Root Down in the Shadow

In honor of the current tour with Headliner Iron & Wine and opener the Low Anthem cruising through the East Coast, I thought it was a perfect time to introduce my readers to The Onion - A.V. Club .  The satirists at the Onion took a break from their off the wall articles to bring an awesome twist to the cover song.  According to the intro on the videos (after the Starbucks commercial - sorry) It goes like this.  "With some help from our readers, the a.v. club made another list of 25 song and we’re inviting bands into our office to cover them.   Once a band has played a song, it gets crossed off the list.  So the later a band comes in the fewer songs they will have to choose from." We start off with the inaugural song of this season's list Iron & Wine covering George Michael 'One More Try' Iron And Wine covers George Michael It's a rare look at Sam Beam & Co doing outside songs. Of course there is the larger than life 'Such Great H...

*** Part of an ongoing series of TOOLS TO ENJOY MORE MUSIC ***** I will attempt to profile great avenues of finding, listening to, and downloading new music, to help you , the music fan, get more out of your listening experience. The interface  was probably my first podcast.   Back in 2006 I spent many weekends working in my new house, and I needed some new music to get into while I was demolishing, rebuilding and painting.   I think I had been looking up bands for the upcoming Virgin Festival in Baltimore, MD ., but somehow I had stumbled onto four awesome new bands.   Pigeon John, the Raconteurs, KT Tunstall, and Lady Sovereign . During these early podcasts, the podcast was referred to as AOL Interface @ Spinner.com .  It was also mainly an interview with some performance added at the beinning or end.  Somehow they embedded chapters into the podcasts, so you could skip through and listen to the songs.  That was nice as, after the 10th time...

Disco Bitch and the Funk Machine - a retrospective Q&A at McgurkMusic with fellow IUP alum and DBFM fan Dan McGurk During my freshman year of college at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, I lived in Scranton Hall. While Scranton Hall no longer exists, the memories of three fellas on the floor starting a band with other like minded musical friends still remain.  During that first Spring semester musical sparks started flying with these hall-mates and their classmates and a funk band was started.  Soon they became Disco Bitch and the Funk Machine.  The band was extremely popular!  Although other bands on campus such as Bob, Teenage Girls, or Levelhead, could give them a run for their money, a Disco Bitch and the Funk Machine concert became an event like none other.  During the next four years the experience was a wild one for the guys. The band was funk galore. They started off with incredible covers to go with their own incredible original material. A...