Author: Popdose Staff

ROADTRIP

Popdose Rides Eternal: The Ultimate Roadtrip Mixtape, Reloaded

Published by Popdose Staff

Roads can take you anywhere, but they have a funny way of bringing you around to the same spots now and then. You pass through these hubs and junctions on your way someplace new — but as you pass, you take a look around and see what’s changed. The Ultimate Roadtrip Mixtape is like that for us here at Popdose. The idea was always to provide a curated soundtrack for your long car ride, with the aim of elevating that everyday experience into the realm of the mythic — to make your ride as cool as the movies — and we seem to keep coming back to it. We’ve gotten periodic reader requests to repost these longform mp3 mixes, and as we have occasionally done so, we have also expanded the scope of the project. That’s the nature of a roadtrip, after all. Constant motion. Constant change. It’s not enough to simply revisit your points of reference. The journey is always getting longer; the scenery grows ever more wild and strange. And the trip has …

Night Ranger

Spotify Playlist: Night Ranger Picks Their Favorite Tunes

Published by Popdose Staff

Veteran rockers Night Ranger might be celebrating their 31st year as a band, but that doesn’t mean that they’re slowing things down one bit. The band just released their 11th studio album High Road on June 10 and they’ll be on the road playing shows around the globe for the rest of 2014. For some good road trippin’ music, we asked bassist/vocalist Jack Blades, drummer/vocalist Kelly Keagy and guitarist Brad Gillis to give us a Spotify playlist of some of their favorite songs and they were happy to oblige. They chose a rockin’ list of tunes with some of their favorite songs from their own catalog spiked in, including several songs from the new album. Enjoy the playlist and read the band’s comments on each song below! “White Room” – Cream Love the timpani in the intro. It is one of the most unusual sounding vocal tracks. One of the coolest ‘Wah Wah’ solos in the history of rock ‘n roll in the 2nd verse…”I’ll wait in the cue”….. love it! “Burn” – Deep Purple Glenn Hughes and …

ROADTRIP_2014

Popdose Rides Again! The Return of the Ultimate Road Trip Mixtape

Published by Popdose Staff

She watched him as his taillights disappeared around the bend The road goes on forever, and the party never ends — Robert Earl Keen We chose those lines as the epigram for our Ultimate Roadtrip Mixtape, first posted five years ago as a three-disc soundtrack for your summertime travels. With that project — later expanded with an autumnally-themed fourth installment — we saw the best aspects of the Popdose experience come together. It was a collective effort, with involvement from our whole stable of writers (the original post is still very much worth reading if only for Jon Cummings’ introductory essay), and marked the flowering of an idea that’s really come to the fore in our Conceptual Theater series — that art is an integral part of the experience of living, and that careful curation can elevate pop music from background noise to something like a companion, whose presence enhances even a task as mundane as a long car ride. Or, to put it another way: With the right soundtrack, your everyday life can feel …

Sam Morrow

Desert Island Discs with Sam Morrow

Published by Popdose Staff

If you had to go away for awhile and you could only take five of your favorite albums with you, which ones would you choose? Yes, we know it isn’t a fair question, but that hasn’t stopped us from asking music fans who happen to be recording artists in their own right. This edition of Desert Island Discs comes courtesy of Sam Morrow, whose latest album, Ephemeral, is out April 29. Visit his official site and watch the trailer for his new single, “War,” below — and then read his Desert Island picks, of course! Manchester Orchestra: Mean Everything to Nothing This is a record that I can always come back to and it will find me right where I am. It’s just honest rock n’ roll. David Ramirez: Apologies This record is what made me really step up working on the art of writing songs. It made me fall in love with just writing damn good songs. Songs that are good with just an acoustic guitar and a vocal, or with a full band …

Americans

A Songwriter’s Story: The Americans, “Gospel Roads”

Published by Popdose Staff

Visit the Americans at their official site, and hear more music — including their latest release, Home Recordings — here. There’s an old story I remember, maybe in a book I read as a kid, about a boy with a preacher father. They’re a traveling act just scraping by, pitching their modest tent in each town and taking donations. His father starts doing some odd things – buying second­hand suits, sanding down his shiny shoes, and otherwise disheveling their appearance. Donations increase as locals take pity on the preacher and his boy. Spurred on by their success, they go to greater lengths to fleece their followers. Washington Phillips was a real­life roaming preacher unaffiliated with any denomination. His surviving musical works ­­– sixteen songs preserved on 78 rpm discs between 1927 and 1929 ­­– are among the most expressive and unusual of their era. One tune, “Lift Him Up, That’s All,” sings the virtues of spreading the gospel. But in the context of that old story I heard it twisted into an advertisement for the …

Johnny Beauford

Desert Island Discs with Johnny Beauford

Published by Popdose Staff

If you had to go away for awhile and you could only take five of your favorite albums with you, which ones would you choose? Yes, we know it isn’t a fair question, but that hasn’t stopped us from asking music fans who happen to be recording artists in their own right. This edition of Desert Island Discs comes courtesy of Johnny Beauford, whose latest album, A Pig Eating Past Love, is out now. Visit his official site and watch the video for the new record’s title track below — and then read his Desert Island picks, of course! To help narrow the scope of this scenario, I’ll have to choose a theme to work from. The number one band on my short list at the moment is called the Greenhornes. My cousin Ben Gastright gave me their album Four Stars as a gift sometime in 2011, and I have been in love with the record ever since. Since my cousin, with his exceptional musical taste, and the band in question are both from Cincinnati, …

JR2013posterright

Jonathan Rundman Crowdfunding New Album “Look Up”

Published by Popdose Staff

Minneapolis-based folk/pop songwriter Jonathan Rundman will end a decade-long break between studio albums of new material with a new album, entitled Look Up, in 2014. The record is currently being crowdfunded at PledgeMusic.com. For Look Up, Rundman convened at the Library Studio in Minneapolis with producer Matt Patrick (John Mark Nelson) and a band that included drummer Steve Goold (Sara Bareilles), guitarist Tyler Burkum (Leagues), guitarist Jasper Nephew (Owl City), and bassist Ian Allison (Jeremy Messersmith). Guest stars include power pop legend Parthenon Huxley (ELO, Eels) and neuroscientist/musician Daniel Levitin (author of This Is Your Brain On Music). via press release: The last time Jonathan Rundman released a studio album of all-new songs was in 2004. After moving to Minneapolis from Chicago, Rundman declared his Minnesota citizenship with the launch of Public Library, recorded with Americana stalwarts the Silos. The album generated much acclaim in magazines like Paste and Performing Songwriter, and it appeared on the City Pages Top-10 Local Albums of 2004 list. After the release of Public Library, Rundman became a new father, …