The man was a cinematic god in the realm of pop culture if not beyond. You got through high school watching The Breakfast Club, you got through puberty watching Weird Science, and you survived countless home invasions through the tricks you learned in Home Alone. Your new teen drama will be the ultimate tribute to [...]

Forty years ago, concert film were big. No really, they played on big screens and carried cultural import. In 1970, the documentary Woodstock won an academy award. When Talking Heads released Stop Making Sense in 1984, people were apparently dancing in the aisles of the theater.
Then, shortly thereafter, there were no aisles left to dance [...]

Because I wrote about Title Tracks' versions of songs by The Flamin' Groovies and The Merseybeats earlier this week, and because Bob Dylan's truly atrocious new disc of Christmas standards leaked yesterday, I've been thinking a lot about covers.
Let's put aside the illustrious history of ill-advised tributes (read: the entire Me First and the Gimme Gimmes oeuvre). A good cover can [...]

So, you like Daniel Johnston's music. And maybe you've glanced over the Waller, Texas-based outsider artist's drawings—surreal folk-art interpretations of Superman and Casper the Friendly Ghost, along with other, harder-to-define images—and liked those, too. So how's about getting lost in a three-dimensional labyrinth where his drawings spring to life and gyrate to  his greatest hits?
Last [...]

David Byrne's had his hands in many a cookie jar. The ex-Talking Head and Luaka Bop label founder played a building (literally), designed cheeky bike racks, and released one of 2008's best records with fellow '70s-era musical-genius-who-just-won't-quit Brian Eno. Now Byrne's got a new concept album in the works (via Stereogum via BBC).
Inspired by Imelda [...]

What is David Byrne interested in as a musician? What does he like, and what makes him cranky? There's probably no multiplatinum-selling rock frontman who's more deliberately Sphinx-like—he's usually had some complaint or other to make about consumerism, but he's more likely to soak those messages in abstraction ("Heaven") or irony ("[Nothing But] Flowers") than [...]

Seriously, it's been on repeat in the office all morning and doesn't appear to be losing steam. "Strange Overtones," they call it, and it rocks—in the offbeat, bouncily bittersweet way that you'd probably expect. It's tight but expansive, rhythmically impeccable and certainly not—whatever Byrne may sing in the chorus—"slightly out of fashion."
Download it [...]