Soundcheck

In this epiosde: Bill Janovitz -- writer and founder the ‘90's alternative rock band Buffalo Tom --  talks about a new collection of essays about 50 Rolling Stones songs.  Plus: Last year the British post-punk band Savages was hailed as one of the best new bands in the U.K. — and at the time, only had one or two songs to its credit. Now that the group's brutal and elegant debut, Silence Yourself, is out, the reviews are in — and they are rave. They play live.  And: Columbia University’s Center for Ethnomusicology is voluntarily returning — to several Native American groups — a treasure trove of rare recordings of traditional songs and dances.  Aaron Fox, Associate Professor of music at Columbia and former director of the Center, explains why.

This year has been good to Tegan and Sara Quin, the identical twin sisters who lead the band Tegan and Sara. Their seventh studio album, Heartthrob, premiered at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart, and the duo recently made the short list for Canada's prestigious Polaris Music Prize. And it's easy to hear why: Tegan and Sara's fizzy brand of pop draws you in immediately with pulsing synths, a propulsive beat, and uncannily catchy melodies.     For more photos, visit Soundcheck's Tumblr page.  Set List: "I Was A Fool" "Closer" "I'm Not Your Hero"   Interview Highlights Tegan Quin, on the benefits of collaborating and writing for other artists: I encourage young artists out there to collaborate with each other all the time. Bands constantly come to us for advice — young artists, aspiring artists, singers, writers, etc. — and I always say now, the best thing you can do is go and collaborate with someone else, because you are broadening your horizon right away. Instantly you are learning from someone else, and I think that that’s the best way to become a good writer. Sara Quin, on the duo collaborating with each other heavily for the first time: There's something creatively frustrating for me that in the compromise we've ended up having so much more success. You of course stubbornly think that it’ll be your song or it’ll be your vision that ultimately pushes you forward. And I think that over the years I’ve realized that that was fairly, that’s not true. Tegan and I, probably our most successful moments have come when we were probably both stubbornly moving towards the middle. And that sort of compromise has created some of our strongest work, probably.  Tegan, on her and Sara’s decision to go in a more mainstream direction with Heartthrob: We’d always just said, “No, there’s no room for us on radio. We’re different. We’re girls. We write own songs. Nobody wants that. No one wants that.” All of a sudden, we didn’t care anymore. We shrugged off all that insecurity. And I was like, “I want to change the way that mainstream radio looks. I want to change the way that mainstream music looks. I want to get things like SNL. I want to get on The Ellen [Degeneres] Show. I want to tour and play really big venues. And I don’t want to compromise. I want to just go for it and still have integrity in our music.” And Sara was on board for that too.

Lately, the big stories in the art museum world have revolved around works of art from all over the world -- and how the countries of origin want them back. Some of these repatriation deals can get pretty contentious. But Columbia University’s Center for Ethnomusicology is voluntarily returning a treasure trove of rare recordings of traditional songs and dances to several Native American groups. Aaron Fox, an associate professor of music at Columbia and former director of the Center, tells Soundcheck how the center worked to return these recordings and how a Columbia student was sent to find her own grandfather's recordings.   Interview Highlights Aaron Fox, on the unexpected ties of the rare recordings to a Columbia student: It's a very long story that starts with a Navajo family in Alburqueque, N.M. gathering for a family funeral. One of the daughters of this family was a young woman named Nanobah Becker, who has gone on to become a well-known Navajo filmmaker. At the time she was an MFA student in film at Columbia University. She had returned home for the funeral of her grandmother. Her sister from Chicago had picked up a record called Navajo Songs, which featured a set of tracks of recordings by the collector Laura Boulton. The girls' mother said, "I hear my father and grandfather on that record." It turned out that she was exactly right. The record featured an elder Navajo medicine man named Pablo Wellito and his son. These were in fact Nanobah Becker's great-grandfather and grandfather. They googled Laura Boulton, whose name appeared in the notes to the collection along with a credit to Columbia University. Since Nanobah was a student, they sent Nanobah in pursuit of her grandfather's recordings. On anthropologists' presumptions on "dying languages:" In the middle of the 20th century any number of collectors or scholars set about documenting what they perceived to be dying languages and cultures. In most cases those presumptions were quite wrong. Take something like Alaskan Eskimo dance which Laura Boulton recorded in 1946; she believed as did her Inupiaq consultants that the music she was documenting was in serious trouble. It couldn't be healthier now. It's explosively important to the performance of Eskimo and Inupiaq identity in Alaska and more broadly around the world. Virtually every young person in Alaska's North Slope participates in traditional dance. On how you add value to returning these recordings: It's my argument that Native communities and artists gave freely of their creative work to people like Laura Boulton, who collected this music, or Alan Lomax or any of the other famous collectors. They did so in the reasonable expectation of reciprocity. The collector who recorded these songs and about 115 others did not speak Inupiaq, spent a week in town, had minimal contact after that with the community and the culture. With National Science Foundation funding, my collaborator Chie Sakakibara and myself have spent a number of years re-documenting this collection by listening to it systematically with the leading elder experts on Inupiaq traditional music in the Inupiaq community. We're able to produce an oral historical account of the recordings that provides a far, far richer account of what they are.   Music played in this segment: Hopi: "Spanish Song" Singer: David Monongye Recorded in Hotevilla, Arizona in 1940, by Laura Boulton ---- Iñupiaq: Untitled dance song Singers: Joseph Sikvayugak with Leo Kaleak, Rodger Ahalik, Otis Ahkivgak, Willie Sielak, Guy Okakok, and Alfred Koonaloak. Recorded in Barrow, Alaska in October 1946, by Laura Boulton. ---- Navajo: "Moccasin Game Song" Singers: Pablo and Frank Wellito, from Ojo Encino, New Mexico, Recorded at Century of Progress Exposition, Chicago in 1933, by Laura Boulton ---- Hopi: Lullaby "Puuva." Singer: Unknown Recorded in Hotevilla, Arizona in 1940, by Laura Boulton

Chris Richards, pop music critic for The Washington Post joins us from Washington D.C. to spin three very eclectic new songs, including indie rock from Massachusetts' Speedy Ortiz to a viral rap track from Atlanta's Migos. Speedy Ortiz, "Pioneer Spine"  They're a band from Western Massachusetts. There are a lot of indie rock bands reviving the sounds of the '90s right now. I particularly love these guys because it seems their album isn't skewing the '90s as much as zeroing in on the summer of 1995. That was the summer when Helium, Hazel, Polvo, and Pavement were all making these really impressive albums with really captivating guitar language. I think Speedy Ortiz has definitely learned how to speak that language.    Hailu Mergia, "Amrew Demkew" Keyboardist Hailu Mergia lives here in the Washington, D.C. area where he is 67-years-old and drives a cab at Douglas Airport. This is an album that was released in Ethiopia on cassette in 1985. It was recently reissued by the label Awesome Tapes from Africa. [Mergia] combined the accordion sounds with synthesizer sounds and he ended up making [an] album almost entirely improvised in the studio over the course of three days.      Tink, "Versace (Remix)" A viral rap song by the Atlanta trio Migos, it has since been remixed by everyone. There's versions from Shana, Meek Mill, Game, [and] Drake whose remix kind of kickstarted it and got it a little more widespread attention. Just recently Frank Ocean allegedly tried to do a remix of it but he lost his voice so he just posted the lyrics on his tumblr. One of my favorites of all these remixes is from Chicago. [It's] from a rapper named Tink, I think she really balances playfulness and attitude so well.   

Seattle-based songwriter, performer, and composer Jherek Bischoff has made a career out of collaboration, working with sonically diverse bands like Xiu Xiu, Amanda Palmer, and the Wordless Music Orchestra. He seemed to have soaked up those experiences and put them to good use: Last year, he released his solo debut, Composed, which blends the pop, rock, classical elements of his collaborators to create a laid-back yet complex sound. And he doesn't skimp on his own collaborations — eight out of nine songs feature a musical guest, including "Eyes," which features the Talking Heads' David Byrne. In the Soundcheck studio, Bischoff is joined by New-York-based classical ensemble Contemporaneous.         Set List: "Eyes" "Reminder" "DAE 2" Jherek Bischoff performs at Le Poisson Rouge on Wed., July 31.

Albert "Prodigy" Johnson is best known as one half of the Queens hip hop duo Mobb Deep. He's also the author of the memoir "My Infamous Life: The Autobiography of Mobb Deep’s Prodigy." But now, he's got a new role: fiction writer. He joins us to talk about his new street-lit novella, "H.N.I.C.," about a Brooklyn man who just can’t seem to leave a life of crime behind. "H.N.I.C." is also the name of a trilogy of his solo albums. Hear the rapper and author discuss writing fiction, his new Albert Einstein project with producer The Alchemist, and basketball player Metta World Peace.     Albert "Prodigy" Johnson, on whether the novella H.N.I.C. is connected to his music projects: The music that [Mobb Deep and I] make is more like — we call it reality rap. We talk about a lot of real situations in our life. We put our life in the music.... We don’t really do fiction too much in the music. We try to stay away from that. So writing a fiction novella was definitely something new for me. It’s something that I like to do though because it gives me a chance to use my imagination and my creativity more.   On the difficulties of entering the hip hop industry as a teenager: The hip hop music that we do is very street-related, is very rugged. And we deal with a lot of unsavory characters out there. It’s kind of hard to get away from that, especially at a young age. We were very young when we came into the business. We were like 15, 16 years old. So we were just like young juvenile delinquents trying to do something good, but at the same time caught up in that lifestyle. It took me a while. I had to learn to take myself out of certain situations and put myself in the right circle of people that are doing positive things like I’m trying to do with my life.   On struggling to write music while he was in prison: You gotta order from a prison catalog. And in a prison catalog, a lot of the music is bootleg, a lot of it is overpriced. A lot of music is just instrumentals that are out there already, like the best of Jay-Z or the best of Kanye West, best of Nas. It’s hard for my creativity to come out when I’m writing on stuff that I’ve heard. Somebody else rapped on it before. I need something original. That was a hard thing for me when I was locked up.  

Even as digital tools give musicians the ability to record and distribute their own material, a record label contract can still unlock doors for a budding professional musicians and young bands. That said, being on a record label doesn’t always guarantee that fans will be able to hear their favorite bands' music; it's not uncommon that an album winds up locked away and never heard — even from an artist who wants to release it. "It sounds counterintuitive,” says Aylin Zafar, Deputy Editor of BuzzFeed Music. She wrote a recent article on record labels' decisions not to release albums. "They would want to sell the record, you would think." However, sometimes artists get caught in the crossfire of label politics. Zafar explains the phenomenon further — including story of R&B singer JoJo, who hasn't been able to release an album for seven years.        

In this episode: Albert “Prodigy” Johnson is best known as one half of the Queens hip hop duo Mobb Deep. The rapper talks about his latest role: Street lit author. His new novella, H.N.I.C, is about a Brooklyn man who just can’t seem to leave a life of crime behind. Plus: The band Rabbit Rabbit -- which digitally releases a new song to subscribers on the first of each month -- joins us in the studio to play a few songs off of their latest compilation album, Rabbit Rabbit Radio Vol. 1. And: Just because a musician is signed to a record label doesn’t necessarily mean that the label will put out their music. BuzzFeed Music Deputy Editor Aylin Zafar explains with the story of the stalled career of young pop star JoJo.

Rabbit Rabbit -- the inventive new project from violinist/vocalist Carla Kihlstedt (Tin Hat, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) and drummer Matthias Bossi (Skeleton Key, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) -- joins us for an in-studio. The husband and wife duo plays songs from their upcoming release Rabbit Rabbit Radio, Volume 1 (out August 6th). Rabbit Rabbit plays Joe's Pub on July 13th. More information here. Set List: • Hush Hush • In The Dead of Night • Curious One Below, a video from the band:

Even the savviest music geek will miss a few records here and there. Last week, Soundcheck shared music from 1993 that we missed out on, but this week we widened that out to any song or album from any time.  All week, Soundcheck shared and celebrated some of our better-late-than-never favorites, and asked listeners to pick some songs, albums, bands that they may not have known about back in the day, but love now. Plus, we asked why they missed them in the first place. Soundcheck host John Schaefer and executive producer Joel Meyer kicked us off, and we also heard from bands like Tegan and Sara and Franz Ferdinand and more. Today, we're spinning those songs and hearing stories from listeners about what songs and records they missed. We also put together a handy Spotify playlist as well. 

Back in January, Elvis Costello revealed that his next release would be with rather unexpected collaborators, hip hop group The Roots. Costello is no stranger to these unlikely team-ups; he's worked with everyone from the Brodsky String Quartet and Paul McCartney to Burt Bacharach, among many others. And The Roots obviously are known to work with a lot of artists too both on its albums and especially in its role as the house band for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. It was on Fallon's show where the two parties apparently hatched the idea for this new record. Still, you might be hard-pressed to find someone who could have foreseen this collaboration. This week, we finally got a taste of what the full album (out Sept. 17) will be like with the single "Walk Us Uptown." And it got us thinking: What other bizarre musical partnerships have there been throughout the years? Emily Rems, managing editor at Bust Magazine, throws us a few of her favorites. Elvis Costello and The Roots, "Walk Us Uptown" from Wise Up Ghost I dig it a lot. And it sounds so natural for both sides. They both come from gritty, urban backgrounds, and that's in their music. But they’re so polished as artists that it really melds together so beautifully.     Snoop Lion and Miley Cyrus, "Ashtrays And Heartbreaks" from Reincarnated I felt like I did a double take when I found out this year back in may that Snoop Lion, formerly known as Snoop Dogg, had paired up with Miley Cyrus for that song “Ashtrays And Heartbreaks,” -- this song about dead friends and stuff. I wasn’t quite sure what Miley would contribute to that track, but I actually really liked it. I thought it was catchy.     Iggy Pop and Kate Pierson, “Candy” from Brick By Brick Kate Pierson’s from the B-52s. Super pop, super Southern. Iggy Pop is like the Pope of punk. In 1990, his album Brick By Brick had this song on it, and it became his only Top 40 hit ever. He’s been in Bust Magazine a couple times over the last 20 years, and he’s always said, “I hate love songs, I can't do love songs.” But the one time he did is solid gold.     Lou Reed and Metallica, “The View” from Lulu You know when you're riffing on two German plays and you’re trying to make a super heavy concept album, you’re really asking a lot from your audience. I don’t know if you heard that interview where Lars Ulrich said that Lou Reed challenged him to a street fight while they were making this album. I don’t think they were even happy with it themselves.     What unexpected collaborations and musical partnerships do you like or despise? Tell us in the comments section below.

In this episode: This year has been good to Tegan and Sara Quin, the identical twin sisters who lead the band Tegan and Sara. Their album Heartthrob premiered at number three, and they made the short list for the Polaris Music Prize in the duo’s native Canada. Tegan and Sara play live in the studio. Plus: Elvis Costello and The Roots just announced a collaborative album, which got us to thinking: What other unexpected collaborations have happened throughout the years? We tapped Emily Rems, Managing Editor at Bust Magazine, for her picks. And: Guitarist Glenn Jones descends from the tradition of the late, great finger-style guitarist John Fahey, but with his new album, My Garden State, his songs display another one of his influences: New Jersey itself. He plays live.

Nearly 50 years after Glenn Jones moved to New Jersey, the guitarist has released an album of instrumental postcards from his home state. Jones descends from the tradition of the late, great finger-style guitarist John Fahey, but with My Garden State, his songs display another one of his influences: New Jersey itself. Set List: "Across the Tappan Zee" (with Laura Baird) "Going Back to East Montgomery" "Bergen County Farewell" Glenn Jones performs at the Center for Strategic Art and Agriculture at the Silent Barn on July 4.

In the early 1960's, a then-little-known TV producer who worked with Harpo Marx skyrocketed to fame with his song parodies. Thanks to parodies of popular tunes like "Frère Jacques" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Allan Sherman strongly resonated with American culture at the time, and particularly among Jewish Americans. And although Sherman found fans in Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy, he unfortunately found himself away from the spotlight due to his voracious appetite for women, alcohol, and food.  In his new book Overweight Sensation: The Life And Comedy Of Allan Sherman, writer Mark Cohen chronicles Sherman's swift rise and fall.    Interview Highlights Mark Cohen, on who Allan Sherman was and why he's important:  Allan Sherman appeared on the pop music scene as one of the unlikeliest stars we'd had in a long time. In 1962, he released his first album which was called My Son the Folksinger. That was during the folk music revival that was very popular in the late '50s and early '60s. Sherman parodied the American folk song. The essence of the parody was that in the place of the great heroes of the songs, whether it was a western song like "The Streets of Laredo", or the nursery rhyme Frère Jacques, or the great "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Sherman took these songs and inserted the lives of the people he grew up with, who were first generation American Jews. It turned out to be an unexpected and enormous hit.  On Allan Sherman being the first of his kind:  There was definitely signs that this was coming. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner had produced their first 2000 Year Old Man album in 1960, and even a second one the following year. They were critically praised but did not do well commercially. Jackie Mason was an up-and-coming comedian, he was already on Ed Sullivan and doing well. But the kind of response that Allan Sherman got to singing songs like "Sarah Jackman" which was the great radio hit of his first album, that was really something new.  On the title of the biography: He used his weight in his own comedy, so I didn't feel bad about creating a title like that. One of his greatest songs is "Hail To Thee, Fat Person" where he wrote about some of his own travails with weight. He was a man of completely unregulated appetite for: food, very unorthodox sexual engagements, liquor. He smoked. He really was not trying to live a very long life. He wasn't a moderate individual in any way. So the pun occurred to me of "overweight sensation" and "overnight sensation." I think it's fair and funny and hopefully appropriate to the subject in that way.  On Sherman's lasting influence:  Well the most obvious answer is, of course, "Weird Al" Yankovic, whose made a career out of song parodies. He's been very open of claiming Sherman as an antecedent. More interestingly, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Jason Alexander -- that whole Seinfeld gang. Rick Moranis, the comic actor from Ghostbusters. Paul Reiser, the comedian who had the hit show Mad About You. All of these people can be found on the internet or in journalism talking about Sherman and their enjoyment of Sherman. Larry David was invited to be a guest of honor at a Boston Pops concert. He chose to sing "Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max" by Allan Sherman. When I speak with people of certain generations, the person they refer to as one of their great comic early loves is Allan Sherman.     

Even the savviest music geek will miss a few records here and there. This week, Soundcheck is going to celebrate your better-late-than-never favorites – and ask you why you missed them in the first place. Today, Tegan and Sara Quin -- the identical twin sisters that lead the band Tegan and Sara who joined Soundcheck earlier this week to record a session -- share their picks: The Replacements' Let It Be and The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead. Plus, we hear from a few of our listeners about some of their newly discovered favorites. Watch Tegan And Sara perform "Closer" live in the Soundcheck studio: Sara Quin on The Replacements'  "Androgynous" from Let It Be One of our first major tours in North America was with Ryan Adams. We got talking one night, and he asked us if we were aware of a band called the Replacements. I had never heard of them before. And he actually ended up gifting us the whole discography. Specifically, Let It Be really resonated with me. I just couldn't believe that I had never heard it before and that it could resonate so much.     Tegan Quin, on The Smiths' "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" from The Queen Is Dead When [Sara and I] became teenagers, we got really into the punk rock and indie rock scene in Calgary. My mom would drop us off at gigs on the weekend. And we became obsessed with this Calgary band called Red Autumn Fall. I remember, I was probably 18 or 19, stumbling upon The Smiths' record The Queen Is Dead and thinking to myself, "These people sound just like Red Autumn Fall!" But not thinking, "Oh, Red Autumn Fall must be ripping off The Smiths." I thought I had discovered a new band.