I’m increasingly on the receiving end of an email that starts out something like this “such and such artist has a new record coming out and Songs:Illinois is the perfect place to expose him/her to a new audience”. Sometimes there’s flattery and praise of me/Songs:Illinois which is always very effective btw. Meanwhile I know that somehow the label/pr group/marketing agency has probably used some clever bit of software to make it appear as if I’m being singled out.
The most recent case was really effective because I’m sure I’m the only one on their blogger list to have the debut record by the artist being promoted. The artist is Stephen Yerkey and I remember buying his last disc, confidence, man, 12 years ago and listening to it for awhile and thinking how stangely interesting the music was.
He could be easily compared to Tom Waits, Leon Redbone, Bob Dylan, or even Tom Petty and that’s not because he necessarily sounds like any of those artists but just that his eclectism is umatched except for by the very few established artists that can say fuck you to the establishment and it’s rules. So twelve years later and a lot of water under the bridge on March 7 his followup to confidence, man comes out and of course it’s got the creatively challenging title MetaNeoNatureBoy. It’ll be available on March 7 on the English label Echo (home to BRMC, Feeder and Roisin Murphy). There’s no way to pre-order yet, in fact his label makes no mention of him or the release on their website but if you would like to order a used copy of his 1994 debut confidence, man click here.
PS Just out of curiosity is anyone reading this on Friday night. I usually don’t post at night assuming everyone’s surfing for free at work during the day on a high speed connection. How in the hell the internet is increasing productivity is beyond me!!
YES-CAN’T POUND NAILS WITH COMPUTERS
Yes here too — I was discussing the crowding on my RSS reader with a friend, and she mentioned your blog, and I scrolled down about three posts, enjoying myself greatly, and added you to the reader… wait, that was not what was supposed to happen. Uh-oh.
I’m impressed to see you pick up on the barely recongized greatness that is Steve Yerkey. Note he put out a record in ’04 called “Up from Mo’s” — acoustic solo, mostly new material at that time. You can hear a couple tracks on download.com music (for free). I highly recommend it.
About reading habits: I’m a very productive woman who never reads you at work
Once and again, search pages lead me to your site when I happen to look for interesting mp3, then I download a bunch of songs, till next time. (congratulations for the site, by the way)
sorry I had a rerquesty from copyright holder to take several of these songs down