Get well soon, Darren.
NME: Ex-Hefner Frontman Darren Hayman Attacked After Nottingham Gig
Statement From Darren’s Wife
My favorite song of his, post-Hefner:
Darren Hayman – Little Brown Chevette
And my favorite song of his during the Hefner days:
Hefner – The Cure For Evil
not this rain
It has been raining here since Wednesday. That’s all the reason I need to search my hard drive for songs with the word ‘rain’ in the title, then arrange them into an aurally-pleasing package. Enjoy.
01) The Temptations – I Wish It Would Rain
02) The Clientele – Rain
03) Richard Hawley – Early Morning Rain
04) Thom Yorke – And It Rained All Night
05) The Ladybug Transistor – Like A Summer Rain
06) Scott Walker – It’s Raining Today
07) Darren Hayman – It Can Rain All Summertime
08) Bishop Allen – Rain
09) The Decemberists – Raincoat Song
10) Pavement – It’s A Rainy Day Sunshine Girl
- Andrew Bird makes up cool words all the time (like “Plasticities“, “Anonaminal“, “Ethiobirds“, and “Armchairs”) so I decided to make up my own. Hence, “randominities“.
- Max Tundra is playing here tonight, opening for Junior Boys at The Mercy Lounge. Once again, I’ll be working an overnight shift this evening, virtually guaranteeing that I won’t see the Junior Boys at all. So is it worth $12 to catch an opening act? Has anybody out there caught Max Tundra’s set this year? Is it worth catching? I’ll probably make up my mind at the last minute. If anything, it gives me something to write about on Monday. And, you know, the blog’s called The Opening Acts, so it might be nice to actually write a post relevant to that title for a change.
- If you recall from my curse-tastic post at the beginning of April, the hard drive crashed on one of my laptops (my other laptop is used primarily for recording), taking a bunch of music with it. In an amazing piece of amazingness whose amazingness can not be underamazingalyzed, I managed to install a new hard drive AND recover all my old files all by my (sad, sad) lonesome. Good for me.
Anyway, now I can finally give second listens to the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Dan Deacon albums that I had only played once before the crash. I liked both albums quite a bit upon first listen, which is noteworthy because I haven’t really liked either group before. The reviews for each of these albums repeatedly use the word “mature”. My inability to like YYY and Dan Deacon during their days of immaturity succeeds in making me feel a heck of a lot older than I actually am.
- I can also get around to finishing the posts I started about Darren Hayman and The Boy Least Likely To. Or not. I could just save time and sum things up here. Let’s give it a try:
Darren Hayman – good. Very mature.
The Boy Least Likely To – not so good. They failed to mature between albums, thus alienating me.
neither of you have puppy powers
- My other band – you know, the one that I haven’t been blatantly shilling on this blog for the past month – will have a couple songs playing soon at a radio station in Iowa. I’m still not sure why.
- If swine flu were a British band, it would receive saturation coverage in NME. If swine flu were a Canadian band, it would receive saturation coverage in Pitchfork. If swine flu were a Nashville band, no one in Nashville would admit to liking them.
swine flu
- On Sunday, I chatted briefly with one of the members of The War On Drugs at a bar across the street from the venue where they had played earlier in the evening. I hadn’t heard of them until that evening. After a quick listen on Myspace, I wish I would have heard them before they played here, as I’m really digging the 3 songs they have posted there. They just wrapped up a very long tour, so they might not head out on the road again for a while – check them out if they do.
- At that same bar several years ago, I spent a late night drinking with two of the guys from Living Colour. This town is fucking weird.
- Let’s leave it at that. I’m gonna eat a banana and continue to suppress my urge to bitch about my job, even though it affords me the opportunity to write lengthy blog posts all week long (it’s like I get paid to blog!). If you’ve read this far, I thank you greatly. If you haven’t read this far, that’s ok – I still like you. How could I not?
Have a great weekend.
My draft of the Darren Hayman post that I had alluded to on Friday has disappeared, along with all the tracks from his lovely new album, Pram Town. Why? Because it appears that the hard drive has crashed on one of my laptops – specifically, the one that held most of my new music (i.e. the stuff I had yet to back up onto my external hard drive). As would be expected, I had made a note to back up my files the day before this happened but had yet to actually do so. Thankfully, I didn’t lose much, as I had performed a back-up two weeks earlier. Still, this kinda sucks.
I also lost the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, which – to my absolute shock – I really, really liked. Oh, and the new Dan Deacon album (also very good). Goddamn, now I’m getting pissed off.
Anyway, in lieu of the Darren Hayman post, here’s a Compare And Contrast post featuring his previous bands, Hefner and The French. Just before Hefner called it a day, the band—-
Shitfucking Christ, the pictures from my ski trip – they’re gone! Fuck!!! Fuckfuckfuck!! I shot some cool video on that trip, too. Dammit, I has hoping to edit those—
MY LAMBCHOP VIDEOS!!!!! I totally forgot to back those up!! Motherfucking asscock! I know I posted some of them here last month, but that’s only about half of the total video I shot from those shows. Shit! Fucking shit.
Oh man, now I’m really peeved. I know I need to focus on this post, but . . . yeeaargghhh!!!
FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just listen to the fucking songs:
