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June 26, 2006

Paste Podcast on 100 greatest living songwriters

Paste Culture Club - Episode 19

holy jeepers, if you didn't take my previous advice about listening to the Paste Culture Club Podcast, then you have to listen to me spout of about how great it is... again!

the most recent Paste Magazine has Bob Dylan on the cover and is their attempt at naming the 100 Best Living Songwriters of All-Time. when it came out, I held off from blogging about it because I realize that ever 100 Best List is pretty subjective and there's no reason to get my panties in a wad about someone else's opinion. the blogosphere (silly name, I didn't come up with it) was all aflutter about who they left out... if you don't believe me, just check this google of 174,000 results (the best part is that a ton of people didn't catch the whole "living songwriters" thing and started complaing about Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon and Johnny Cash and many others being left off)

after listening to the podcast, I have to say the guys (and girls) at Paste have THE "job that I most envy" (I'll have to make a list of these at some point, but then why would you want to read my subjective opinion about jobs I don't have!). on the podcast, they play 3 of the interviews that they used to publish the magazine: Paul McCartney, Peter Buck (R.E.M.), and Andy Partridge (X.T.C.). how freakin' cool is that?!?

well, beyond my vocational covetousness, you should just listen to the podcast because it's good stuff. case closed. you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, or you can simply download this episode.

2 comments:

Brian T. Murphy said...

I was looking at this last night. I quit reading paste a few months ago for reasons I don't want to get into here because I will sound like an ass. maybe that's because I am an ass.

I'm a loyal reader of spin and rolling stone, but this recent paste issue definitely caught my attention. I'll probably go pick it up today. I hope it doesn't mean I'll start subscribing to paste.

lbrodine said...

i was a long-time reader of Rolling Stone, but got sick of them not really talking about music so much as being a vehicle for the music industry machine (I realize this is the cop-out response to stop reading any publication). maybe it was when the thrust of their writing focused on music that didn't really interest me; perhaps they've changed. I pick up a copy at the airport when I'm bored, but that's about it anymore. (same with Spin, but I think they talk about music and it's music that I typically like more than RS).

I picked Paste because they talked about musicians I like, like Over the Rhine and Patty Griffin, who weren't getting much press from other music sources. I don't always like the sampler, but I have learned about a few musicians for the first time that I am now devoted to (Sufjan, most notably).

The reason I read music magazines is to keep up on the music that I would have at my disposal if I was living in Nashville or Seattle again, and had the collective ears of friends to help filter through what's out there. Now that I live in a small town in the south (2 strikes against it, but not enough to be out... it would have to be the suburbs to do that), everyone is either 1. old or 2. listens to country music or CCM, so I don't have anyone to get a discriminating musical/artistic opinion from.

Perhaps that's what this new interweb thingy is good for