Lykke Li's childhood was unconventional, nomadic and even sort of romantic. The Swedish singer -- full name Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson -- was born to a photographer mother and musician father who raised Li and her siblings in Sweden, Portugal and India. With that kind of artistic upbringing, it seems only natural that she could someday become a performer.
"I would say I was a quite charming child, but I was very quiet," Lykke Li says on the phone from her New York apartment. "I was performing a lot in front of everybody but I was still quiet. I'm shy, but at the same time I'm really not shy."
A similar range of personalities and emotions erupt on Li's debut LP, "Youth Novels" (Atlantic), which bowed at No. 18 on the |
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Ask José Guajardo, lead singer of Los Amos de Nuevo León, to explain "El Hyphy" as it applies to regional Mexican music, and he will politely but firmly refer you to the lyrics of his group's hit song of the same name:
"The women of the San Francisco Bay and San Jose and Oakland/are bringing a new movement they call hyphy, they hear it and they go crazy/the hyphy's so popular that they're dancing it in Sacramento, Stockton and Fresno/I bring fever to everyone in California, it's the movement that's hitting."
"Everyone's going crazy listening to fast corridos/they shake up beers, everyone gets wet, they don't care when they're dancing/head and shoulders up and down, dancing the hyphy/jumping up and down like cr |
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It's an unusually hot and humid summer night in Hollywood. A murmuring line of fans—mostly women—snakes around the Sunset Boulevard perimeter of the House of Blues. They're waiting for one thing and one thing only: Robin Thicke.
Inside the crowded venue, women begin yelling as Thicke's band troops onstage to some James Brown funk and the announcer promises "a true soul experience." Then the whole room seemingly undulates as Thicke, his slender frame encased in black, bounds onstage and launches into his new '70s soul-grooved track "Magic."
That afternoon in an upstairs dressing room, a sound check-bound Thicke mused about the audiences that have been queuing up as he sets the stage for the Sept. 30 release of his a |
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It's shaping up to be a year filled with highlights for Mac McCaughan. Not only did the prodigious North Carolina musician welcome a second child into his family this year, but he's also seeing Merge, his little label that could, turn 20 in a celebrity-studded mix tape extravaganza.
Meanwhile, Portastatic, his one-time Superchunk side project that has since become his main focus, has amassed such a huge catalog of songs that it warrants a two-disc compilation of B-sides, rarities, covers and previously unreleased items.
The 44 tracks on the new "Some Small History" date back as far as 1990, but they're a more fitting audio history of McCaughan's mind than his work with Superchunk, as he's long used Portastatic as his cha |
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The Lovely Sparrows lately seem to be the go-to indie-pop band for artists as they travel through Austin. Opening for acts as diverse as Fleet Foxes, Appleseed Cast and the Black Angels, the group is now poising itself to bust out of its Texan hotbed.
With help from New York-based management/consulting agency the Rebel Group, the Lovely Sparrows will release their first full-length, "Bury the Cynics," Sept. 9. The album was preceded by an Aug. 19 digital release, a Daytrotter session and an interview on NPR's Austin affiliate KUT. Additionally, spin.com debuted the powerful viral video for "Bury the Cynics" track "Year of the Dog," directed by video artist Eric Power.
The music crafted by primary songwriter Shawn Jones h |
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To celebrate Cherry Lane Music founder Milt Okun's Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony, organizers paired a bit of the old with the new. The publishing mainstay's first signee, Tom Paxton, sang John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane" with Cherry Lane's newest addition, 22-year-old Madi Diaz.
"Madi Diaz is someone I'll be watching carefully . . . She has the goods to go far," Paxton later wrote on his Web site.
Diaz, originally from "BF nowhere" Pennsylvania, made an early fan out of Ty Stiklorius, a member of John Legend's management team. Stiklorius "was at [New York's] the Bitter End for somebody who was playing before me, but came up to me after my set and was like, 'OK, I'm not |
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