original? Only you can decide. This week Johnny Cash takes on Nine Inch Nail’s “Hurt.” MAGNET’s Ryan Burleson pulls the pin. Take cover!

Judging from the YouTube comments sections of the videos below, the debate over whose version of “Hurt” reigns supreme—Johnny Cash’s cover or Trent Reznor’s original—remains at fever pitch seven years after the former’s take was released. The tension is certainly plausible: Before Rick Rubin recommended the song to the Man In Black, most country fans had never laid ears on the song, despite how deep it’d resonated with rock fans for nearly a decade prior to 2003. Indeed, until then, even some rock purists assumed Reznor was a talentless weirdo, a myth perpetuated by his purchase of the infamous home in L.A. where the Manson family murders took place in 1969. “Le Pig” aside, many others simply relegated Reznor to the status of that other Manson, Marilyn, assuming his music was gimmicky and feckless. Cash’s “Hurt” altered this perception dramatically, reinvigorating an interest in Reznor that stands today while legitimizing his work for many who’d once falsely measured his worth.

The cover did more than shift perceptions of Reznor, of course. Released just five months prior to Cash’s death, the Mark Romanek-directed video, in particular, served as a sort of epitaph to a musical giant, powerfully aligning the elderly, meditative Cash with the youthful, rebellious one. The spartan audio is penetrating on its own, but the video marked a high point in music video-making rarely achieved in the last decade. The experience is not unlike stepping inside Cash’s mind as he wrestles with the finite nature of his being, pondering a life lived to the fullest, though cognizant of the weight that inevitably bears on all humans as they look back for the last time. No matter your religious preference (or lack thereof), the imagery of Christ in the film and the altered lyrics are worth noting, as Cash was devout in his belief in the power of redemption, especially at the end of his life. But, true to form, the song isn’t a blithe gospel incantation; it’s Cash at his most transparent, reliant on his hope above while honest about the contradictions of temporal existence.

“Hurt,” to me, inhabits that holy space of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a song that most everyone can find themselves in. Though Reznor’s opus is plainly more personal than communal, it’s depth transcends bias, marking the zeitgeist of Cash’s end-of-life narrative and the surge of musical decentralization, thanks to the iPod. It’s also a conversation between two legends on the nature of art, which has the power to take on a life of its own, uniting dissimilar people in ways simple dialogue often fails to achieve.

The Cover:

The Original: