Ben Walker

“I became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars and they had to be there. Even his words - all of the syllables are divided up so they make perfect mathematical sense. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records.”

“Comte’s thinking on religion had as its starting point a characteristically blunt observation that, in the modern world, thanks to the discoveries of science, it would no longer be possible for anyone intelligent or robust to believe in God. Faith would henceforth be limited to the uneducated, the fanatical, women, children and those in the final months of incurable diseases.”

What a quaere fellow...

“If you give fans great songs, a great show, and a great party…they can and will do everything else now. Everything.”

“As the Jesuits might say, ‘Give me the child and I’ll give you a customer for life,’” he says. “The Beatles are just so f*cking wholesome.”

Post-micturition convulsion syndrome

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For myself, I think it’s critical to set reasonable expectations about how, when, and where people can expect to have authentic, honest-to-God contact with us, and here’s why: if you leave every channel open to everybody and anybody, all the time and without limit, you necessarily prevent yourself from ever stepping away from the fray for long enough to focus. You’ll never make the time that it takes to produce the sort of good work that theoretically made you so appealing in the first place.

And, perhaps as importantly, you also can never devote your undivided attention to the biped mammals who are breathing air in the room with you. Here. People. With faces and hands. Not “friends,” but friends. Real people. Because, if total focus on the known important stuff in your life has to battle with a never-ending doorbell attached to your brain, it’s hard for me to imagine how your work, or your family, or your sense of who you are, alone in a room without the ringing, can possibly thrive. But, again, that’s really up to you to decide.

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“A fantastic band I saw at Terminal 5 in NYC a couple months ago is Little Fish. Little Fish cares more about their fans than any act I’ve encountered for a long while. The duo from the UK have something called the Little Fish Paper Club, where you sign up, and they hand-make and send you absolutely gorgeous little presents. All they ask for in return? Nothing. There is an opt-in mailing list signup at the bottom of the registration form. Talk about dedication to fans. I’m sold twice now. They absolutely rock so give them a listen and spread the word!”

“Sunshine, my darlings, Musical fucking sunshine…”

“Type Two bundling [where you have to buy it all - good and bad] is nothing more than the pig of artificial scarcity wearing the lipstick of producer-driven choice. And you know my views on that: every artificial scarcity will be met with an equal and opposite artificial abundance.”

“For me, I had to be hit over the head several times. I used to think that blogging, Twitter, and Facebook were all idiotic, narcissistic wastes of time. (Well, OK, I still think Facebook is a kinda stupid.) In each case, I had a conversion experience in which I came to realize how the utility of the tool is not so much in what it enables me to do but in how it changes the way I want to be. I learned new behaviors and habits that I found to be productive and fulfilling. I learned to ask questions that I probably wouldn’t have asked otherwise, to reach out to more people more often for help, and to rely much more on the intelligence of my friends and colleagues to help me on my intellectual (and social) journey. These changes are intimately related to the ways in which we learn.”

Walk With Me

750 Words

“The biggest confusion is the idea that music is a chosen career – it can’t be, unless you actually take up an appointed position within a going business concern, as in a seat in an orchestra, a position in a gigging well paid covers band or whatever… Being brilliant has never mapped to a guaranteed salary, and working hard previously would only shorten the odds on you being a success.”

“Twitter is your opportunity to show off your best attributes. Some people will defend rude or tactless behavior on Twitter by quipping, “I’m just being myself.” It’s true, but you’re also just being yourself when you’re using the toilet. Don’t share every little facet of your life, only the charming parts.”

The National Trust | Music To Think To

“With the flattening of recognition accuracy comes the flattening of a great story arc of our age: the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence.”

Create Tumblr Bookmarklet in Safari on the iPad — Ken Clark

“Courtney is a cataclysmic event. Watching her perform is not about the songs, or the banter, or the band, or the crowd. It’s about Courtney, and just being in her presence is electrifying.”

“He was supposed to get through dinner not thinking about the only things he could think about. He was supposed to do this forever. However much he might crave to get out, he was to remain stopped dead in the moment in that box. Otherwise the world would explode.”

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Hole looked even more lackluster after an opening set by Little Fish, a three-piece band from Oxford, England, that is about to release an album on Ms. Perry’s label, Custard. Julia Sophie, its singer and guitarist, seizes the incantatory tone of Patti Smith, P. J. Harvey and Siouxsie Sioux. Her thick, quivering voice rode three-chord rock songs that accelerated as she wailed about desire and power, and sent her striding and skittering around the stage.

Little Fish’s one slow tune, with sparse, sustained organ behind a plaintive “I lost my way,” was equally arresting. Little Fish had the raw rock spark that doesn’t depend on fame.

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“Their strength is tremendous, their teamwork is flawless. The shattering of the glass windows is thrilling. The not paying for things is intoxicating. The American appetite for ownership is dazzling to behold.”

Meeting Linda Perry

• Linda Perry: So you're the new Hammond guy, huh?
• Me: Yep.
• LP: I've been told you're good.
• Me: ...
• LP: Don't let me down.
• Me: I'll see what I can do.

“I have been thinking about the love-hat relationship. It is the relationship based on love of one another’s hats. The problem with the love-hat relationship is that it is superficial. You don’t necessarily even know the other person. Also it is too dependent on whether the other person is even wearing the favored hat. We all enjoy hats, but they’re not something to build an entire relationship on. My advice to young people is to like hats but not love them. Try having like-hat relationships with one another. See if you can find something interesting about the personality of the person whose hat you like.”

“Home electricity was a hard thing to sell because people used to gas lighting and the domestic equipment of the time simply could not imagine what electricity might be used for. As a result the focus is on the transformative power of the electric light, because it is easy to describe and easy to illustrate.”

“Spotify isn’t a replacement for CDs. It’s a replacement for adverts. It’s not stealing money from sales, it’s saving money from promo. It makes no sense to think otherwise, and if you do think otherwise, and you’re music is still on Spotify, you’re either an idiot, or trapped in the kind of record deal that is symptomatic of everything that was bad about the old industry – big corporate machines working against the expressed interest (well informed or otherwise) of the artists they really ought to be working for.”

“By focussing on a pre-millenial obsession with money-changing-hands-at-the-point-of-discovery, you’re effectively crapping on the best music discovery, fan-generating, culture-sharing, life-benefitting ecosphere that musicians in the world have ever experienced.”

“The entertainment industry as a whole has seen record revenues. The period from January until October 2009 saw record singles sales within the UK, according to the British Phonographic Industry — so much so that the number of singles sold in that period was nearly three times the number sold for the whole of 2002. The statistics presented to Parliament are a simplistic measure of losses, based upon estimates of file-sharing supplied by the British Phonographic Industry (themselves extrapolated from a survey of a small group of people, and was widely debunked in June 2009). Indeed, the sectors of industry which the referenced report claims could suffer three hundred thousand job losses in the UK employs only marginally more than that to begin with. Is it really the case that legitimate sales will cease altogether, despite rising steadily for the past ten years?”

“Chatroulette is a pure expression of that punk spirit, delivered through the tools available to today’s teenagers rather than the electric guitar and seven-inch single of my childhood, and the anger with which it has been received by the establishment is a testament to its disruptive potential.”

Phil Campbell interviewing me at MediaCamp Nottingham

“‘I really enjoy it – it’s a fantastic song’. No, it isn’t. It’s rubbish. At this point in the show, it becomes obvious that Bannatyne isn’t so much struggling to choose just 8 songs from eternal playlist of his life, he’s struggling to just think of 8 songs he’s ever even heard.”

“The trip back can be a lonely one. Your assigned showcase was east of the highway, or west of Congress, and no one came. Every morning I walked from my hotel to the grocery store for breakfast, and along the way I passed a dozen clubs that had bands playing to no one at 11am. It’s this overkill of content that sxsw is able to thrive on. Every year the festival expands because every band that’s ever been written up on a blog feels like there is a signed record contract waiting for them on the off ramp of the I-35. Bands making bad decisions is part of why big companies are able to prey on the festival as a whole.”