Years ago Radiohead reached the point where they could operate with near-complete autonomy. Their fruitful relationship with Parlophone/EMI came to a close in 2004, right around the time it started to become apparent that being fruitful did not necessarily require a contractual tether to a major label. Thus untethered, Radiohead recorded 2007’s In Rainbows. Without an established distribution network, and tired of having their material leaked before its release, the band “leaked” it themselves, making it available for download on their Web site via the first large-scale implementation of a “pay-what-you-want” system. Fans and foes alike could download the entire album for free, if they so chose. Most people, however, paid somewhere between a few dollars and near-full retail price. The album sold very well online (various figures cited have proven unreliable) and, once a deal was struck with respected indie powerhouse XL Recordings, the physical release of In Rainbows appeared not to have suffered from the pre-release experiment. It reached Number 1 on the Billboard 200 and was the top-selling vinyl release of 2008—a big success, by any reasonable measure.

In Rainbows (2007)

Skipping forward to present-day, we find the record industry still in flux, to put it mildly, but having felt the repercussions of the In Rainbows model. The concept of what recorded music is worth is increasingly a source of debate and ever-changing ideas. The commercially-minded and forward-thinking among us try to identify alternative sources of revenue for artists. Those with a more philosophical bent ponder whether art has meaning or value if an original work can be copied exactly and distributed an infinite number of times. Now, having made their contribution to this compelling state of chaos, why has Radiohead jettisoned the “pay-what-you-want” model for their 2011 release The King of Limbs?

Radiohead manager Chris Hufford has said that this is simply a “logical progression.” What Radiohead is concerned about is what’s good for Radiohead—a natural and healthy attitude, for certain. For them, the take-away from the In Rainbows venture was not that they challenged perceptions of art and commerce, but that they got their music out into the world without going through what Hufford called “the gatekeepers” who would impose a pre-set business plan and encumber the release process. For the band, getting the album out while it was fresh and exciting was the true success of the In Rainbows release.

With The King of Limbs, they took that piece and ran with it. On February 14th, Radiohead announced the impending release, a mere five days before it was scheduled…. then they released it a day early (again digitally, but at a fixed—though competitive—price). This maneuver, coupled with a beautifully strange and minimalist video for the single “Lotus Flower,” set the music world abuzz. From the pages of The New York Times to the walls of Facebook, the new album was being declared the most exciting, poetic, groundbreaking, boring, piece-of-shit trash ever heard.

This is what Radiohead does, and what artists need to pay attention to: they buck expectations and they create excitement in an environment where it is very difficult to inspire a yawn about a 20-year-old rock band releasing their eighth studio album. They do this by means of the strategic maneuvers described above, and with the innovative music they create. But whatever the specifics are with Radiohead, artists (and labels, managers…all of us) should step back and take the larger view. Don’t try to do what they did, just try something different. Subvert the expectations, create excitement and make it enjoyable.

As an aside, let it be clear that Radiohead is not a band un-interested in the cultural ramifications of their tradition-breaking modus operandi or the upheaval occurring in the way we consume media. They call the physical release The King of Limbs a “newspaper album.” Subtle.

Victoria Faiella

Within the first few measures of “War Pigs,” you realize that Victoria Faiella is a force to be reckoned with. Taking on Black Sabbath’s perennial anthem is one thing, transporting it to the other side of the world is another. Under Faiella’s direction, “War Pigs” receives a culture shock, heavy metal turning into mysterious, Middle Eastern exoticism. But this rhythmic, witchy arrangement is sort of a non sequitur. “Love Ashes—Crack the Whip” is pure romanticism, the singer’s voice shifting from the distorted pitch of “War Pigs” to one that’s soft and lilting. Faiella is a nimble picker and percussionist, and both skills are on display on “All Fall Down”—a track that would feel like global folk if not for a string section. As a musician, Faiella’s scope is formidable, her songs transfixing each in their own way. And she can give Ozzy a run for his money. We like her.

There are few clichés in the rock world as hoary and dust-laden as the “return to form,” a phrase that’s most often employed by artists well past their expiration date desperately trying to recapture their glory days. But when Smithereens drummer Dennis Diken uses that well-worn term to describe his band’s new album, it’s quite literally true in a number of ways.

For one thing, Smithereens 2011—the title seemingly a play on the New Jersey-bred band’s third album, Smithereens 11 (itself a play on the film Ocean’s 11)—was produced by Don Dixon, the man who helmed The Smithereens’ classic 1986 debut album, Especially For You, and its follow-up, the great Green Thoughts, after putting R.E.M. on the map by co-producing their first two albums. It’s also the first new batch of Smithereens tunes since 1999’s God Save The Smithereens. It’s not that the band has been idle over the last decade-plus, though—far from it. Led by the brooding baritone of Pat DiNizio, The Smithereens had carried the torch of ‘60s British Invasion influences through the second half of the ‘80s, when such things weren’t exactly in vogue, and two decades later they came full circle, cutting a string of tribute albums honoring those influences.

The 2007 album Meet The Smithereens! was a song-for-song recreation of The Beatles’ first US album. “I guess we had the idea to do something to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of ‘Meet the Beatles!’,” Diken remembers, “So we came up with ‘Meet the Smithereens’. That one did so well for us that I guess it inspired us to continue. It was kind of like being in our basement as kids and playing along with our favorite records.” The next year, the band unleashed B-Sides The Beatles, covering the flipsides of classic Fab Four singles. And in ’09, the tributes turned into a trilogy with The Who homage The Smithereens Play Tommy. “For Jimmy [Babjak, Smithereens guitarist] and I it was a big deal,” says Diken, “Because it was the 40^th anniversary of Tommy. Jimmy and I played together in high school, and our meat was The Who at the time. Tommy was a big record for us.” In fact, that project led to the band’s appearance at an all-star Who tribute at Carnegie Hall. “That was an honor to play there,” enthuses Diken. “That’s one of those venues I was always hoping we could play. It really was a thrill.”

But in the midst of all this, where was the long-overdue batch of new Smithereens songs? “We were trying to get it together to do an original album at one point during that period,” explains Diken, “And Don Dixon said ‘Let’s do it!’ Don did our first album so there was a real kinship with him…he’s a very organic producer, he knows what it’s like to play in a band. He kind of lets you do your thing and seasons to taste. In the process, he will make very prudent suggestions for our arrangements. He’s an old friend, he’s a guy that we trust, and it was like stepping into an old comfortable shoe.” This approach led to a vibrant feel for Smithereens 2011. “We were coming up with some fresh ideas in the studio and we could almost read each other’s minds,” Diken says, “It made for easy going. I think that free-spirited atmosphere and attitude and the fun we had comes through on the recordings.”

Another aspect of recapturing the classic Smithereens sound had to do with letting the riffs and rhythms bounce off some familiar old walls while trying out the new tunes. “We chose to return to a rehearsal studio that we used when we were working up material for ‘Green Thoughts’,” explains Diken, “A place on the Lower East Side called Tu Casa. We started going there in ’86 or ’87, and lo and behold the place is still there. The familiarity of that, and the old home feeling of it, was a boon to the recording.”

From the bittersweet sentiments of opening track “Sorry” to the garage-rock riffs of closing cut “What Went Wrong,” Smithereens 2011 should resonate with anyone who ever had seminal Smithereens tunes like “Behind The Wall of Sleep” or “A Girl Like You” stuck in their head. “Some folks have told me when they heard even the downbeat of the first song from the new album, right from the first chord you can tell that it’s the Smithereens” says Diken. “To me that’s a real compliment, if you’re fortunate enough to have a sound you can call your own that’s identifiable. The sound we make is the sound we make…when we come together the noise that comes out is wholly ours. It’s all in the fingers, all in the heart—it just comes out that way. It’s always us.”

As far as the contributions that come from Diken’s end, it should be noted that he’s more multifaceted than many rock drummers. For one thing, his 2009 solo debut, Late Music, is a critically-lauded orchestral-pop adventure that evokes a Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys vibe. “That whole project really was started in the ‘90s,” Diken reveals. “A lot of those recordings were just glorified demos. It was a whole other chapter of stuff that I was involved in. It was a bunch of songs that I wanted to get out but I just never focused on finishing them up until somebody kicked my ass hard enough.” He didn’t limit his songwriting to Late Music, though; while DiNizio is the band’s primary songsmith, Diken had a part in the songwriting process on the Smithereens’ latest album as well. “I contributed a hook to one of the songs, and the song ‘Turn It Around’ is mostly mine,” he says. “Jimmy wrote most of ‘One Look At You,’ and there were lyrical collaborations on this record, there was more of a kind of think-tank approach to this album, we all knocked heads pretty good on this one.”

When he’s not knocking heads with his bandmates, Diken keeps busy by gigging with a wide range of other artists. “I was playing recently with [CBGB-era punk trailblazers] Sic F*cks. It’s really funny because I was asked to be their original drummer in 1977. I didn’t join back then for whatever reason. When their other drummer couldn’t make it, they called on me. Diken has also drummed with everyone from ‘60s girl-group goddess Mary Weiss of Shangri-Las fame to alt-country songstress Amy Rigby. “I love to play,” he says simply, “And if I’m around I love to do all kinds of projects.” Those other projects include penning liner notes for reissues of some of his ‘60s faves, like The Lovin’ Spoonful, and DJ’ing on renowned free-form New Jersey radio station WFMU. “You only go around once,” Diken says of his busy agenda, “You might as well have some kicks.”

Ivan Julian’s name has been attached to so many high-profile projects over the last three-and-a-half decades, from Richard Hell & The Voidoids’ milestone debut album, Blank Generation, to The Clash’s Sandinista! and Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, that it comes as something of a shock to realize that his new album, The Naked Flame, is the first solo release of his career.

“I’ve never had the inclination to make a solo album,” explains the New York singer/songwriter/guitarist, who was a founding member of pioneering punk band Richard Hell & The Voidoids in the ‘70s and fronted his own band, The Outsets, in the ‘80s. “Even with The Outsets,” he says, “It was my band but I didn’t want to call it Ivan Julian & the Outsets. I just wanted it to be a band. This was different,” says Julian of The Naked Flame. “I just kind of put it all together myself.”

While Julian did shape the album at his own Lower East Side studio, N.Y. Hed, a full-service operation that has hosted everyone from Jon Spencer to Ronnie Spector, the impetus and the basic tracks came from an unexpected source. “This band came in from Spain called Capsula,” explains Julian, “And they wanted me to mix their album.” Over the course of the project, the young Spanish punks tried to talk Julian into making an album with them as the backing band. Though he was uncertain, Julian eventually sent them a batch of demos, from which Capsula cut basic tracks that they sent back to him. “These guys really had the immediacy of what I was trying to say with the songs,” he says, “Theyreally captured it. I was surprised about it.” When the band found a Spanish label for the project and booked a tour in their homeland as well, it was an offer Julian couldn’t refuse. He set about completing the record, adding his voice, guitar, and keyboards, and bringing in some guest musicians to broaden the sonic palette. It became abit of a mad rush, though, because Julian only had two months before the tour started. “I had to get it finished in a month and a half but my studio was booked in the daytime,” he recalls,  “So I only got to work on it from 9 at night till 9 in the morning, which kind of made me a zombie for a while.”

Now Julian has found a US label for a domestic release of the recording, which contains a career-spanning batch of songs. The oldest, “Young Man’s Money,” goes back to the Outsets era. “When I was thinking ‘What songs am I gonna put on the album, what have I always wanted to do?’ I kind of picked and chose,” explains Julian. “And of course there’s newer stuff that I’d written.” There are also a couple of covers, “The Beat,” by Alejandro Escovedo’s early punk band, The Nuns, and “Broken Butterflies” by Lucinda Williams.  “That song ‘The Beat’ that was done by The Nuns, that was a seven-inch single that I found in, I guess, ’79 or something. I said to myself ‘One day I’m gonna re-record this.’ I always thought that was a brilliant song. The same thing with the Lucinda Williams song, I thought ‘This is a brilliant song, I’m gonna take a stab at it and see what I can do with it.’ Rather than look at this as a historical collection of songs, to me it’s present and urgent.”

History is something Julian has a lot of. He started out as a touring guitarist with British R&B group The Foundations, of “Build Me Up Buttercup” fame. While he was abroad with the band, he made a fateful decision. “I was living in Zagreb , Yugoslavia,” he remembers. “I’d just finished a tour with The Foundations…I’d moved from Washington to England and then stopped after the tour in Zagreb. I decided ‘OK, I’m gonna go to New York.’” Soon, Julian was placing a “Have guitar, will travel” ad in a New York music paper, and receiving a call from former Television/Heartbreakers member Richard Hell, who was preparing to strike out on his own. In 1976, Richard Hell & The Voidoids released a three-song 45 that contained the epochal “Blank Generation,” which would become a rallying cry for the nascent punk scene. It mated moonlighting-poet Hell’s iconoclastic, Rimbaud-in-a-ripped-shirt lyrics with the arch, angular barbed-wire dance of Julian and Robert Quine’s guitars, for a shockingly singular sound.

The Julian/Quine guitar team was like a brash, spitfire counterpart to Television’s Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. “We found a way to work together,” says Julian of his six-string partnership with Quine. “We agreed on so many things, like, we should never be on the same part of the neck, and the guitars should always be panned to one side and the other…we tried to find parts that worked together as opposed to banging the song out. Even today, I do two Voidoids songs in my set and when I show people the parts, it’s much more intricate than it sounds. They think ‘Oh we’re just playing A.’ No, it’s not about that, it’s about texture. I was more of a straight ahead rock & roll player,” he recalls. “I was into people like Keith Richards and Hubert Sumlin…we just added our two styles together and they became what they became. What’s interesting, though, is that the longer the band was together, like people and their dogs, or people that are married…the more we began to sound like each other.”

But for as much of a punk staple as the short discography of the band became, Julian still questions the genre tag. “To me, anything that has a creative, aggressive edge is punk. Punk has become this blanket term for Ramones-style music; there were so many different genres of bands playing CB’s back then— is Blondie punk? Bob [Quine] and I sat down and said, ‘We want to make a record like the Yardbirds’ when we actually got a chance to do the album. We just wanted to make a good rock & roll record, and one that we thought people would want to listen to for a long time. There was an atmosphere and an attitude in the air. It’s one of those times in creative history when there was a kind of fire in the air. Just that you were here made you a punk when the city was falling apart and it was really dangerous, and you had to be here because there was nowhere else for you to have a creative outlet. You had to come here.”

One of the striking things about The Naked Flame is that it sounds like a continuation—as opposed to a rehash—of the sonic story Julian started telling back in ’76. Especially with the energy of a young, enthusiastic band of disciples backing him up, Julian manages to put across a sound that’s simultaneously spiky and sophisticated, visceral and richly textured. “It covers a broader scope of course,” says Julian of the new album, “But I still play like that today. I still think that when you deliver something, you have to give it everything. As I always say, ‘Show me your spleen.’ So that’s how I look at this record, it’s a complete spleen reveal.”

The Voidoids, photo by Roberta Bayley

Of course, between his Voidoids days and Naked Flame, Julian has kept busy revealing his spleen in an admirably disparate array of contexts. After The Outsets disbanded, he started The Lovelies with Cynthia Sley, the singer for New York No Wave darlings The Bush Tetras, and all along he’s been a journeyman guitarist. In 1980, his old buddies the Clash were in town cutting their epic musical mélange, Sandinista. “On the first English Voidoids tour, we opened for the Clash,” Julian remembers. “The [Voidoids] record wasn’t even out yet. We’re doing the first concert and I realize I know the drummer; Topper [Headon] played with [‘70s blues-rock guitar hero] Pat Travers…when I was in the Foundations [in] ’75 or something. So I start talking with Topper and the rest of the band, and it turns out Mick and I have the exact same birthday, down to the minute almost, and I became friends with him. When they came to New York, they called me. They said ‘Come to the studio, we’re making this record.’ I thought I would hang out and say hello, but they started playing ‘The Call Up,’ and I said ‘Okay, give me a guitar,’ and I started playing the riffs on that. And I started telling them the story about me going up to Studio 54 which eventually became ‘Ivan Meets G.I. Joe.’”

In the second half of the ‘80s, Julian toured with deliciously creepy British post-punk groovemeisters Shriekback, and at the start of the ‘90s, he began a long, fruitful association with power-pop hero Matthew Sweet. Sweet had a couple of non-starter albums behind him when he started working on 1991’s Girlfriend, produced by former Voidoids drummer Fred Maher. A decision was made to spice up Sweet’s melodic songcraft with the artfully off-kilter fretwork of three CBGB alumni, Julian, Quine, and Television’s Richard Lloyd. “He’s a really good pop writer, beautiful voice, but he’s also in love with an angular kind of musician juxtaposed against what he does,” says Julian. Girlfriend became Sweet’s breakthrough album, with the title track becoming his only Top 10 single. Not one to tamper with success, Sweet kept the unlikely partnership going. “There was like a tag team between the three of us [guitarists] over the next 10 years, where each one of us played sometimes at the same time on a record and sometimes different ones.”

In fact, one of The Naked Flame’s tracks was written while Julian was touring with Sweet, and was inspired by the bandleader’s open-ended approach to performance. “Matthew’s thing with me live, and with all the guitar players, was like ‘It’s in B, go!’ And you could do all this wild and crazy stuff on stage, I used to have this Echoplex I would f**k with and make all these weird sounds. And one day when I came home I just thought ‘I want a feedback song.’” That notion turned into the rather Hendrix-like modern psychedelia of “Godiva.”

“That’s part of me,” says Julian of the acid-rock influence. “I listened to Hendrix a lot and still do. I love garage psychedelia, and the 13th Floor Elevators; a lot of the music from that late-‘60s period I think is really inspiring. “Godiva” is very Hendrixy.” In fact, the ‘60s psychedelic sound had an effect on many of Julian’s peers in the ‘70s as well, despite people’s current misconceptions about punk’s disavowal of all things ‘60s. “When you think about it, it was only six years earlier or something; [at the time] the ‘60s were only six years ago. If you put it into perspective now, this is 2011—think back to 2005, it’s not such a long time. What was on the jukebox at CBGBs? I can definitely remember 13th Floor Elevators, [Love’s 1966 hit] “Little Red Book,” the Rolling Stones—almost the whole Between the Buttons album was on there—and people played them constantly. This is my issue with people trying to define punk as some kind of musical brand of down-strokes.”

However you define The Naked Flame, it’s still a cohesive statement from a musician who has enhanced the visions of many other artists but whose own vision has too seldom seen the light of day. While the Spanish release of the album last year found Julian playing a series of dates in Spain with Capsula, an American band has been assembled for stateside shows. Bringing things full circle, the second guitarist will be Al Maddy, who not only plays on the album, but was also a member of the great ‘80s NYC band The Nitecaps, fronted by onetime Voidoids bassist Jahn Xavier. And for as much as Julian decries contemporary listeners’ misinterpretations of the punk legacy, he’s still justifiably proud of his Voidoids history. “It never ceases to amaze me,” he muses, “I meet 20-year-olds today who have [Blank Generation] on their iPod; it’s like a rite of passage now. It contains a certain element that they need at that stage in their lives.”

It seems there’s a worrying trend these days wherein more and more veteran rockers seem to be turning to bluegrass. We’re using the term “turning to bluegrass” here in the interest of fairness, since the more popular “going bluegrass” bears too much pejorative potential, what with its evocations of “going ballistic,” “going rogue” or even “going postal.” At least for the moment, we’re trying our hardest to keep an open mind about this phenomenon, so bear with us on this.

The rock-to-bluegrass move isn’t a new idea—in terms of high-profile artists, you can trace it back at least as far as David Lee “I’ll try anything once” Roth, who may have had mandolin-shaped dollar signs dancing before his eyes ever since the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack made the mainstream start paying attention. Diamond Dave sang on a back-porch version of “Jump” for the Van Halen bluegrass tribute album Strummin’ With the Devil back in 2006. With the ice thus broken, others began following in Diamond Dave’s footsteps, even though it’s unlikely they were emboldened by the aforementioned VH reinvention itself. The following year, not only did patron saint of punk and last surviving (original) Ramones member Tommy Erdelyi unleash the self-titled debut album of his bluegrass duo Uncle Monk, the original shirtless wonder of stadium rock, Robert Plant himself, delivered Raising Sand in collaboration with Alison Krauss. Of course, in Plant’s case, the aesthetic and commercial rewards for this venture turned out to be enormous, and that probably proved to be the real turning point for this whole thing.

Suddenly, it seems as though we’re inundated with warhorses from the rocking side of the fence willing to dip a toe— if not an entire foot—into the Appalachian stream ofbluegrass music. To wit: some guy named Paul McCartney takes a vocal turn on Steve Martin’s new bluegrass outing (bluegrass-bound actors are a topic for a whole other column) Rare Bird Alert, singing on the Martin-penned “Best Love.” Guitar man Brian Setzer’s latest release, Setzer Goes Instru-MENTAL!, finds the former Stray Cat picking up a storm on the old Earl Scruggs tune “Earl’s Breakdown.” Elvis Costello’s recent acoustic, country-tinged National Ransom was cut in Nashville with a raft of hotshot bluegrass cats. Even the ultimate urbanite, Paul Simon, has collaborated with one of the biggest acts in contemporary bluegrass, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, on the former’s upcoming So Beautiful Or So What.

Okay, so most of these are relatively minor dalliances in the high-lonesome hinterlands—guest-spots, one-offs and the like. Perhaps in and of themselves, each one of these examples shouldn’t be enough to inspire concern in those who feel that rock/bluegrass mergers may not be the best thing for artists on either side of the fence in the long run. Like we said at the outset, we’re still attempting to keep an open mind, despite any initial misgivings. But then along comes the clincher, the one that makes all these other examples seem less like isolated incidents and more like a snowball slowly gathering steam as it rolls down a white, wintry hill.

It turns out that Tommy Shaw, longtime frontman for classic-rock kingpins Styx, has just released a full-on, Nashville-recorded bluegrass album, Great Divide, featuring contributions from Alison Krauss as well as legendary pickers Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and others. Now, even allowing for the relatively generous assumption that you accept such Shaw-penned Styx hits as “Renegade,” “Blue Collar Man” and “Too Much Time On My Hands” as the arena-rock classics they are, does that mean you have any good reason to approach this project with great expectations? Again, we’re just posing the question here, not handing down any overt judgments about the bluegrass potential of Ted Nugent’s former Damn Yankees bandmate. We’ll simply say that the most convincing bit of mountain music we’ve heard thus far from Shaw has been a ‘grassed-up take on “Renegade,” which does not appear on the all-original Great Divide. Regardless, Shaw’s going whole-hog on this thing—hell, the guy’s playing the freakin’ Opry in a couple of days! One can only wonder which of Shaw’s fellow stadium-rockers will be the next one up on the hay bale. Say…has anybody been keeping an eye on Steve Perry lately?!

If you’re in a band and you part ways with your bassist, what do you do? Well, some bands might replace their bassist or hire a studio musician, but not American Heritage. They enlisted an all-star cast of bassists to put in guest spots on their latest album, Sedentary. Bill Kelliher (of Mastodon) laid down some bass and even a guitar solo on the album, Rafa Martinez (of Black Cobra) lent his bass talents on the album, as well as Eric Bocek (of Joan of Arc, Ghosts And Vodka), who would become the band’s full-time bassits after the recording of Sedentary, among others.

If you’ve heard much music from Mastodon, Black Cobra or any of the other bands that lent a member to the recording of Sedentary, then it’s rather easy to hear the distinct influence from the different bassists. It’s especially easy to tell on the Bill Kelliher track since the guitarists in American Heritage use guitar tones similar those used by their friends in Mastodon for Remission and Leviathan. Bill’s signature bass style shines through on “Fetal Attraction.” The slight variance in style from song to song is one of the best parts about Sedentary, as each song is noticeably fresh and different, but still very much cohesive.

Before Sedentary was the band’s 2006 album Millenarian, which took a very similar style approach. It was dirty, fast, raucous, gritty, sludgy and all those other clichéd adjectives for American Heritage’s brand of music. In a March 1 interview with The Bone Reader Scott talked about the inspiration for Sedentary: “musically it came from evaluating what we were doing in general. Trying to figure out what had worked and what had failed in the past and trying to address those issues. I’m still pretty happy with most of Millenarian, but I also saw its weaknesses and tried to write towards a record that would fix some of what I thought was missing.”

And that’s exactly what they did. They took the formula from the critically-acclaimed Millenarian and made a better record. Even the artwork is incredible this time around—it was so good that it won first place for March 1 on ReignInArt.com, a site devoted to showcasing great album art in hard rock and metal.

Sedentary was released March 1 on Translation Loss Records, and you can pick up a copy from Translation Loss’ online store (along with a bunch of other great merch) or you can get it on iTunes.

We’re not surprised that The Hundred Days have been climbing the Best Of charts on OurStage—the quartet’s haunting and moody melodies make them hard to ignore. But while they seem poised for success, the group’s lovely lyrics have us a little mystified, especially on tracks like “On My Head.” So we asked The Hundred Days’ Jonathan Smith to take a break from getting ready for SXSW and tell us the story behind the cryptic words of the band’s Interpol-esqe track.

According to Smith, “On My Head” is a tale of struggle and triumph. “I think in this song there was a mixture of imagery which sought to juxtapose strife and hardship during the verse (biting metal in the snow, standing on your head) with success and escape (“try and catch me now!”) at the end of the song,” he says. It’s addressed to the listener; Smith knows that they’ll relate to the feelings of frustration and loneliness the song’s imagery invokes. But it’s not so bleak as all that, because he also knows “that they have also felt the relief and exhilaration of overcoming that challenge.” He says that he’s daring people to catch him, as they run beyond the limits they had previously set for themselves.

If you’re wondering about the line “it’s titanic,” which closes out the chorus, Smith says it refers to the size and scope of the listener’s challenge. “It’s larger than the listener,” he says. “All of the things which have forced him/her out of themselves, to become themselves, these are forces which they cannot control. Forces frighteningly huge and unrelenting. This could be going to school for the first time, or being on stage for the first time, or falling in love for the first time. Or overcoming an addiction.”

Check out “On My Head” below and see if you can relate to The Hundred Days’ plight!

Have an interesting story behind your lyrics? Let us know at pr@ourstage.com!

When the surviving members of the New York Dolls first reunited back in 2004 at Morrissey’s behest—for a performance at the Meltdown Festival that the former Smiths singer and lifelong Dolls obsessive was curating in London—it was difficult to believe that the seminal band, which had been inactive for nearly thirty years, was storming the stage once again. At the time, suggesting that the Dolls would actually remain together, write new material and become a fresh creative force capable of recording three new albums would have seemed like a flight of sheer fantasy. But seven years later, here we are, greeting the arrival of the post-meltdown Dolls’ third release, Dancing Backwards In High Heels (out yesterday on 429 Records). To mark the occasion, we chatted with David Johansen about how it feels to be fronting the Dolls four decades after they first came together.

According to Johansen, Dancing Backwards came together in a short, somewhat frenzied rush of creativity. “We rehearsed for like three days,” he says, “And then we went into the studio for three weeks. It’s not really something that you get a chance to sit back and take a look at. By the time you go home at night it’s like you don’t even want to listen to that stuff, you want to listen to Maria Callas or something, to clear your head.”

Whether it was the between-session doses of opera or just the artistic frisson in the air, Johansen and original Dolls guitarist Syl Sylvain came up with a biting batch of tunes for the album. “Streetcake,” for instance, incorporates everything from Beach Boys-like background vocals to blues idioms, and deftly drops lyrical references to The Orlons, Tommy James and even the Dolls themselves, all into one big pop-culture blender. “I think it’s a great song,” says Johansen. “Those different influences, they just get layered on one at a time. Syl had an instrumental version of that song that he had made at his house…I just thought it was such a—I guess I want to use the word ‘confection’—that I guess we wanted to have a lot of pop references in it.”

The Dolls have always been emblematic of their hometown’s gritty underbelly, and on “I’m So Fabulous,” they take a pointed poke at the poser “arrivists” who make life wearisome for real New Yorkers. “You could aim it at a lot of different people I guess,” figures the feisty Johansen, “I know these kids who have this kind of faux Web site called the Upper West Side Style blog, and they take pictures of people on the street, like, wearing Birkenstocks and stuff. I don’t know—there’s a lot of that stuff going on. It’s kind of about how people come to New York and they start making rules, like ‘Where we’re from they don’t allow smoking in the park,’ or something, ‘So we want to have that here.’ And it’s like ‘Whoa! We’re here already.’”

The album contains a couple more overt links to the band’s past, too. Back in the ‘70s, the Dolls were recording ‘60s R&B covers like Archie Bell & The Drells’ “Showdown,” and Dancing Backwards includes the Dolls’ take on The Blue Belles’ ’62 single “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman.” “It really rocks,” Johansen reckons, “We had it on a mix tape that we would play before the band plays at shows, and we just kind of always dug it, so we decided to play it. Then we put strings on it, and girls [singing backup], and horns, we threw everything at it. I’ve known it as long as I can remember; I play it on my radio show on Sirius.” The guys even cover themselves, by delivering a new version of “Funky But Chic,” which opened Johansen’s 1978 solo debut album. “A lot of people have been telling us we should cut that song for various reasons,” the singer explains, “Depending on what school they’re from, like agents have been saying ‘Oh, if you cut that song we can use it in movies.’ It’s a song that Syl and I had written for the Dolls originally, and then I recorded it, but one day we just thought ‘Okay, let’s play it and see what it sounds like, in the studio, and it rocked pretty good, so it stayed in the mix.”

As for Johansen’s working relationship with his longtime sidekick Sylvain— the only other original Doll left since bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane passed away shortly after the Meltdown show— things remain rosy. “Syl is like a conduit to this music of the spheres,” Johansen enthuses, “And it just kind of comes out of him. I really get where he’s coming from. We have a lot of the same passions for rock & roll music, and maybe as time goes by we kind of influence each other, like ‘Give this genre another chance and put it into your palette.’ We do it really subconsciously. The psyche has so many things that it digs that are floating around in there, and when you’re a musician you kind of filter them all through something and it comes out as your own thing. It’s not just music, you’re bringing politics and philosophy and all kinds of stuff into it. So it’s really from the soup of the psyche that you create a song. If you can do it without thinking consciously so much, to me it’s successful, and Syl and I seem to have the capacity to do that when we’re writing together.”

It’s Sylvain and Johansen’s shared enthusiasm for performing that fuels the band’s forward motion as well. “We dig playing together, me and Syl,” says Johansen, “We like going out and doing shows. When we began we were only gonna do one show, it wasn’t like we had a plan to be reunited per se. After we did that show we got asked to do some other shows, and we thought ‘Okay, let’s do it, because it sounds good and we’re having fun.’ And then after about a year of that, we decided ‘You know, this is like a band, we should make a record.’ If I’m digging it, I’m not really questioning it so much.” Life on the road these days is a far cry from the old grind though. Johansen says, “In the David Johansen Group, the band I had after the Dolls, I used to be in a van about 287 nights a year, traveling to the next town, and it got kind of tough on my ass. But the way we tour now, we do buses and stuff like that, it’s much more livable. At that time, oh God, I felt like I had been run over by a truck half the time.”

In the long period between iterations of the Dolls, of course, Johansen has incorporated traditional folk and blues influences into his work, especially with his acoustic-based band The Harry Smiths, named for the creator of the legendary Anthology Of American Folk Music. It turns out those influences remain a part of his musical makeup. “As a kid I used to sing those songs, like the Harry Smith kind of songs,” recalls Johansen, “And I also used to sing Wilson Pickett songs and stuff like that, so even when I was like 15 years old I would have that folk/blues thing going on and also have, like, a dance band. So they’re all really strong influences on me. That folk/blues music, to me that’s biblical, that’s like the Book of Life, and then the other stuff is really rhythmic in a way that I really dig, so I just try to find a way to put it all together. I filter a lot of ideas through those old songs I was listening to when I was growing up, because they nourish me in a metaphysical way.”

So, with the Dolls a going concern once again, does Johansen ever allow himself to wonder whether late founding members like Kane or guitarist Johnny Thunders—who died a drug-related death in 1991—would be with the band today if they were still around? “ Arthur, of course, would,” reckons the singer. “If John had gotten to a point in his life where he could travel extensively, I’m sure he would too. When you’ve got your ankle chained to the drugstore it’s hard to go anywhere and do stuff, and the thing about being in a rock & roll band is really about moving, and going to a lot of places all the time. I suppose we could have created some kind of long-running Broadway show,” he says wryly, “And maybe it would have worked out. But it’s so hard to speculate on that; you can have an idea with a rosy ending, or you can look at history and face facts.” At this, Johansen allows himself a low, world-weary laugh that suggests he’s faced his share of facts himself, and is thankful for whatever degree of rosiness currently colors his own existence.

Blues Traveler frontman John Popper has just released his first proper solo album in a dozen years, John Popper & The Duskray Troubadours, and there’s a whole subculture of people who already know far more about that particular topic than they could learn here. This article isn’t for them. It’s for those who blithely turn up their nose at all things Blues Traveler-related because they deem them tainted by the “jam band” tag. First of all, there’s about as much jamming happening on these tracks as there is on any random Ramones album, but before we even get that far along, let’s get a couple of other things straight.

For one, those with doubts about the relative cred of the scene that grew up in late-’80s New York City, centered on the likes of Blues Traveler, Spin Doctors, God Street Wine, Milo Z and Jono Manson, should get their historical perspective corrected. In between the punk and new wave of a decade earlier and the garagey post-post-punk that emerged at the turn of the millennium, Popper and his pals represented New York’s only real homegrown rock movement to make it to the mainstream. And it happened organically, groundswell-style. Your intrepid Riffer, Ranter and Rumor-monger, in fact, was a young aspirant banging around the city’s clubs at the time, and he can recall, for instance, the crowd of whirling, twirling young neo-hippie girls who would fill MacDougal Street’s usually sedate Speakeasy whenever the Spin Doctors took the stage. He also distinctly remembers the way the tiny back room of a Chinese restaurant-by-day/rock-club-by-night in the then-dicey Port Authority area suddenly, almost magically became rush-hour-subway packed when four big, biker-looking dudes fronted by a chromatic-harp-blower unceremoniously took the stage.

These were the days before those bands had even begun releasing albums of course, much less climbing to the top of the pop charts, as they would do in the ’90s. Between then and now, a new generation of riff-happy types like the North Mississippi All-Stars have taken prominence, and the guys who kicked around the Northeast, playing anywhere and everywhere and building their audience the old-fashioned way, have gone in different directions. The frontmen for both the Spin Doctors and Blues Traveler, Chris Barron and John Popper, respectively, have emerged as solo singer-songwriters. Popper’s very first venture outside the Blues Traveler fold came in 1999 with the album Zygote, and while he’s dabbled with various side projects in the interim, John Popper & The Duskray Troubadours marks his first real solo statement since then.

To be frank, fans who found themselves enthralled by Blues Traveler’s extended instrumental excursions and hard-riffing, blues-rocking tunes may not have a very firm footing upon entering the world of The Duskray Troubadours. Ultimately, it’s an Americana-tinged outing full of folk touches, precisely placed guitar twang and understated, thoughtfully-crafted tunes that are more about capturing a moment than letting the band get its rocks off. Bringing things full circle, Popper enlisted his old New York pal Jono Manson to handle guitar and production duties. Manson started out in the early ’80s as a co-founder of the seminal roots-rocking band Joey Miserable & The Worms, who never broke through to the big time but had a profound effect on the New York music scene for years to come. These days, Manson is a globe-trotting artist who takes his singing, songwriting and production talents all over the world, but when he got the call to helm his old pal Popper’s most intimate outing ever, how could he refuse?

“On this album, melody is what drove everything,” says Popper, confirming that his motivations for the Duskray Troubadours project are not necessarily the same as the passions that drove him with his longtime band. If you think you’ve got Popper pegged, you’d better double-check yourself by looking in on his latest sonic statement, lest you miss out on something you weren’t expecting.

Buy John Popper & The Duskray Troubadours on Amazon now.

All great artists require some form of inspiration, a spark that drives their work. Inspiration can be found everywhere and, of course, a lot of guys find their inspiration in girls. Let’s take a look at a few of rock’s most notable muses, the women who inspired the songs we love.

Friday, February 25th marked the unfortunate passing of Suze Rotolo. Even if you aren’t sure who she was, you should probably be thanking her for some of the best music of the 20th century. If you care at all about folk music or Dylan’s early recordings then you’ve almost certainly seen her. Rotolo is the young woman locking arms with Bob Dylan on the iconic cover of The Freewheelin Bob Dylan. Rotolo was not some cover model or even a little fling for the young Dylan, mind you. Dylan describes his initial attraction and infatuation with Rotolo in colorful terms, with Suze leaving “his head spinning” and her reminding the young Dylan of a, “Rodin sculpture come to life… a libertine heroine.”

During their courtship, Rotolo is credited with introducing Dylan to the Civil Rights movement and is cited as the inspiration for classics such as “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”. Rotolo and Dylan stayed together for four years before they eventually split, their relationship both passionate and tempestuous. Rotolo rarely talked about her relationship with Dylan after their split. Instead, she focused her energies on Civil Rights, social activism and her own works as an artist for the remainder of her life.

Pattie Boyd is another notable rock muse but she gets extra points for both quality and quantity—Boyd was married to both George Harrison and Eric Clapton for nearly a decade each. Not at the same time, of course. Boyd and Harrison met on the set of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night when Boyd was cast as a schoolgirl fan in March of 1964. By January of 1966 the pair were married. Not unlike Rotolo, Boyd was an influence on the trajectory her beau’s career. It was her interest in Eastern religions that helped motivate the band to meet with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. However,  Boyd and Harrison’s courtship was quite rocky; Boyd, a model, reportedly attracted the attentions of John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood before her marriage with Harrison crumbled and they divorced in 1974.

Before their marriage ended, George Harrison befriended Eric Clapton and despite the close association they had with one another, Clapton fell in love with and made many advances towards Boyd during this time. Clapton even famously shacked up with Boyd’s younger sister for a time, allegedly using her as a substitute for Pattie. Eventually Clapton and Boyd would wed in 1979 but their relationship was even more rocky due to Clapton’s infidelity and drug addictions. The couple eventually split in 1989 but it’s worth noting that Boyd stayed close with both of her rock star former husbands after their marriages ended. To top it all off, Boyd can also state that she’s the inspiration for songs by both Harrison and Clapton, most notably “Layla” which is regarded as one of the great rock love songs of all time.

Bebe Buell is probably the most prolific of rock and roll muses based on the number of confirmed liaisons she had with prominent rockers, not to mention the speculative hook ups. Buell was in a long-term, open relationship with prog rocker Todd Rundgren through the late ’70s and early ’80s. From her book Rebel Heart: An American Rock ‘n’ Roll Journey, “Todd and I respected each other enough to keep our affairs discreet, and when one was over, we fell back into each other’s arms.”

Around this time period, Bebe can be linked to Elvis Costello (who may or may not have used their relationship for inspiration on Get Happy!! and Blood & Chocolate), Stephen Tyler (Buell is Liv Tyler’s mom) and John Taylor of Duran Duran fame  (we guess because he was in Duran Duran). It’s also alleged that Buell has shacked up with Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Iggy Pop and numerous other rock stars. Buell has even made the claim that Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” is about her, despite the inconvenient truth that the two didn’t know each other when the song was written. However, Buell shouldn’t fret as her place in rock muse history had already been well established. In addition to all of her rock star encounters, she’s the inspiration for the character Penny Lane in Almost Famous. Not too shabby.