Brad Trent

Song of the Day – Kate Tucker Sings for Her Supper!



DOWNLOAD: On The Radio

I’m tag-teaming a Song of the Day along with a bit of good, old fashioned log-rolling today. The song is a previously unreleased acoustic version of ‘On The Radio’ Kate Tucker and Mark Isakson layed down for Seattle’s Bumbershoot festival last year. The log-rolling is explained below…..

Kate has finished recording White Horses, her new solo album, but she need a bit of help. Being an indie artist often means little details like coming up with the last few bucks to press CD’s, promote the album and loading up the tour bus sometimes force her to employ extraordinary measures…in this case, hit up folks on the internet for whatever they might be able to contribute! Kate has put together a Kickstarter Funding Video…complete with ‘prizes’…in order to raise the final $5000.00 she needs to put White Horses to bed. If you toss her a few measly bucks you can get a signed CD and a bit of good Karma…for 50 bones she’ll unlock the vault and give you her bootlegs from her first album, the out of print Eros Turannos, and a few more goodies…$500 and she’ll record an acoustic version of any of her songs, dedicate it to you, post it on YouTube, and send you an exclusive mp3…..and for you seriously High Rollers, a grand will get Kate to play a concert for you and 40 of your closest & dearest friends (!)…two grand and she’ll sing for you, and cook you dinner and get you drunk (!!)…and if somebody were to kick in the whole five grand…well, I think it goes without saying that if anybody hits that target, Kate’s gonna have a friend for life!!! (Or it means she sold herself into slavery…I’m not quite sure…..)

I’m asking all of the friends of The List to head over to ‘Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is! Kate Tucker Sings for Her Supper!’ and watch the Kickstarter video…and if you can, show her a little love. And then pass it along to a few friends. It’s a lot more interesting than those damned LOLCats videos that keep filling up my inbox! And let’s be honest…the more true artists like Kate out there might mean we have to endure less of Lady GaGa…!!!

Check out more of Kate Tucker on MySpace

The End of a Long Night…

Jim Marshall Has Left The Building

Jim Marshall

February 3, 1936 – March 24, 2010

© 2007 Tim Mantoani

Jim Marshall…the only photographer allowed backstage at The Beatles last concert, the chief photographer at Woodstock, the guy who shot Jimi Hendrix as he set his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival and Janis Joplin with that Southern Comfort bottle and Bob Dylan casually rolling a tire down the street and Johnny Cash famously flipping the bird at the World…died in New York on Tuesday night. He was here for the opening of his “Match Prints” exhibition, a book project he and Timothy White did together, at Staley-Wise Gallery in Soho.

Every year for more than a decade, Michael Grecco and I have hosted a dinner for photographers who are still hanging around New York after the annual Photo Expo, and Jimmy was always there…telling stories, grabbing the ladies and usually yelling at me ‘cuz his wine glass was mysteriously empty! Jim is an honest to God legend in photography circles…one of the few guys I know who can be described as being ‘The Real Deal’. And a total wildman, too…that prizefighter nose of his wasn’t for show! One night he showed up with a shiner under his eye and a big gash across the bridge of his nose…the result of a ‘disagreement’ he had in a bar the night before…but Jimmy was also one of the nicest guys you’d ever wanna meet and a true friend. I’m gonna miss him at the dinner table…..

Jim at Woodstock

Bob and the Tire

Jimi Flaming Out at Monterey

Janis with the Southern Comfort

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Song of the Day

A SUNNY DAY IN GLASGOW
So Bloody So Tight

DOWNLOAD: So Bloody So Tight

Today’s song came out of one of those happy coincidences that happens when social networking actually does more than self-aggrandizement, passing on the latest Lolcat video, or informing you about the awesome tuna melt some a guy you haven’t seen in twenty years just had for lunch! My friend Molly Roberts (who I haven’t seen in a while, but it hasn’t been that long!) posted a link on her facebook page to a song by A Sunny Day In Glasgow, a Dream-Pop/Shoegaze outfit from Philly that her son, Ryan Newmyer, just happens to play bass for. Thanks to the power of Google, within five minute of listening to the song I became an instant expert on the group…they formed about five years ago, have a couple of full-length albums and three EPs’ under their belts and have gone through a Baker’s dozen of current and former members, all the while under the leadership of Ben Daniels.

Anyway…my searching also revealed that ASDIG has a new EP out, Nitetime Rainbows, and one of the more creative videos I’ve seen in ages for ‘So Bloody, So Tight’ that I’m including below. Anybody who loves The Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, Lush, or The Jesus and Mary Chain is gonna go nuts for this stuff. They’re on tour right now, in fact, if you happen to be down at SXSW, they’ve got nine gigs set up this week! Give ’em a look on their website or over on MySpace

Song of the Day – Two Times

I’ve had a lotta stuff goin’ on in the past week which has forced me to neglect my blog duties, but I picked up this month’s Esquire Music Issue and noticed that among the songs they say you MUST listen to were a bunch straight off of the Song of the Day List, including The Drive-By Truckers, Charlotte Gainsbourg, The Heavy and Bob Schneider…anyway, it got me thinking I had better get back on the horse and find some stuff for you guys to listen to before the threatening e-mails wondering where the music is begins. I also figured since me and Esquire seem to have similar tastes in music, I should prolly go see ’em…I haven’t worked for the magazine in ages!

Here at The List we have our favorites and God knows The Raveonettes certainly fall into that category. The second I heard ‘Love In A Trashcan’ off of their album Pretty in Black, I became a slack-jawed, drooling fanboy…kinda ridiculous for somebody my age, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and I just can’t get enough of Sharin Foo’s husky, sexy voice…it’s sorta like Nico without all that heroin. Well…no sooner did Sharin & Sune drop a new video for their single “Heart of Stone”, off last year’s ‘In and Out of Control’, and a bunch of covers by other artists start flying at me from every direction!

Psychedelic Brooklyn rockers Amazing Baby have slowed the pace and turned it into a morphine-fuzzy homage to Marc Bolan & T-Rex…..

AMAZING BABY
Heart Of Stone

DOWNLOAD: Heart Of Stone (Raveonettes cover)

…and going in a totally different direction, L.A.’s Dum Dum Girls have enveloped the song with a hollow, echoey surf guitar and a wall of reverb that sounds like a punked-out clone of The Shirelles!!!

DUM DUM GIRLS
Heart Of Stone (Raveonettes cover)

DOWNLOAD: Heart Of Stone (Raveonettes cover)

You can head on over to MySpace to check out both The Dum Dum Girls and Amazing Baby

Song of the Day

Gloomy & rainy here in NYC today…I got no words…..

JETS OVERHEAD
Get It Right

DOWNLOAD: Get It Right

BusinessWeek – Over & Out

I just heard from my friends at BusinessWeek…the entire Photo Department has just been fired and the phones in the Art Department are starting to ring, so they’re probably all gone too….

1:00PM UPDATE: Everybody in the Photo, Art and Graphics departments got fired……

4:10PM UPDATE: I dunno if this has anything to do with the days events, but I just heard that the 43rd Floor is on fire…for real!!!……

Ron Burkle For BusinessWeek

It’s kinda bittersweet to be posting about a job I just did for BusinessWeek on the same day I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop regarding the expected job cuts, but what the heck…it might just be a long time before I have another BusinessWeek story to talk about, right?!!

Last Tuesday, I get a 7:00AM wake-up call from one of my favorite people in the whole World, Sarah Morse…the magazine just got an eleventh-hour OK to shoot Ron Burkle, the supermarket Gazillionaire, and would I be available…like right now…to shoot him?!! I was literally getting ready to head out for a location scout on another gig, but sure…I can call and get Bo’s lazy ass outta bed and the two of us could hang with Mr. Burkle for a bit. And I actually knew a lot about Burkle…he was a huge Democratic fundraiser, a regular on the New York Post’s Page Six, he owns the Pittsburgh Penguins, he hangs out with Bono and Diddy and Leo and various Supermodels…and he recently bought Sky Studio, a triplex photography studio with it’s own swimming pool that I used to rent, as a New York pied-à-terre for about 17 million bucks and that’s where we were gonna do the shoot! Of course, we were told that he would have very little time for the shoot and I wouldn’t get to meet with him until he arrived, but that didn’t matter. Even with a ten-minute shoot window, I figured I should be able to pull something kinda cool off…..

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The backlit, cantilevered staircase gave us a grand entrance focal point and we quickly saw it as the perfect location for our opener. Thank God Burkle showed up wearing a suit and not the jeans and polo shirt his publicist had promised!

After an extremely quick five-minute shoot on the stairs, I asked Ron if we could have a few more minutes to shoot him up on the roof…he graciously obliged and this was the result…..

You can read the article, ‘The Other Ron Burkle’, HERE and y’all stay tuned to see if I have any more BusinessWeek stories to relay in the future!

More Cuts At BusinessWeek???

The sad news racing through the photo community this morning…or at least the small portion I find myself a part of…is that another sweeping round of axings layoffs at BusinessWeek is imminent. I suppose my acting surprised might seem a trifle disingenuous, but since Bloomberg assumed the reins back in December and the initial firings were announced, things seemed to be stabilizing and I was hoping (against hope?) that the friends and colleagues I have known for years would be spared further cuts, but with word that a new design team is in place and both the New York Post and Daily Finance reporting that as many as 30 more people might face the chopping block as early as tomorrow, it’s probably time to face the fact that the magazine I knew is due for some pretty big changes.

Sue Bloom gave me my first assignment back in October of 1988. Roxanne Edwards (then the Photo Director) took a chance and gave me my first cover story a few short months later. It was in 1991 that I began working with the current Photo Director, Ronnie Weil, when she sent me of to shoot the CEO of Pepsi. And Larry Lippman, Kathy Moore, Scott Mlyn, Anne D’Aprix, Sarah Morse, Andrew Popper, Mindy Katzman, Lori Perbeck, Regina Flanagan, Kat Malott, Burte Hughes, Sandra Torres…throughout the years these photo editors and researchers have been like family. This is one of very few magazines I have worked for where I could drop by and feel like an insider and that my opinions and viewpoint actually mattered. I’ve been allowed access into some pretty amazing executive suites over the years…culminating in Ronnie and me getting to spend an afternoon in the Oval Office just a few months ago for our Obama cover story…and I’ve had the opportunity to produce some rather interesting work. I honestly can’t tell you how many covers I’ve shot for them, but it’s gotta be North of thirty by now, and through it all it’s been a wild ride. Now all any of us can do is see how the next act plays out…..

bwcovers

Song of the Day

THE XX
VCR

DOWNLOAD: VCR

It’s been almost a year since I told you guys about The XX, but since that time, the number one outside search that has newbies showing up at the Damn Ugly door is for The XX…I usually get anywhere from 50 to 100 hits a day from people searching for these four sad-faced kids from South London! Their popularity certainly wasn’t hurt by both Rolling Stone and NME placing them on their “Best of the Year” lists, but then came the Winter Olympics…an AT&T commercial with Apolo Ohno featured their song ‘Intro’ and was in heavy rotation for the entire two weeks of the games. They’ve been touring nonstop (and picking up fans) in support of their debut album…so much that keyboard player Baria Qureshi has quite the group siting exhaustion…and then today I found out that they’re gonna be playing SXSW next week. Head over to MySpace and give a listen.

Here is the video for ‘VCR’…..

…and here’s that Apolo Ohno AT&T commercial…..

Song of the Day

JUMP INTO THE GOSPEL
Flagship

DOWNLOAD: Flagship

Maybe it just seems this way ‘cuz I live in New York, but dont’cha think an awful lotta new bands are coming outta Brooklyn these days?!! Throw a rock at just about any music blog and you’re gonna hit an act that takes the “L” Train to get to gigs! And now we can add Jump Into The Gospel to the list. Five guys whose sharp guitar work and sing-along, up-tempo, eccentric rhythms have been filling up all the local clubs…and if you can believe what’cha read (Even MTV has called them Buzzworthy) they put on a killer live show, too. To get your attention, they’re offering up their first EP…for free…over on their website. Once you add their tunes to your iPod, head on over to MySpace and make friends!

Song of the Day

DAN BERN
Tiger Woods

DOWNLOAD: Tiger Woods

Right up front I gotta tell those of you toiling away in cubicles that today’s song is probably considered NOT safe for work, so if The Man is close by, please turn down your speakers and be considerate of your more conservative colleagues. Dan Bern, or Danny Bernstein to his friends, is something of an itinerant singer/songwriter/novelist/painter/all-round-Renaissance man, which is to say he probably looks at traveling the backroads from gig to gig in a 78 Buick and making thirty-five grand a year as a romantic expression of his art…Crazy Heart anyone?!! But he’s also something of a visionary…Dan released Fifty Eggs back in 1998…but who would have known that a decade later this song would make such a perfect theme song for the current troubles Tiger Woods now finds himself embroiled in?!! I just find the whole damned thing funny as Hell. But Dan’s still plugging away (he starts what is probably his 500th tour in April) and you can check him out on his website or over on MySpace

Song of the Day

BOB SCHNEIDER
Changing Your Mind

DOWNLOAD: Changing Your Mind


DOWNLOAD: Changing Your Mind – LIVE

Bob Schneider is something of an institution in Austin, Texas…a town that certainly takes pride in it’s indie music. Back in the 90’s, Schneider co-founded The Scabs, one of those bands that nobody seems to know much about but everybody kinda remembers they were supposed to be great. In no time he built a reputation as being not only a solid frontman, but also became a cornerstone in the Austin live music culture. SInce going solo, he’s quietly put out ten albums and EP’s that always seem to catch the music critics ears, but not much radio play. I heard ‘Changing Your Mind’, from his latest album Lovely Creatures, on my Sirius the other day and was completely taken by the painful ache in his voice, especially when he and Patty Griffin harmonize in the chorus…well, that and the cellos, ‘cuz a sad cello solo with always get me to well up…you don’t get better break-up songs than this. I’m including both the album version and a leaner, acoustic live track he did for the folks at My Old Kentucky Blog Radio. Help a brother out and visit him on MySpace

Song of the Day

THE SHIMMER
Lover’s Void

DOWNLOAD: Lover’s Void

Sounding like a post-modern mashup of Depeche Mode, The Human League and Bauhaus, bother and sister duo, David and Jade Hanks, have got the two-fingered, blips & bloops synth and drum machine dialed in pretty damned good and are making some catchy pop music at the same time. And if the cool electro-beat sounds oddly familiar, it prolly has a lot to do with the fact that ex-Depeche Mode mastermind Luke Smith is handling the production for the kids. But frantic electronic knob-twiddling aside, it’s really David’s dark, haunting voice that resonates and carries this beyond being just another throw away, lo-fi techno downer. From what I can glean from the interweb, the siblings are just getting this little dog & pony show off the ground, but you can follow ’em on MySpace all the same.

The Barron’s Roundtable – 2010 Edition

I’ve kinda been neglecting to include any actual photo-related posts lately, but a lot of what I’ve been shooting hasn’t run yet and until it does, it’s gotta stay under wraps, but here is a recent job I did for Barron’s…..

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I’ve been shooting the Barron’s Roundtable cover for a lotta years now, and every year the challenge is to reinvent how to photograph these ten fund managers in new & compelling compositions that will work for the cover, an inside spread, a couple of weeks worth of feature portraits and if that’s not enough, another cover that runs mid-year…all in a little over an hour! The entire production takes a boatload of planning before we even show up at the location…this year’s meeting was at The Harvard Club…but the main trick is keeping to a schedule that will allow us to get all that work done with only seven or eight minutes per person. It’s one thing to make an interesting portrait of a person given those time constraints, but add in all of the different final uses, the fact that most of the images will have to be assembled into group shots in Photoshop and the meeting room we were using as our ‘studio’ was so old that there was only one fifteen-amp electrical circuit for the whole room which meant we had to rent just about every battery-powered strobe in Manhattan to light the two sets, when we’re done it felt like we had gone to war!

Since we always do the actual shoot very early in the morning, before the meeting starts, we always give ourselves a pre-light day, and this was what we came up with for our cover test…..

…then, on a second set, we put this together…

The ‘fun’ part on a shoot like this is always convincing these very buttoned-down investment executives to trust me when I ask them to do whatever it is we’ve cooked up for the cover. This year, the little metaphor we were trying to hammer home was ‘looking around the corner’, so we rigged a few foamcore panels and had each person playing with that idea…..


…Dr. Marc Faber


…Mario Gabelli


…Bill Gross


…and Kelly, touching up Oscar Schafer!

All of which came together inside as this Photoshop-realized group shot…..

With that part done, we quickly moved to the second set for a few tighter portraits which would result in these images that ran in the following weeks……

Song of the Day

TRACEY THORN
Oh The Divorces

DOWNLOAD: Oh The Divorces

Tracey Thorn has, quite simply, one of the most purely original and distinctive voices in pop music from the past 20 years. No matter if she’s belting out a techno/house-clubland dance hit or gently whispering a bluesy torchsong, or whether it’s with the partnership of husband and longtime collaborator Ben Watt in Everything But The Girl, her ground-breaking work she has done with Massive Attack, or the many solo albums and compilations she has done with other artists, the control she shows with her beautifully evocative vocal range is stunning. The spare piano and swirling array of sad strings that caress and carry her voice through ‘Oh The Divorces’ shows similarities to another of my favorites…..

TRACEY THORN
By Piccadilly Station I Sat Down And Wept

DOWNLOAD: By Piccadilly Station I Sat Down And Wept

…but this leans more towards theater with it’s orchestral flourishes and the lush, tender way the story flows from her. Her new album, Love and Its Opposite, drops May 18th and you can get more Tracey on her blog or over on MySpace

Song of the Day

CATS ON FIRE
The Borders Of This Land

DOWNLOAD: The Borders Of This Land

I remember once reading that Finland has one of the highest rates of suicide mortality in the World. The sociologists who get off on this kinda thing have ever been able to decisively figure out why, but after studying factors such as seasonality, sunlight duration, temperature variation, Solar radiation, atmospheric acidity, rainfall rates and the quality of beer available to the populace, the facts don’t lie…Finns off themselves more than just about any other nationality on Earth! So it shouldn’t be altogether surprising that Cats On Fire, one of the most popular bands burning up the Finnish record charts, has a sound that so closely resembles The Smiths that you would swear Morrissey finally made up with Johnny Marr and got the boys back together for a jam session! Now I have no proof that either The Smiths or Cats On Fire has ever caused anyone to take a header off the roof, but I would be willing to bet a few sad bastards have had “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” playing while they were tightening the rope around their neck. Lead singer Mattias Björkas’ softly accented falsetto so closely mimics The Moz that one has to wonder if he’s simply doing an homage or if his friends should be prudent and slip an electric razor into his shaving kit. But just like The Smiths, Cats On Fire succeeds at balancing the melancholy with uplifting, happy, complexly melodic and even danceable music. And let’s be honest…how can you not love a song as well written and purely poetic as this? I mean, when was the last time you heard a pop song with a lyric like, “…When you are lowered into the ground, Your friends will set up a memorial fund…”…?!! Oh yeah…when The Smiths were still around……

Check out more of Cats On Fire at their website (where you can also download the A-Side single, ‘The Hague’, for free) or on MySpace

Song of the Day


O EMPEROR
Some Small Matter


https://damnuglyphotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/some-small-matter.mp3

DOWNLOAD: Some Small Matter

Playing to sold-out crowds in their native Ireland and getting the kind of press that’ll get you noticed from 5,000 miles away, O Emperor seems very much a band on the verge. There is something quite mesmerizing about Paul Savage’s strained vocals, slightly syncopated rhythms, the stuttering high-hat and that sort of retro/T-Rexy/Rock-God guitar riff that slithers in and out of the otherwise easygoing, jangly arrangement. They just dropped Persephone, a 3-song EP and have apparently finished recording their debut album, Hither/Thither, due out in May.

Song of the Day

INU
The Bailing

DOWNLOAD: The Bailing

I needed a bit of ambient fuzz to help me start the week and the this morning I fell over a leak off of Monster, the 5-song EP by Inu, the new project comprised of producer Mikael (Count) Eldridge (DJ Shadow, No Doubt, New Order, Radiohead) and bassist/guitarist Tim Hingston (The Nightland, Stripmall Architecture), featuring cello superstar Zoe Keating (Imogen Heap, Dresden Dolls). I liked ‘The Bailing’ so much after only a couple of listens that I actually coughed up the five bucks to buy the rest of the EP. I’m sure some of you might find this easy to pass off as your usual mellow blend of electronic trip-hop with techno-squonky vocals, but the smart production and theatrical guitar structures carry this much further up the musical ladder. I get a wonderful Joy Division vibe off of these guys. Don’t believe me? Then head over to Inu Music to stream the rest of the EP. They’re apparently following up this EP with a full-length in March…I’ll be keeping them on my radar, for sure.

Song of the Day

DAWN LANDES
Young Girl

DOWNLOAD: Young Girl

Man…times sure flies, huh? Hard to believe it’s been two years since I last served up a Dawn Landes song on The List, but it was February of 2008 when ‘Bodyguard’ got added to my iTunes folder…..

DOWNLOAD: Bodyguard

Anyway…yesterday I stumbled across her new album and I’m happy to say that time hasn’t changed her style…on ‘Young Girl’, the signature snare drum is still there, and the bare-bones production is reduced to the essential elements, with a stripped-down, almost carnival-like feel to the music, and Dawn’s sultry, deadpan vocal stays in a monotone throughout the song, until she breaks free with a wail at the very end. Sweetheart Rodeo came out a couple of weeks ago, and you can visit Dawn on MySpace