One night at the beginning of last year, Zach Condon stood on stage with blood running from one ear and a broken trumpet in his hands and decided he'd had enough. His band, Beirut, had flown into Brazil earlier that day, with Condon already tired and disillusioned at the end of a long period of touring, and they'd set off for the beach, still drunk from the flight. The sea was rough and Condon was thrown about by a large wave, puncturing a hole in his eardrum. Later, when the band had checked into a hotel, he realised that something was wrong with his voice. "The doctor came and he was like, 'You've got this thing on your vocal cords, you're fucked for the rest of the trip.'" They played that night's gig anyway, but Condon, frustrated by his inability to sing properly, tried to fire up the crowd, telling them, in broken Portuguese, to dance. Something evidently got lost (or rather, exaggerated) in translation and the result was a stage invasion, in which equipment was stolen and Condon's trumpet – his main instrument on stage – left twisted in the stampede. "I remember staring at the broken trumpet. I had a broken ear, I had a broken voice and my mind was in pieces too. And I was just sitting there thinking to myself, What the fuck am I doing? How does anyone survive this?" Condon tells the story with a rueful smile. He's sitting in the corner of a central London bar at the end of a short UK tour – pale and tired, but clearly with a more relaxed attitude to the rigours of touring. "It was a weird moment.
I imagined [doing] some grand disappearing act, but that's the little kid in me that wants attention for doing nothing." Instead, he took a more sensible route to recovery. "I stayed in Brazil for three weeks just sitting on the beach drinking caipirinhas with my wife and it was like, It'll come back. That energy will come back. And that's when I knew I had to write an album that really defined me and wasn't just flirtations and stuff." "Flirtations and stuff" is a rather unfair way of describing his records up to that point. Full of swelling choruses and sumptuous, brassy melodies, they sounded more like fully consummated love affairs with a range of global musical traditions. His debut, Gulag Orkestar, made by the teenage Condon in his bedroom (he used to record every instrument himself and only play with a band live), emulated the Balkan music that he had first heard working at a foreign-language cinema. His next album, 2007's The Flying Club Cup, was a foray into French chanson while in 2009 he released an EP with a 19-piece Mexican funeral band entitled March of the Zapotec. But the appeal of making music that roamed from continent to continent, adopting and refashioning traditional styles, had begun to wane. "The vagabond thing – that was a teenage fantasy that I lived out in a big way. Music, to me, was escapism. And now I'm doing everything that is the opposite [of that] in my life. I'm married. I've got a house. I've got a dog. So it felt ridiculous, the narrative of what my career was supposed to be, compared to what I was actually trying to attempt in my life." When Condon began working on the new record, he moved for six months during the winter to a log cabin in upstate New York. "Chopping wood, cooking duck‌" he laughs. "I got really lonely." It was an idea stolen almost wholesale from Justin Vernon, who famously wrote the first Bon Iver album in similar conditions. ("We joked about it. I said: 'Sorry, man, I ripped you off.'") But it allowed him to continue to find a new outlet for his imagination and escapist tendencies, adopting the habits and persona of an American backwaters recluse even while writing a record about home.
"I lived it up. I bought boots, I had the dog. I used to drink cognac at night and started smoking a pipe next to the fire. I love playing with these ideas. It's all just fun and games but maybe it means more than I think it does." The album that eventually emerged from this process, The Rip Tide, is quite different to previous Beirut records. Its songs are simpler, less cluttered with ideas, more direct. "[There] was a kind of forced complexity to some of the earlier albums. It was like a young boy standing on tiptoes to try and seem sophisticated." And after the Balkans, France and Mexico, the places that he refers to are closer to home. There's even a bright, electro-pop track named after his home town Santa Fe, New Mexico, an attempt to reconcile himself to the place from which, as a teenager, he used his songs to escape. But the music is still recognisably Beirut. At Brixton Academy the following night, great gusts of brass billow through the room, making the new songs surge and swell with feeling while the audience whoop along. For Condon, the focus on simple hooks and melodies reconnects with the music he wrote to distract himself from the boredom of adolescent life. "I had a rule as a teenager – that if I didn't write a hook or a melody it wasn't time to go to bed yet. Until I got some chord progression or melody that would raise the hairs on the back of my neck, I wouldn't allow myself to get to sleep. I needed it every night. "It's funny because when I hear 'The Rip Tide' and 'Vagabond' and even 'Santa Fe' [from the new album] I'm hearing what I used to write when I was 16 or 17; these very simple rudimentary hooks just kind of laid bare." Does he feel more at ease now that he's made this record? "I felt there were some skeletons in my closet, mentally, and that I don't feel them as much now that they're out. And it's satisfying in the sense that [the album] didn't just happen to me, I had to fight for it. The previous albums just came so naturally but this one I really had to grab by the balls."
And what about the prospect of writing music now? Is the sense of adventure still there? "Oh yeah," he says, laughing. And then with an air of satisfaction: "I'm still scared shitless about the next step."
JOURNEY’S SOUNDTRACK NOMINATED FOR A GRAMMY
The first video game score ever given the honor. BY COLIN MORIARTYIn
the music industry, there are few honors bigger than winning a Grammy Award. Started in 1959 by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States, the Grammies have turned into an important annual event, as the Academy hands out its coveted golden gramophone to the yearly winners. And this year, something major has happened for the video game industry. For the first time in the history of the Grammy Award, a videogame soundtrack has been nominated. (To answer some inquiring commenters, Babu Yetu -- a lone track from Civilization IV composed by Christopher Tin -was the first videogame song to be nominated for a Grammy, which it won. This is the first full videogame soundtrack to get a nomination.) As Tweeted out by former Thatgamecompany employee (and co-founder) Kellee Santiago, Journey has received a nomination in the Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media category, alongside The Adventures of Tintin - The Secret of the Unicorn, The Artist, The Dark Knight Rises, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Hugo. Such industry titans as John Williams, Hans Zimmer and Trent Reznor are among the composers nominated for the aforementioned projects. For Journey, it’s composer Austin Wintory, who Tweeted out his astonishment.
Community and Yahoo find love in a hopeless place
The embattled cult favorite gets another chance on Yahoo By Jacob Kastrenakes on March 16, 2015 11:15 am
Community has always been about a group of misfits who find themselves in a miserable place only to come together against, well, modest odds. So perhaps it's fitting that the show has now ended up at Yahoo, the tech company whose brightest stars go nowhere. COMMUNITY IS THE START OF YAHOO'S VENTURE INTO TV-LENGTH ORIGINAL SERIES Last year, Community should have been due for a resurgence. It had just been reunited with its creator after a season away, but instead, the show found itself losing two main actors and all sense of plot and purpose. The season had its highlights, but it was largely a lifeless affair. You could blame NBC for a lot of Community’s problems in its embattled five seasons, but by the end, you couldn't blame the network for canceling it. That’s where Yahoo found the show: all but dead. Last year, it agreed to give Community a new home at the eleventh hour, right as the cast's contracts were set to expire. The pairing is all too fitting. Both Communityand Yahoo are desperate, and both are looking for a new start. Community, quite literally, is going to be part of a new start for Yahoo. Yahoo has been building toward the launch of TV-style original content for a year now, and that all kicks off on Tuesday with the release of the first episode of Community's new season. Even though it was never a huge ratings success, Community is still a meaningful name for Yahoo to grab. It has a cult following. Critics loved its early seasons. And it's already brought Yahoo good will and tons of attention. The only remaining question is: will it also bring Yahoo a good show? Having seen the first two episodes of the new season — which were provided in fuzzy, pre-release video streams — I can say that Yahoo should be pretty pleased. In its new season, Community feels like it's taken a moment to breathe and collect itself, and it's now trying to take a firm step forward again. There is a bit of bad news for the show coming right into episode one: it's lost yet another main cast member — this time, Yvette Nicole Brown, who played Shirley. Also gone is Breaking Bad’s Jonathan Banks, who was brought on last season to replace Chevy Chase but never really fit in (he's also busy with Better Call Saul). So the show is still without a sensible premise and is now down to four core characters, but things are different this time around. This time, rather than trying to force the change,Community is willing to talk about its problems. THE FIRST EPISODE OF SEASON 6 IS SELF-REFERENTIAL IN ALL THE RIGHT WAYS Of course, that's all too sensible for this show. Community has always been selfreferential, constantly commenting on story tropes and sloppy narrative techniques, and here it does just that while looking at itself in order to level with us.
During the first episode, a stern new school administrator named Frankie, played by Paget Brewster, walks up to Abed and asks if he has concerns about anything. Naturally, Abed discusses the show in response. "I'm worried you're not distinct enough from Annie, both in terms of physicality and purpose," he says. "I can't determine if you have any specific flaw, quirk, or point of view that makes you a creative addition to the group." So yes, things are a mess, but Community knows how we're feeling. There are just enough nods like this to give you faith that the show knows what it needs to do to pull itself together. There's also more of the wordplay, jokes that veer way off on tangents, and out-of-nowhere entertainment references that helped to make this show so fun in this first place. CAN YAHOO ACTUALLY GET ANYONE TO WATCH? That's not to say the show doesn't have other things to worry about. Its core characters still feel like caricatures, and Yahoo's lack of time constraints seems to have made these episodes a touch less sharp (each runs about four minutes longer than usual). But, altogether, it seems like Community is in a better place than when we left it last year. It’s starting to feel like itself again. That’s good news for fans, but it's also good news for Yahoo. According toThe New York Times, Yahoo's recent push into "digital magazines" (read: websites) and online video may not be going as well as it hoped. Its highest-profile venture has been hiring Katie Couric as an interview anchor — reportedly paying her $5 million per year — but the Times says that, as of last June, "Yahoo’s users weren’t clicking on the videos." (Yahoo paints a different picture, telling Backchannel that Couric’s videos were off to a "slow start" but are now growing. Its magazines are reportedly growing as well.) Netflix and Amazon have already proven that TV shows don't have to be on TV: people are willing to watch them wherever, as long as they're good. Yahoo already has a huge audience to put shows in front of, which means that it may just be fighting for quality. But that's still an uphill battle.Community probably isn't going to gain many fans in its sixth season — especially since Yahoo doesn't have the rights to air any of the previous five. And Yahoo’s next original TV show, Sin City Saints, is a comedy thatdoesn’t look very funny. Yahoo lucked out by getting the chance to pick up Community. Getting started with original TV shows isn’t easy — just look at how many failed series Amazon had before it found Transparent — and launching withCommunity means Yahoo gets to skip some of that. Whether it works to prime the pump for the rest of Yahoo’s series is, ultimately, up to what Yahoo does next. Either way, at least Community got that sixth season.