April 2010 Archives

On the Record is a video series where rock stars gush about their favorite records -- in exactly 45 seconds. Click above to watch Jakob Dylan talk about his favorite album of all time. Rhapsody subscribers can listen to Women and Country and millions of other albums whenever and however they want. Click here to sign up for a free Rhapsody trial subscription and see what we're all about.

ARTIST: Jakob Dylan RECORD: Greendale

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As you may have noticed from our new header, Rhapsody’s got a spiffy new logo, one that’s more representative of what Rhapsody is, at heart: playful, musical and fun.

The new logo is tied to some big news about our company. Last week, after seven years as a part of RealNetworks, Rhapsody became a standalone company.

Don’t worry - we’re still called Rhapsody, we’re still based in Seattle, and our music programming team still enjoys the odd argument about the fine lines between post-modern pop and '00s alternative music.

More importantly, we’re still wildly passionate about music and about helping people enjoy millions of songs, wherever they find themselves. It’s something we’ve spent a lot of time on.

Since its launch waaaay back in 2001, Rhapsody has evolved from something you enjoy on your PC to a delight for your home stereo, your TV, your MP3 player, and, with last fall’s launch of our iPhone app, your mobile phone.

This morning, we’re introducing a new subscription offering, Rhapsody Premier, that gives you access to Rhapsody from any of those places (or all of them!) for one low price: $10 a month.

Now, whether you’re streaming Rhapsody through a browser at work, listening through your Sonos at home, or enjoying it on your iPhone as you go for a jog, you can get all the music you want, anywhere.

Coinciding with Rhapsody’s new pricing, we’re also bringing the service to an even wider audience of mobile users with the release of our Rhapsody mobile app for the Android platform; you can read more about the app (which is available now for free through the Android Market) here. Check it out and let us know what you think.

This morning, we’re formally releasing our Rhapsody mobile app for the Android platform.

Now, people with Android-powered handsets like the Motorola Droid or Google’s Nexus One can explore and stream Rhapsody’s entire catalog of over 9.5 million songs from pretty much anywhere. Using the app requires a Rhapsody subscription, but anyone can try it free for seven days.

We’ve been beta-testing our Android app since January; thank you to the hundreds of people who have tried it and given us your feedback.

PC Magazine recently honored the app’s beta version with their Editor’s Choice award, saying “Rhapsody is the best streaming music service for Android.”

You can get the app for free starting this morning- check it out and let us know what you think.

Actors have done it for years. So have pop stars. The ability to parlay mainstream recognition into an opportunity for more success is a concept that's been around for ages, but lately it seems more country music stars are taking the entrepreneurial bull by the horns.

Parallel to the rising popularity of country music in the mainstream, the past decade has seen a proliferation of creative ventures by country music artists, from clothing lines to perfume to restaurants — and just about everything in between. And while not every venture is going to be successful (just ask Naomi Judd or Lorrie Morgan how their restaurants worked out for them), more opportunities are making themselves available to country singers. Here are just a few country stars who have put their entrepreneurial skills to the test.

Dave Barnes' music is yours to enjoy whenever and however you want with your Rhapsody subscription. If you don't have one, click here to sign up for a free trial and see what we’re all about.

Dave Barnes is definitely an "artist's artist," someone whose music gets passed around on tour buses and covered by bigger names, who find themselves wishing they could have come up with those words and melodies.

His fourth studio effort, What We Want, What We Get, is a showcase of the talent that probably should have made him a household name three releases ago; the music reveals some angst over a career that hasn't gone exactly according to plan. It's a thematic collection that takes on longing and loss, and that place called grace where we all wind up when life doesn't turn out like we planned.

But don't get the idea that he's bitter or looking back with regret. This pastor's kid who picked up a guitar in college knows that in his career, and in his life, he's beyond lucky — he's just plain blessed.

This is your first themed album. Why choose the track you did for the title?
I've never had a song-titled record, but it was just, "That's it! This is what the album's about." It's about expectations, when life and situations disappoint you, and where is God in all that stuff. A lot of it dealt with success, with me doing my first record deal and having insane expectations for how all that was going to turn out and seeing situations not pan out like I thought they would.

What did you want that you didn't get?
I saw people I admired become fans of mine, but I was frustrated that I wasn't a member of a country club I never bothered to join. It was a real wake-up call. I realized, you'll never be tomorrow what you're not becoming today.

But this album is about so much more than frustration, right?
Sometimes the blessing is in what you don't get. Sometimes the blessing is that these expectations don't come true. God really had to pry my career out of my hands.

Despite some disappointment on your part over the response to your first Razor & Tie release, Me and You and the World, you continue to make quite a name for yourself among A-list artists in Nashville and beyond. What are some of the stories there?
The Amy Grant story is one of my favorites in the world. I was at Davis-Kidd bookstore in Nashville with a very dear friend. We see her and we're gawking at how beautiful she is, then she actually came over to us and said, "Hey guys, do you have Mother's Day gifts yet? I'm here with my friend and she's selling her books." So I introduced myself, and she asked if I had any music. Then later a friend of mine told me he heard her at a [Nashville area] benefit and she was talking about my CD from stage.

Later, she called me and said, "You gave me that record, and I heard the first three songs and I got the Nashville telephone book out and tried to find you!"

Then there's Matt Wertz. Your careers have been pretty intertwined, haven't they?
In 2001, I had just finished recording an acoustic EP with [producer] Ed Cash when [Matt] e-mailed me. So we met, and he invited me to play some Young Life dates with him. That's really how I got my start. We ended up playing half of our shows with each other for three or four years. He's like a brother.

Ed Cash played a role in your early career as well, didn't he?
Bebo Norman, Ed and Wertz are a big part in different ways of me doing what I'm doing today. I met Bebo at a Young Life camp, and he invited me to play during his set. Then he said, "You've got to meet Ed!" Ed was moving to Nashville and I was graduating, so I helped with babysitting and picking up furniture and then stuff in the studio. We even wrote some songs together for other people. We've done two EPs and four records together now. If it's not broken, don't fix it. He gets what I do and knows how to push me.

The album is about more than just career, though. It's also your most accessible and covers a lot of ground in the relationship department.
This is the first time I said, "I want these to be singable quickly." I want to sing this one time and you can sing the chorus back to me, so I took a lot of time.

As a preacher's kid, some might have expected you to go the more traditional Christian pop route. Was it intentional to go in another direction?
As I was writing songs, I tried to write Christian songs — being around Bebo and Ed, that's just what you do — but they were terrible! They were so trite; it's just not in my gift set.

But now you've come full circle, with an album that's being promoted to the Christian market too. Did it just work out that these songs were a fit for both markets?
It just kind of unfolded that way. When I'm at my most nonthinking, doing what comes naturally, this is what comes out.

April 5, 2010, marked the eighth anniversary of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley's death from a drug overdose. By the time he died in 2002, Staley had been out of the spotlight for years, in a kind of self-imposed exile following the massive success of the band's acoustic appearance on MTV, released as the album Unplugged in 1996. Staley's addiction to drugs had long been the subject of most of his songs, and his ghostly, frail appearance meant that, to many, his death in such a fashion was a foregone conclusion. And today nobody really ever talks about him. It's sad, because there was a time when Alice in Chains were the most influential band of the whole grunge pack, and Staley's vocals were filled with a menace and a palpable loss that no one could touch, although almost everyone adopted his "hey-yeah " yodel-snarl style.

When Alice in Chains first appeared in 1990 and "Man in the Box" hit MTV, they came on like the toughest, scariest band since Guns N' Roses. Guitarist Jerry Cantrell's playing reflected a deep connection with Slash's style, but it was the combination of this post-glam metal/Sunset Boulevard sleaze and the slithery groove of the emerging grunge movement they concoted for second record Dirt that made Alice in Chains the megastars they became. Distinctly heavier than their peers, the band did not fit easily into either metal or grunge categories. The subject matter of such songs as "Junkhead" (a depiction of heroin addiction with lyrics that could only have been written by someone with firsthand knowledge of admission to a detox) and "Rooster," which took a character from John M. Del Vecchio's Vietnam novel The 13th Valley and built a creepy, heavy-as-all-hell dirge around him, set the group apart from the already dark vibes of grunge. For his part, Staley's vocals ranged from broken to ferocious, but it was his bleak honestly that makes hearing some of this music today sound truly chilling, specifically "Dirt": "I want you to kill me/ And dig me under/ I wanna live no more/ One who doesn't care is one who shouldn't be. " Scarifyin'. As if to prove he was not kidding, Staley effectively quit the band at the height of their popularity and essentially disappeared from the landscape, making only occasional appearances in public, each time weighing less and looking worse. He weighed only 80 pounds when he died.

So you can't blame people for their lack of surprise when Staley turned up dead in 2002 after checking out on everyone in 1996. It's just too bad people don't seem to talk about him much anymore. Even when he died it was portrayed in the media as more of an inevitability than a tragedy. Listening to the songs Staley wrote today, all these years later, one can't help but notice this sort of brutal honesty is not something you hear on the radio anymore, ever. Maybe that's what killed him, that honesty. Well, no it was the drugs. One listen to "Junkhead" again and we can deduce it was definitely the drugs that killed him.