Today on Current Music, you can watch an exclusive clip from Jason Mraz’s new live CD/DVD, “Beautiful Mess,” filmed during his most recent stop in Chicago.
Jason is a performer who’s gone from tiny coffeehouses in San Diego to headlining sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl. He’s toured nearly non-stop for what seems like the past five years straight. (Next he’s off to South America.)
His shows pack in a lot of things at once—radio hits, rarer b-sides, Jason-as-band director leading the audience in massive, extended singalongs. And not to sound like a total hippie about it, but they’ve got this vibe to them that even I—who will only ever set foot in jam band-land if dragged there by my wife—can’t help but be all moved by. Plus he’s got a hell of a voice that never quite shines as much in his studio takes as it does on a big stage he makes feel just like one of those tiny cafes where he got his start.
Check out jasonmraz.com for more music, tour dates and one of the best—and oldest—tour blogs from any musician in the business of spending life on the road.
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:
On this Wednesday’s Current Music Presents: Embedded, we’ll have a very special repeat guest in the form of Fleet Foxes. (They’re appearing in a segment called Impromptu, part of our longstanding partnership with the French blog La Blogotheque, which shoots bands acoustically and spontaneously across the world.)
Fleet Foxes’ appearance on our first Take-Away Show is among our most popular pieces of music programming ever. (Seriously, I probably answered a dozen emails a week with some variation on, “Help, I just saw some awesome band on Current, they were singing in a gym or something?”)
Here’s Chryde talking more about how he and the team at Blogotheque get such great performances:
Be sure to tune into Embedded on Wednesday, October 28 at 11/10c to see Fleet Foxes, plus Death Cab For Cutie’s Nick Harmer and featured artist Ben Harper.
I’ve been a fan of Mason Jennings for a long time, ever since I saw him open for Richard Buckner at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle many years ago. That night he listened to me complain about my job at an architecture firm, then recommended a few books—East of Eden and everything by Toni Morrison. Since then I’ve seen him play more times than I should probably admit. He recorded a couple songs for a documentary I was editing (one of them ended up on his album “Use Your Voice”), and I’ve interviewed him a few times for Current, covering everything from transcendental mediation and Rick Rubin to skateboarding and the Wu-Tang Clan.
Mason’s last album, his eighth, is called “Blood of Man” and it caught me off guard as somebody who knows his music pretty well. This album is different. It is harder and more of a rock album; it is certainly more biographical and the electric guitar is more present than in any of his previous work. It is an album made by an artist who is clearly experimenting. Mason recorded the entire album by himself at his cabin in Minnesota. It’s what Mason Jennings wanted to make right now, in this moment—and his experiment worked. The album is amazing.
Recently I was lucky enough to catch up with Mason at Brushfire Studios, where he played two songs from “Blood of Man.” I wrangled Danny Carney from Roll The Tanks into bringing his 4-track tape recorder along to get some analog audio for “Tourist” and “Lonely Road.” These two songs break from the rest of the album and offer “the other side,” in Mason’s words, from the overall darker tone of the album.
As always, it was great catching up with Mason and I look forward to the next time and place our paths cross.
Thanks to all who participated in our Make Common’s Day video call for content! We hope you’ll all take a look at the amazing videos created by our community, leave the filmmakers some constructive feedback, and vote up the ones you like best. Then hang tight till we announce Common’s pick in October.
After 15 years of hauling ass from town to town, the Vans Warped Tour has finally figured out how to air condition their event: film a special doc highlighting the history of the punk rock tour, add in performances from an all-star show, and screen it at more than 400 movie theaters across the country. It’s a one-night-only deal, Thursday, September 17. Get tickets and the full list of locations here.
Here’s a sneak peek from the film. Ice-T definitely wins the prize for most direct pitch: “Bring your punk ass to the theater and see the ****ing movie!”
BYO Records has got 10 years on Warped, and included in their 25th anniversary CD/DVD pack is a 90-minute feature documentary called Let Them Know, about the early LA punk scene. It’s out September 22, and we are very sorry to have missed the LA screening with performances by a bunch of the bands featured.
But what the fuck do we know? Probably not much, and probably you’d tell us that if we bothered to ask. So we went to our friends on Twitter for their recommendations for the best punk rock docs of all time.
We’ve spent a lot of time with Common over the last year, as well as the great team that manages him. Somewhere along the way, we started talking about what else we could do together—something a little different and a lot more interactive. In my experience there are two kinds of artists in any media, those who are very proprietary and controlling of what they make, and those who work their asses off to make something great, then enjoy sitting back and seeing what other people do with it. Common’s already been throwing his music out there for people to remix at DJ conferences, and his team basically said: what kind of video would your community want to make with us?
We decided to shoot a green-screen performance take, just like Common’s done for most of his music videos shot by high-priced pros, then cull through candid footage we have and offer a big old download to anyone who wanted to make it into something more. That’s how we ended up with Make Common’s Day—your chance to direct the video for his song “Make My Day.” Common will hand-pick his favorite, which will be promoted on our site and his site. And, if Current puts yours on TV, you’ll get $2,500. Not to mention an impressive notch for your filmmaking resume.
And sorry to be a bit of a tease—we wanted to give you a heads up, but you’ll have to come back next Monday, September 14th, to get the song and video assets. Then you can shoot your own footage to go with it, just be sure to upload your final work by September 28th at midnight, and be sure you’re using footage that you own—or that we provided. (We’ll offer some tutorials on working with green-screen elements, too.)
When Imogen Heap was in California last month, giving her fans a sneak first listen of her album, Current Music was there with her. In celebration of the release of “Ellipse” (out today from RCA), here’s a little sneak peek of our own.
At Royal Percussion Services in Sun Valley, Imogen gets her hands on the instruments that might help recreate the carefully orchestrated sonic art of “Ellipse” when she goes out on tour.
