#Columbia music

[sweetdreamsjeff]

LIVE AT SIN-E - LEGACY EDITION

2 CD + DVD release celebration planned

Live Music + Documentary Film Preview + Special Guests + Giveaways at SIN-E

On Tuesday, September 2, 2003 (CD release day)

The Estate of Jeff Buckley and Shane Doyle, owner of Sin-e, present an evening of rising musical talents, documentary film preview, and giveaways to celebrate the end of a 10-year wait for the commercial release of Jeff Buckley Live at Sin-e -- legacy Edition, deluxe 2-CD package of 157 minutes of music plus an 11-minute DVD. The evet will take place at the recently re-opened sin-e, 150 Attorney Street, New York City, on Tuesday, September 2, 2003 (doors at 7:30 PM), the same day that the 2CD + DVD arrives in stores across the United States. Tickets for the event will be $10.00 each and admission is for those 21 years & over.

The following festivities are planned:

First local airing of songs from the Live at Sin-e (Legacy Edition) and a screening of an 11-minute DVD featuring 3 live performances shot at Sin-e, and additional interview footage of Jeff recalling his early gigs.

World Premiere Preview of Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley, a passionately crafted documentary five years in the making, ready for domestic and international film festivals in 2004. Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley takes viewers on an expansive, yet incredibly intimate trip through the world of Jeff Buckley.

A variety of musical guests who played with or were influenced by Jeff Buckley over the years including Sandy Bell, the group Maggi, Pierce & EJ, Brendan O'Shea, Sage, Jeffrey Hyde Thompson, Emily Wells and other unannounced special guests.

Cool, limited promo items offered to attendees from the Estate of Jeff Buckley and Sony Music Entertainment.

Originally issued as a 4-song EP, Jeff Buckley - Live at Sin-e was the first official Columbia release by Jeff and was originally issued in the final days of December 1993, within weeks of his "showcase" performances to fifty people or so at the hole-in-the-wall coffee-house on the Lower East Side. Until the release of his debut full length album Grace the following August, the EP was the only memento of those incredible nights (July 19 & August 17, 1993), solo tours de forces by the 27-year-old Buckley armed only with his Telecaster and a Guinness. The appearance of this 157-minute 2-CD package is cause for rejoicing among Jeff's fans. Among the 34 tracks are a dozen between-song monologues by Jeff -- ranging from poignant to surreal to downright hilarious -- and 22 songs that range from covers of Billie Holiday, Led Zeppelin and Nina Simone, to Nussrat Fateh Ali Khan, Bob Dylan and Ray Charles, plus a dozen original works from Jeff.

[phoenixyfriend]

Pro-Palestine music as protest has been a thing for ages but nothing prepared me for "Hind's Hall" by Macklemore, which has both some great lyrics, some great commentary on protests at Columbia, and for which ALL PROCEEDS GO TO UNRWA.

You don't gotta like his music, but damn. Gotta admit Macklemore has been putting his money where his mouth is for months on this issue.

You can donate directly to UNRWA on their website.

It's not yet on streaming platforms but I heard a snippet in Democracy Now, and he posted part of it to Twitter/X.

I will disclaim that I disagree with the "not voting for Biden" thing, due to the fact that I personally believe that the American political system forces a Lesser Evil approach. I understand the intent, but I do disagree on a personal and political level.

[mysharona1987]

[the-fabulous-johnny-cash]

Johnny Cash Mugshot at Folsom Prison (1966)

[the-mother-of-lions]

J CHRIST - LIL NAS X (January 12, 2024)

[mystic-sn0w]

[scopophilic1997]

scopOphilic_micromessaging_1054 - scopOphilic1997 presents a new micro-messaging series: small, subtle, and often unintentional messages we send and receive verbally and non-verbally.

[cutencaffeinated-blog]

I may be too old to be part of the campus protests going on now, but I have the utmost respect for these students and supporters.

The kids in their first years of college? They were born in 2004-6. They were kindergarten age when Sandy Hook happened. They were in junior high when covid hit. They are struggling to choose a path to education that doesn't put their own lives or entire vulnerable populations at risk.

I was born in 1990. The first instance of school violence I knew of was Columbine, and I was 9. The first instance of terrorism or threat to my "normal" was 9/11, and I was 11. My first indication that the US might not be the altruistic big brother of the world was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was 13. The first time I realized that family financial situations can change unpredictably, was 2005 (parental medical issues, followed by 08 crash), and I was 15. My first experience being the victim of police brutality was in 2007, I was 17. The first currently-happening protests I knew of were Occupy Wall Street in 2011, I was 21. The first ongoing attempts at revolution I was aware of were Arab Spring in 2012, I was 22. I was in my 30s when I learned colleges support genocide and the military industrial complex. For the first three decades of my life, I was able to convince myself the system was working and progress was happening, at a snail's pace, but nonetheless.

These kids have NEVER existed in a world that felt safe, have never had a future that seemed secure, have never even lived the illusion of the American Dream. The kids who are trying to choose a college that doesn't support genocide were the first kindergartners to do active shooter drills, how do they choose which university to allow to point guns at them? These were the first kids to have to live through, and study the historical impact of Covid, and they saw that the economy is valued above all else. These kids lost their virginity or came out of the closet in a world that was getting safer only to have healthcare taken from them. The world has failed this generation so intensely, and I can only hope y'all hold society accountable.

I have a child now, a true Gen Alpha Honey badger, and I am so hopeful that gen z can lead the charge to making sure my child doesn't have to face these same choices. Go forth, we got your backs, I'm too old and disabled to be front lines anymore, but I'll show up with snacks and do the jail release runs. I'll babysit and cook for when y'all get back from your actions.

[thisisrealy2kok]

Columbia - Y2K Beat The Clock (1999)

[coutureboard]

[agentx8d]

BASSAM’S FAMILY NEEDS HELP 🇵🇸

Haya, Bassam’s daughter, and her cat in the tents of Rafah.

Bassam needs help to get his family out of Gaza IMMEDIATELY. His family already survived countless encounters with death, and with the threatened invasion of Rafah as well as the continuing bombardment this may be their only chance for SURVIVAL! Please help me share their message so they can receive help and get out of Gaza!

[gameraboy2]

1970 Columbia Record Club's 15th Anniversary

[dreamings-free]

James Vincent McMorrow: ‘I’ve been building back a version of me that made me happy rather than crying every night’

The Dubliner isn’t the first name that comes to mind as a songwriter for a boy-band megastar. But working with Louis Tomlinson was just what he needed after his record-label disappoinment

The Irish Times | Sat Nov 30 2024 by Ed Power

During the pandemic the songwriter and producer James Vincent McMorrow would rise early, go for a run and write songs for Louis Tomlinson, of One Direction.

“I actually made half of a record for him,” he says. Tomlinson’s team “had a lot of songs but maybe not a lot that he was as into as he wanted to be. I think they were maybe looking for a weirdo. So they reached out to me. I love him. He’s a fascinating human being. I absolutely loved making that album,” adds McMorrow, who is about to start a tour of Ireland.

When it comes to potential collaborators with a boy band megastar, McMorrow’s name is not the first that springs to mind. He’s an indie songwriter whose open-veined, falsetto-driven pop has been compared to that of folkies such as Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens. But Tomlinson was a fan of the Dubliner’s beautifully wrought music. He wasn’t alone: Drake famously sampled McMorrow on his 2016 track Hype.

One of the tracks they wrote together, The Greatest, would serve as the opener to Tomlinson’s second LP, Faith in the Future. As is often the way with the music industry, the rest are in a vault somewhere. Still, for McMorrow the opportunity to work with a pop star was about more than simply putting his craft in front of a wider audience. The call from Tomlinson’s team had come at a low point for the Irishman, who had become mired in confusion and doubt after signing to a major label for the first time in his career.

Executives at Columbia Records had recognised potential in McMorrow as an artist who bridged the divide between folk and pop. The fruits of that get-together would see daylight in September 2021 as the excellent Grapefruit Season LP, on which McMorrow teamed up with Paul Epworth, who has also produced Adele and Florence Welch.

The album was a beautifully gauzy rumination on the birth of his daughter and the muggy roller coaster of first-time parenthood. It went top 10 in Ireland and breached the top 100 in the UK. Yet the experience of working within the major-label system was strange for McMorrow, who at that point had been performing and recording for more than a decade. He didn’t hate it. But he knew he didn’t ever want to do it again.

“It was a weird time. I stopped touring in 2017. My daughter was born in 2018. I signed with Columbia Records at the same time and made a record that … There were moments within it I was proud of. But fundamentally, I think if I was being very honest, I would say that I definitely got lost in the weeds of what the music industry wanted for me rather than what I wanted for myself.”

Finding his way out of the weeds involved putting out The Less I Knew, a mixtape of tracks, in 2022, and, in June 2024, Wide Open, Horses, the official follow-up to Grapefruit Season. It’s a fantastic reboot from an artist who has found his way into the light once again. The album showcases McMorrow’s propulsive voice – imagine a goth Bee Gees – and his ability to turn a diaristic observation about a tough day into musical quicksilver, as he does on White Out, a blistering ballad that draws on his experience of suffering a panic attack while out at the shops (“white out on the city street … pain comes from strangest places”).

He workshopped the project with two concerts at the National Concert Hall in Dublin in March 2023, performing the as-yet-unfinished record all the way through. The risk of something going amiss was significant – which was why he did it in the first place.

“Those shows, that process was me very much back on my bullshit,” he says, meaning that, having tried to fit into a corporate structure, he was embracing his old idiosyncratic methods once again.

“I’m the worst sort of career musician in a lot of ways. I do the weird thing. I like doing things that make me interested selfishly. ‘I’m engaged with this process.’ ‘The stress of this is making me feel the way that I want to feel.’ And I’d lost that. Doing those two shows was me doing something where I was, like, ‘There’s stakes to this’ ... ‘If I f**k this up, people are going to see it.’ That brings out the best in me.”

McMorrow grew up in Malahide, the well-to-do town in north Co Dublin; as a secondary-school student he suffered debilitating shyness. In 2021 he revealed that he had struggled with an eating disorder at school, ending up in hospital (“Anorexia that progressed into bulimia”). He was naturally retiring, not the sort to crave the spotlight. But he was drawn to music. “It was definitely a difficult journey,” he says. He wasn’t alone in that. “The musicians that tend to cut through and make it ... A lot of my friends, musicians that are successful, they’re not desperate for the stage.”

The Tomlinson collaboration was part of his strange relationship with the mainstream music industry. It went back to McMorrow’s third LP, Rising Water, from 2016. A move away from his earlier folk-pop, the project had featured engineering from Ben Ash, aka Two Inch Punch, a producer who had worked with chart artists such as Jessie Ware, Sia and Wiz Khalifa.

That was followed by the Drake sample in 2016 and by McMorrow writing the song Gone, which was at one point set to be recorded by a huge pop star whom he’d rather not identify.

“Gone is the red herring of red herrings in my entire career. I wrote that song for other people. I didn’t write it for myself. The whole reason I signed to Columbia Records and I had all these deals was because of Gone. I was very happy tipping away in my weird little world. And then I wrote that song, and a lot of bigger artists came in to try to take it,” he says.

“I won’t name names. There were recordings of it done. It got very close to being a single for someone else. I would go in these meetings with all these labels, and I would play it for them – just to play. Not with any sense of ‘This is my song.’ And they were, like, ‘You’re out of your mind if you don’t take this song. This is the song that will make you the thing that is the thing.’ And I was, like, ‘You’re wrong.’ For a year I basically was, like, ‘I disagree.’ And if you go in a room with enough people enough times and they tell you that you’re crazy ... I loved the song, but I did not love it for me. I never felt I fit. There was a little part of me that wanted to believe.”

As he had predicted, Gone wasn’t a hit. He received a lot of other strange advice, including that he cash in on the mercifully short-lived craze for NFTs by putting out an LP as a watermarked internet file. All of that was swirling in his brain when Tomlinson got in touch. To be able to step outside his own career was exactly what McMorrow needed.

“With Louis it was like boot camp. I had a very limited time with him. I had to wake up every morning, go for a run, write a song in my head, go to the studio. We made songs all day long. It lit a fire in my head again. I loved the process. I like sitting and talking to someone like Louis, who’s had this unbelievably fascinating lifestyle – so much tragedy in his life,” he says. Tomlinson’s mother and sister died within three years of each other, and his 1D bandmate Liam Payne died in October. “So many things have happened to him. I chatted to him and then write constantly. That was a lovely process.”

Because life is strange and full of contrasts McMorrow ended up working with Tomlinson around the same time that he was producing the Dublin postpunk “folk-metal” band The Scratch, on their LP Mind Yourself. “Totally different animals,” he says. “The Scratch album was an intense period in the studio of that real old-school nature of making music. A lot of fights. A lot of pushing back against ideas. A lot of different opinions. And you have to respect everybody’s opinions and find the route through.”

During his brief time on a major label, McMorrow was reminded of the music industry’s weakness for short-term thinking. In 2019, the business was obsessed with streaming numbers and hot-wiring the Spotify algorithm so that your music posted the highest possible number of plays.

“Everyone was driven by stats. ‘This song has 200 million streams.’ ‘That song has 400 million streams.’ I went into my meetings with Columbia Records ... the day I had my first big marketing meeting was the day my catalogue passed a billion streams, which, for someone like me, who started where I started, was a day where I should be popping champagne corks. Instead they immediately started talking about how they have artists that have one song that has two billion streams. So by their rule of thumb I was half as successful as one song by one artist on their label.”

Five years later he believes things have changed. He points to Lankum, a group who will never set Spotify alight yet who have carved a career by doing their own thing and not chasing the short-term goal of a place on the playlist. They are an example to other musicians, McMorrow says.

“I was in Brooklyn, doing two nights, a week and a half ago. In the venue across the road from where we were, pretty much, Lankum were doing two nights and had [the Dublin folk artist] John Francis Flynn opening for them. Those are two artists that, if you were to look at their stats, you wouldn’t be, like, ‘These are world-beating musicians.’ You start aggregating to this stat-based norm and you miss bands like Lankum, bands like The Mary Wallopers, people like John Francis Flynn.”

McMorrow is looking forward to his forthcoming Irish tour, which he sees as another leg of his journey to be his best possible self.

“The last two, three years have been a process of building it back to a version of me that actually made me happy rather than making me cry at night-time – a version that was making music because I liked it. Within this industry there’s so much outside noise. It’s quite overwhelming. I was overwhelmed. It’s been nice to reset the clock.”

James Vincent McMorrow’s new single is Glu. He plays Vicar Street, in Dublin, on Monday, December 2nd, and Tuesday, December 3rd; Black Box, Galway, on Thursday, December 5th; and Set Theatre, Kilkenny, on Saturday, December 7th

This article was amended on December 2nd, 2024, to correct the name of Louis Tomlinson’s second album

[the-fabulous-johnny-cash]

Johnny Cash Greatest Hits Volume 1 (1967)

[the-mother-of-lions]

bitch i'm back like j christ

[oldshowbiz]

Canadian comedian Tommy Chong had an incredible music career long before he met Cheech.