Canadian singer Feist will be coming to Sesame Street. She’ll make her debut on the August 11th season premiere and change the lyrics to one of her most famous tracks – The Reminder – to a song about counting that four-year-olds can relate to.

She was born Leslie Feist in Calgary, Canada and moved to Toronto, Canada as an adult after spending time in Paris, Berlin, and other areas. For a time, she performed with a sock puppet and called herself Bitch Lap-Lap.

Now that she’s grown up her music has changed a lot and so has her fan base and the way that the world sees her. Sesame Street will be happy to welcome her to sing about the number four and count with chickens and friendly monsters.

While the artists who appear on it might be more contemporary nowadays, Sesame Street itself and its hopeful, joyful, happy message of learning has not changed much. With Feist’s recreation of herself, she’s just right for the children who watch the show and the parents who pay attention to what their children are watching.

Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys was both psychologically tormented and musically gifted. He was a complicated person with complicated problems and a lot to say that he couldn’t seem to express. His brother, drummer Dennis Wilson, was largely overlooked. (more…)

Not everyone who started out in the music business stayed in it. Some left because there were a lot of layoffs and problems, but others left because they decided that it was time to do something different.

There are a lot of success stories like Millman and Baeyertz out there, including Darryl Franklin, who used to be the vice president of business affairs over at Interscope records. Now he manages a skate boarder and runs a company overseeing the ramp at the X-Games. Going back to the ‘biz’ isn’t an option for any of these men – they’ve found just what they wanted to do.

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Seriously. EBay has an auction for Vinnie Paul’s oven, with no reserve. If you win it he’ll personalize it and autograph it for you, but you have to pick it up. It’s in Arlington, Texas and there’s no shipping available. Vinnie – the Big Vin – loves to cook, and his dad got him a better oven for Christmas so this one has to go.

You can own an oven that has had the pleasure and privilege of serving up a lot of meals for rock stars, and over the next few days they’ll be more stuff to buy, as well. Vinnie is going through his storage space and getting rid of a lot of the things that he’s stuffed in there over the years – who knows what he’ll find?

In order to move the merchandise, Big Vin Records is setting up shop on eBay. Some of the items offered will be things that Vinnie owned personally, but that won’t be all of it.

There will also be a lot of HellYeah, Pantera, and DamagePlan merchandise, too, so fans should keep their eyes open and check the site often to see what else they might want to bid on. They could end up owning a rarity that not just anyone can have, and what would be better than that for a true fan?

Trey Anastasio, frontman and lead guitarist for Phish, has teamed up with Orchestra Nashville for a project called Time Turns Elastic. When the orchestra starts its 2008-2009 season at the Ryman Auditorium Anastasio will be there, too.

The work is touted as groundbreaking for vocals, orchestra, and electric guitar. Given the work Anastasio has done with Phish and some of his more ambitious solo products, the Time Turns Elastic project promises to be creative and interesting beyond measure. The first team up for Orchestra Nashville and Anastasio was back in 2004 and 80,000 fans were treated to “new classical” music. The collaboration was such a hit that the work continued.

Anastasio has been working on this newest collaboration for 18 months now, as he’s been off the road. A lot of emotion went into the work, and all who have worked on it seem to believe that a lot of emotion will come out of it, as well. It’s like nothing else out there, with long passages of orchestral music intertwined with vocals and unparalleled electric guitar work.

Some think it odd that the Ryman – a traditionally country music venue – would be the choice for this music, but it’s actually not so strange when you consider that Orchestra Nashville has a serious reputation for music that goes beyond the boundaries.

Zach De La Rocha has a new band. The line  up features the former Rage Against The Machine front man, as well as  Jon Theodore (formally of The Mars Volta).

The band says this when asked about the significance of it’s name: (more…)

Okay so maybe this isnt exactly “moshable” in the traditional sense.

Or maybe it’s extremely “moshable” in the traditional sense depending on your sense of the word traditional.  Whether the classics for you were written by Mozart or McCartney, anyone can appreciate a natural knack for pure musical genius,

Check out this blind baby prodigy who one day, according to her mother “just started playing.”

Amazing.

Something very cool happened last week in the world of Independent music.  Last FM has launched their Artist Royalty Program.  The self described “groundbreaking” program promises to pay royalties to unsigned artists.

Whether a Last FM listener chooses to stream music from a particular artist, or the song is randomly selected and recommended to listener by the Last FM engine, the artist will receive royalties.

Co-founder Martin Stiksel says, “The young musician making music in a bedroom studio has the same chance as the latest major label signing to use Last.fm to build an audience and get rewarded. The Artist Royalty Program is another revolutionary step towards helping musicians take control of their music — and, more importantly, make a living from it,”

Since announcing the launch of the program last january over 450,000 different tracks by unsigned artists have been uploaded into the Last FM library.

Watch it all the way through

This is cool