Coupla Things

I just wanted to throw a couple of noteworthy articles your way...

1) One of our Bluegrass Pantheon... the God of Banjo... Earl Scruggs, tripped and fell from a Myrtle Beach stage over the weekend. He's doing well but had to have twelve stitches -- on his HEAD. Man, I hate hearing stuff like this. Hang in there, Earl, we love you!

2) I heard a great article on NPR tonight about how a certain Indie Rock band, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, were discovered almost overnight via buzz generated on the Internet and music blogs like ours here. Of course, it's a different style of music, and we're not in it... but it's still facinating. I love how they run from the very beginning step by step, outlining how from a single blog posting the idea -- a "meme" in blog terms -- jumped around and around, until the band sold out of CDs and had to have several extra pressings. (By the way, I was really impressed with the band... but very Indie, no twang. I'm gonna put some of my birthday iTunes gift money towards it!)

I find this sort of empowerment of the listeners especially encouraging. I feel like it's time we can finally -- just by saying 1) I like band A, and then 2) I like band B -- on the Internet -- and people reading it -- and people commenting on it, and 3) saying they like band C, which is similar to bands A and B -- DISCOVER new music! That's the whole freakin' reason for running this site at all.

You didn't know that, did you? That all this is a clever ruse just to get y'all to comment, to show us all the music we don't know about yet? That's pretty much it. Oh yeah, and the HickoryWind groupies. Ahh... groupies.