Ready, Steady, Still Going: An Interview with Shonen Knife

Now here’s an opportunity that doesn’t come around every day. Japan’s premier all-girl punk-pop noisemakers Shonen Knife are celebrating their 30th anniversary this year, and they’re doing so by releasing an album of Ramones covers. Osaka Ramones has got to be one of the most plain fun records put out by anyone all year and I was lucky enough to have Shonen Knife frontwoman Naoko Yamano answer a few of my questions about the project.

Read the full interview at The 405 here

Interview: “Not the Beginning of the End” For Laura Veirs

Laura Veirs’ song “July Flame” is one of my favourite things of the last few years – there’s something about that vocal and the atmosphere it creates that is incredible. When its parent album proved to be a real critical success for the Oregon-based singer-songwriter, she didn’t choose to simply do the same thing all over again: instead, Veirs has just released an album of songs intended for children. A while back I gave her a call and asked all about the background and recording of Tumble Bee, which has earned some glowing reviews over the last couple of weeks. My interview is now up over at PopMatters.

Read the full interview at PopMatters

“One Million Percent Serious”: An Interview with Florian Lunaire

Signed to the wonderfully named Records Records Records, Florian Lunaire is frontman of the elusive London band Disappearers but also an artist in his own right. This year he has already released two EPs, Spring and Summer 2011, which are to be the first in a series of seasonal recordings Lunaire plans to keep going until he dies. I had the chance to email over some questions to the ambitious man himself, and he got in touch to tell me how he is “one million percent serious” about the project.

Read the full interview at The Line of Best Fit

[Video] Imelda May – “Mayhem”

This single came out way back in September of last year but I’m posting it for no other reason than because it’s a great tune and because I just got off the phone with Imelda May – I’ll be putting together a full interview article for PopMatters in the near future.

Blitzen Trapper Interview @ TLOBF

How better to celebrate an improved blog than with a Blitzen Trapper interview? It’s actually been in the pipeline for a while this one, first happily coming my way not long after I’d reviewed the Portland band’s wonderful new album Destroyer of the Void. I was able to ask the Eric Earley, the band’s frontman, plenty of questions about the writing of and influences behind that album, as well as a few other things. If you’ve not the album yet I thoroughly recommend it, in the meantime let my interview at TLOBF entice you still further – it’s here. Welcome (back) to the blog by the way…

Inner-Views

I’ve made a concerted effort to make sure that all my One a Day posts are proper pieces of work in and of themselves, and I’ve been lucky in that so far, I haven’t run out of ideas! Unfortunately though, this post is going to be rushrushrushed as I haven’t planned my time particularly well…

This post is inspired by an interview of mine that’s gone up on TLOBF today. I was lucky enough to be able to do an email interview with Swedish band The Mary Onettes. I hadn’t actually done an email interview for TLOBF before, so it’s a feather in my cap I guess. One of the more brief interviews I’ve done, it’s still got a few interesting nuggets about the band’s new album Islands which is out on Labrador Records in February. Check it out here.

It’s been a while since I’ve done an interview so it’s been nice to do another – I was talking in my last post about the thrill of seeing your stuff getting published, and I think that’s magnified in interviews by the idea somehow, the final piece is a kind of collaboration between you and someone vaguely famous, or at least interesting, and hopefully both. Looking back across the interviews I’ve done is odd because I started in a very strange place – I ended up doing by the biggest ‘view I’ve ever done first – with Röyksopp.

That interview was pretty damn scary. I was ridiculously tense in the run-up to it, and frustrated that I had to make a call to Norway myself (which as it turned out, didn’t appear to end up costing me anything). However, Svein Berge is an incredibly nice and chatty bloke, and it all went well… I even ended up getting used as a Wikipedia reference, which was A Big Thing to me. Curiously, the sequel album that I was used to reference the existence of was delayed until this year, I’m looking forward to hearing it.

Hopefully 2010 will bring more interview oppurtunities… I’d definitely like to do some games-related ones too. Now, I must rush off – until next time!