Since we began shooting Common for Embedded, we have built a great relationship with him and his team. They came to us for Make Common’s Day because they knew Current had experience in doing these sort of viewer-created video call outs, and they wanted to take a unique approach to making a video for the song.
It was an opportunity with a big name artist that we couldn’t really pass up. It sort of plays off the VCAM initiatives as well as the Writer in Residence project, but seemed like a perfect way to bring Current’s filmmaker community together with Common to create something special.
From what Common’s team told me, he chose this one because it was overall a different vibe than your typical clichéd rap music video. It had a fun feel to it, and the use of clip art was simple yet effective, as was the way the producers integrated the green screen footage, and gave it a grainy clip art feel.
Watch Common’s pick for his favorite “Make My Day” video here, and tune in tonight just after our Embedded with Common special—so, about 11:30/10:30c—to see it make its TV premiere:
And check out these photos from when we shot the green screen footage:
Ben Harper’s one of those guys most of us have been listening to since… well, let’s just say since we were much younger than we are now. Pretty much all of us have seen him play with the Innocent Criminals over the years, so when we got a chance to film him with his new band, Relentless7, we were all over it.
We covered a lot of ground with Ben. He took us in the studio with him as he recorded his protégé Grace Woodroofe, he invited us along on his cover shoot for Guitar Player Magazine, he brought us along as he inspected his fashion line—but most impressively, he gave us the royal tour of his family’s music store and museum, showing us how he got where he is today.
Senior Producer Alex Simmons was most struck by the store:
“The Claremont Folk Music Center, opened by Ben’s grandparents over 50 years ago is an amazing place, worth visiting if you are in the area.
When we shot the interview with Ben in the Folk Music Center, half way through this kid sits down pretty close to our set up and starts noodling around on a guitar. We didn’t want to tell anybody they couldn’t try out a guitar in the middle of a music store and it wasn’t very loud at first so we let it go. However, after a little bit the kid started playing Zeppelin loudly right in our direction to the point where it was getting really distracting. I think he was trying to impress Ben. Thankfully Ben politely asked him if he could take a quick break and we wrapped up the rest of the interview.”
Ben was a gentlemen and very polite the whole time, but after listening to songs like “Burn One Down,” some people maybe surprised how intense and motivated he is. Alex explains how driven Ben is:
“Ben Harper is focused and he does everything with intensity, whether it be playing music, designing clothes, overseeing his family’s music store or producing other musicians. And he has a low tolerance for bullshit. In interviews if he doesn’t like a question or disagrees with you he will tell you, which I appreciate.”
Often when you interview a musician, they only talk about themselves, but this was not the case with Ben. Ben was more than eager to thrust Jason Mozersky, his new guitar player, into the spotlight at their cover shoot, and was most excited to talk about the rest of his band, rather than himself.
While a lot of frontmen will give the obligatory nod to their band, Ben was intent on letting the world know how talented and deserving they each were. Not only did Ben share the limelight with his band, he also wanted to bring another musician onto the show: his protégé Grace Woodroofe, introduced to each other by the late Heath Ledger. The two of them allowed us to film, as Grace laid down some tracks with Ben at the boards. From Alex:
“Grace Woodroofe is really quiet and shy in person, at least when confronted with a television film crew, but when she starts singing she really transforms into a force. She has such an incredible voice and I can’t wait until her album comes out.”
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE’S NICK HARMER
The guys from Death Cab For Cutie are such talented musicians, you really wouldn’t expect them to be good at anything else. But it turns out, bassist Nick Harmer is also a really talented photographer.
Nick’s Tour Stop segment really captured the spirit of why we shoot those. When he’s on tour, he spends his days photographing the town he is in. We spent an afternoon with him, on the road, shooting San Francisco. (Here’s an outtake of him talking about the Full House houses they saw.) Then Nick taught us how to transform ordinary photos into tilt shift photography.
Alex, a photographer himself, seemed to enjoy shooting this segement more than most:
“Nick is one of the more energetic and good-natured people I’ve met in the last few years and it’s always fun hanging out with him. We spent a day walking around San Francisco taking pictures that Nick could turn into tilt-shits. Nick calls them “tilt-shit fakes” since he creates them with the aid of PhotoShop. You can actually use a tilt-shift lens if you want to do it the “real” way. Ever since the shoot I’ve started creating a few tilt-shift fakes of my own, not nearly as good as Nick’s, but still fun to do.”
UPDATE: Check out the full episode with Ben Harper on Embedded, and then head over to http://current.com/embedded to see more with Nick Harmer and additional outtakes.
We’ve got a bunch of Beyond Embedded posts penned by our amazing intern Chanelle for you to backread. Here’s something you could watch while you dig deep to learn more about Silversun Pickups‘ and K’naan’s influences and inspirations: the actual show!
Please enjoy Current Music Presents: Embedded with Silversun Pickups, K’naan and Arcade Fire, as just aired on Current TV. (Hint: we have a really nice full-screen player you can click in the lower right corner.)
Silversun Pickups were one of the first bands senior producer Alex Simmons shot for Current TV (watch that piece here). Pretty much everyone on our staff loves their music, and a lot of us live in their neighborhood. They anchor a great scene in Silverlake and are the kind of band that makes you proud to live in such an artist-friendly section of Los Angeles, which is a large part of what put them on Alex’s radar years ago:
“Everyone in the band is a big supporter of the local music scene and I see them at Spaceland and The Echo all the time checking out other people’s shows. I think that respect for the under the radar bands is pretty indicative for how hard they work and how little they take all of this—such as a top 10 album—for granted.
We were lucky enough to be with Silversun the day “Swoon” was released. We all knew it was going to be huge, but most of us didn’t realize it would break the top 10 that week. Alex seems to have the best perspective on why the album hit as big as it did (other than just being an amazing collection of songs):
“I distinctly remember the evening this March when I was driving home and first put on an advanced copy of ‘Swoon.’ I think I had been listening too to much “Dark Was the Night” and Grizzly Bear and the first notes of ‘There’s No Secrets This Year’ kicked me in the gut and woke me up. It was just one of those moments when you feel like this is the album I personally needed to hear right at this moment.”
Most of Silversun Pickups’ fans have the same feeling: it’s a personal connection. When we showed up to shoot them at Rasputin Records, their fans lining the sidewalks all echoed similar stories and were eager to tell us about their personal ties to the music.
Alex was equally moved by their stripped down performances. “We shot two acoustic performances with the band, one at KROQ at 7AM and the other on Record Store Day in Berkeley,” he says. “A lot of bands don’t hold up as well when you peel away the effects—but they really do. It’s impressive.”
In the end, the toughest test for an album is whether or not it can survive a work cycle. Working on a music show is a blessing and a curse. You get to listen to music all day, but you can’t always pick what you listen to and you often have to hear the same parts of the same songs thousands of times. For Alex, “Swoon” passed the test. “It’s one of my favorite albums of 2009, and while I normally get really sick of an album after hearing it all the time in edit sessions, I still like this one.”
K’naan
When you meet an artist that came to America from Somalia and let nothing, not even a war-ravaged country and an entire ocean, get in the way of his dreams, you have to respect his drive. But when our producer Manoj Gopinanth looks back on his time with K’naan at Fat Beats Records, he remembers the person more than the story:
“He seemed like a very down to earth individual, soft-spoken and very knowledgeable about hip hop and music in general. I’m guessing his upbringing in Somalia and New York City has humbled him. He also spoke about Mos Def, and how they are great friends and how he has learned a lot from him.
Mos is featured on K’naan’s album Troubadour.
Now stop complaining about your childhood.
UPDATE: Watch the full second episode of Embedded, with Silversun Pickups, K’naan, and Arcade Fire, here on Current.
Current’s music supervisor, Travis “TK Disko” Kirschbaum, is not only a kick-ass DJ (if you’re in LA, check out his monthly party, Hot Biscuit), he’s got the best ear for emerging must-hear music I’ve ever encountered. If you like what you hear on Current TV, generally speaking it’s TK you should be thanking.
I asked him to talk a little about the song “Outsiders” by the Great Escape, the theme song for Current Music Presents: Embedded.—Shana
Here’s a great clip we found of the band recording the track. And TK says:
This time, it’s how I came up with the Doves’ “The Outsiders” for the Embedded theme song, so I thought I’d share with you all how it came to be. We must have auditioned close to 50 tracks to come up with this but once the crew had heard this, it was an instant fit. Well, almost… But I’ll spare you the details on the back and forth within the department and what the song “could have” been.
The main criteria for choosing this particular theme was simple. It needed to be loud, anticipatory, hard to define in terms of genre and, most importantly, speak to our audience.
“Outsiders” most certainly had all these things, so once we got the team onboard, we tested out several different edits and sent them to our kick-ass graphics team so start building the opening graphic. The end result is a well crafted marriage of beautifully designed raw visuals and a soundtrack that we want to grab the attention if the viewer in its first few seconds of hearing this.
We are all really happy the outcome and hope you are too. Because for now, you will be hearing this, well…a lot. Like anything we choose here in terms of you sonic experience at Current TV, we cherish your feedback, so please, tell us what you think. We’d love to know!
Lauren is our designated fire fighter: all day long, every day we’ve worked on this show, Lauren puts out fires. She also makes the trains run on time. Suffice it to say without her you’d never have seen a single frame of Current Music Presents: Embedded.
See a little peek of her calm, cool technique in the webcam above.
That cool-yet-excited, calm-yet-urgent voice you hear over the Current Music Presents: Embedded promos and—very soon—the show itself is Emily Foster. Once writer Peter Grumbine has drafted and redrafted the scripts that stitch all parts of the show together, Emily takes the words and records them in her cozy VO booth, seen in the clip above.
A quick dispatch from behind the scenes at Current Music Presents: Embedded, where we’re finishing up post-production on all six parts of the special.
I’m working specifically on making the online viewing process as seamless and awesome as possible (okay, usually I call it “optimized” in meetings, but awesome is what I mean), which means today I’m neck-deep in all the slightly different requirements from our online distribution partners.
It’s like having five friends over for dinner who each have their own special snowflake dietary restrictions, and you love your friends, and you want them to eat only what they want—but you spend 10 times as long in the kitchen making it possible. It’s kind of like that, except nobody brings over wine.
Once we premiere on Wednesday, October 14, you’ll be able to watch everything that airs on Current TV—plus a whole laundry list of extras and outtakes—on current.com/embedded.
But if your online viewing platform of choice is somewhere else, we’ll be sad to see you go, but we’ve still got you covered:
Hey everyone, I’m Shana, your online guide to all things Current Music.
I’ll be heading things up at this blog as the music team shows you how things really work behind the scenes as we make a new half-hour TV show. I’ll also be giving personal tours of Current.com’s Music Channel, answering any questions you might have about how the site works and how you can get involved with our community. (Think Cribs, only geekier.)
This is definitely a work in progress, but let me know what you’d like to see on the Music Channel — and on Current TV — whether it’s a favorite blog or a brand new band. You can leave comments here, send me a message on Current, or drop me an email.
