Kathleen Edwards / The Flaming Lips

http://pitchfork.com/tv/pitchfork-classic/1885-the-flaming-lips-the-soft-bulletin/

Just in case you were asking yourself, “Self, what is John Gallaher watching this afternoon?”

It’s a very nicely done series of eight videos on the creation of The Flaming Lips’s great album The Soft Bulletin, which is one of my favorite things in teh universe.  It says there’s an embed option, but I can’t get it to work.  You should go there than watch it right now.  The Flaming Lips are an unusually forthcoming crowd.  You never know what they’ll say next, but you can be certain it’ll be interesting. Like what Wayne Coyne has to say about "meaning things" and where he found the image for the cover. (Not to mention the true spiderbite story.)

And then this, from Paste, on Kathleen Edwards, on her excellent new album out today:

http://mplayer.pastemagazine.com/issues/week-28/articles#article=/issues/week-28/articles/kathleen-edwards-making-a-left-turn-at-the-crossroads

Edwards is suggesting that there are two kinds of premeditated change: change that repudiates a mistaken past and change that breaks from a successful past before it curdles. She was looking for the second kind of change but wasn’t sure how to go about it.

. . .

If narrative songs rely on the forward movement of time—first this happened, then that happened—reinforced by the forward movement of rhythm, metaphoric songs deemphasize time. The latter approach tries to capture one particular moment or feeling by encircling the target with layers of images and similes—and also with layers of harmony. So it’s not surprising that her two co-writes with Roderick replaced the twangy, clippety-clop canter of her early songs with more atmospheric resonance.

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So today it’s The Flaming Lips and Kathleen Edwards.  What an interesting painting.

I meant to write "pairing" above, but sometimes you just have to go with the typo.

And as long as I’m just talking, here are a few more things I’ve come across today:

D.A. Powell is judging The Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry.  Submissions accepted January 1 - March 31 http://www.fourwaybooks.com/contest.php

Territory Ahead is telling me to “Remember What You're Best At‏.”  Yikes.  Well, whatever sells shirts, I guess. 

And then there’s this:

Poets & Writers is telling me that there are “Over 770 Literary Magazines Looking for Your Work‏.”  That sounds like an obscene number of literary magazines.  Could the English-speaking poetry world really be large enough for that?  And really, I hate the visual of that many literary magazines out there looking for my work.  Double yikes.  Yikes yikes.  Seriously.