The Morning After

The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson recently sat in the same room together to record the first “Replacements” music in years.   The extended play they recorded is a collection of 4 covers that will benefit Slim Dunlap (Replacements guitarist ’87-’91) who suffered a severe stroke last winter.  The ep also features drummer Chris Mars covering a Slim song and he created the art of the record.

SPIN has all the info on how to buy this limited press to support Slim.  Trolling the net, I also found this great 2008 interview Paul Westerberg on Pitchfork.  Good times.

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The other day SPIN featured up a very pretty song by Shannon Whitworth.  I heard this track and it got me thinking it would make a pretty good wedding first-dance type of jam.

Shannon Whitworth – “You Are In Love”

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The Black Keys… pretty good band.

Their record El Camino came out December 6th, 2011 and became a modern rock legend.  The album is huge.  We were sitting around here at the radio factory yesterday talking about what music to have in our “heavy rotation” and what new music to add in when Bossman Johnny said, “where are we at with “Little Black Submarine?”

We were poking around and were surprised to find the song is one of the most played modern rock songs on some pretty groovy Modern Rock FM stations.  Got us thinking (and me in particular) about the speed of sound…I like finding out new music and listening to all sorts of stuff, but the average music fan…happy to jam the forth single on a record that is over a year old.  And is a year old record…. old? Does the Zone churn on the songs too quickly?   How about The Black Keys?  Seems they are ready to march forward, they have some new music in the pipe…but to a Radio Programmer….the forth single is hot.  huh…

addition:

I wanted to add something from this article about music sales this week that is related to the above discussion about The Black Keys.

If there’s a silver lining here, it’s the slow, honest rise of the Lumineers who scoot up from No. 9 to No. 8 as their “Ho Hey” picks up radio adds and on-demand plays since their Grammy nomination and despite their album (The Lumineers, 51K) having come out all the way back in April.

To illustrate the “speed” in which the world turns their attention to music…. this song has 2,000 on The End in Seattle…but its brand new to so many people.

Go with yourself.