I listened to "Songs From Nothern Britian" today. What a great album. Not only is it the cool Big Star/Byrds derrived British pop/rock that we all know and love, I also noticed this while checking the liner notes.

The album has 12 songs and the breakdown is like this

Blake wrote 4 songs
Love wrote 4 songs
McGinley wrote 4 songs

How many bands have a trio of good songwriters these days? Or at anytime? Well, I guess there was the Beatles...?

Grand Prix breakdown - 13 songs. Blake = 5, Love = 4, McGinley = 4

Howdy! breakdown - 12 songs. Blake = 4, Love = 4, McGinley = 4

...I think I knew in the past that TF was not soley the work of Blake, but I always thought of him as the front man, and I never knew the songwriting was split so evenly. Cool very cool.

Fleetwood Mac had at one time a trio of songwriters. And Genesis at one time as well.

Sloan may not have 3, but...THEY DO HAVE FOUR!!!

Ideally, my band aspires to this model. Well, at least I hope it does. Can't speak for the others.

KPH

Drive By Truckers anyone? Anyone?

Oh, and all 3 rip on lead and rythm guitar too.

Also, wouldn't it be cool if people were more into splitting songwriting duties and abdicating the accepted notions of "frontman" and whatnot?

Fugazi, Hoover, Minutemen...sigh.

KPH

Teenage Fanclub and Sloan = top notch...I think I'm going to put more sloan on MyPod right now...

and, on "The Argument", four out of five members of Fugazi split songwriting duties...

And whats more, you can usually tell who wrote what without consulting the sleevenotes. McGinlay, Blake and Love all have there own unique songwriting style.

Ian's new album with Amy Farina comes out today. Woo!

I have all of Sloan's albums on my iPod. Mixing a playlist of their "greatest hits" was pretty fun.

on deck for today:

from their website :

It gives us great pleasure to announce that our new album Man-Made, will be released on the 2nd of May. Twelve new songs for your delectation. Released on our own PeMa label, with the catalogue number PeMa002. We'll also be playing a couple of shows to celebrate our return. The first is in London at the Scala on the 29th March followed on the 31st with a show at the Mitchell theatre in Glasgow. Support on both shows will be Green Peppers. We'll be announcing a fuller touring schedule very soon.








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'smazing... Or, at least, it's pretty good...

i haven't heard the evens yet - plan to soon though.

KPH