Robert Baird

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Robert Baird  |  Aug 28, 2007  |  0 comments
The amount of flux in the world of music and the businesses of marketing and selling creativity continues to be absolutely amazing. In nearly 25 years of writing about music I’m seeing things I almost don't believe.
Robert Baird  |  Aug 13, 2007  |  2 comments
For good measure alone, Critics, particularly the cranky ones like I've recently become, all deserve a well–placed boot up the arse once in awhile and so, much to my delight I too loved much of The Simpsons movie I prematurely sniffed at last week on this forum. I even get to add this delicious addendum: The critics are wrong! It's pretty wonderful. Many great bits. Much self-deprecation. Maggie emerging as a full–blown character. Okay, okay: I was wrong.
Robert Baird  |  Aug 10, 2007  |  1 comments
Insider music biz stuff should in most cases stay that way because normal folk, what I like to call "civilians," don't care about who said what to whom in the bowels of some label HQ in Burbank or Manhattan. There's also something pitifully self-indulgent and exclusionary and ultimately pathetic about people who are in the know about the music biz and live to tell you about it.
Robert Baird  |  Jul 23, 2007  |  1 comments
It's Monday. It's raining. And people, tourists in particular, (excuse me, why don’t you just poke out the other eye while you're at it!) cannot walk with umbrellas, so let’s talk Ticketmaster.
Robert Baird  |  Jul 20, 2007  |  0 comments
Now that we're perched upon the precipice of the Simpson Movie opening—at least a decade too late—I, by chance, I caught the Hullabalooza episode with the Smashing Pumpkins this week, the one where Homer becomes part of the "pageant of the transmundane," by being shot in the stomach with a cannonball.
Robert Baird  |  Jul 13, 2007  |  2 comments
Here's a number to contemplate: 52% of recorded music sales at Sony/BMG are now via downloads.
Robert Baird  |  Jul 12, 2007  |  0 comments
It's too bad the word "jam" was ever invented, much less the concept it implies being attached to music.
Robert Baird  |  Jun 22, 2007  |  1 comments
The old saw about "the first album was their best" is often true, truer than most artists want to admit. And no where in music is that state more widespread than with singer/songwriters who only have a guitar, their voice and their material and no band to hide behind. Trying to hack out a career as a solo act is a bitch. Takes guts or overweening ego to get through it. Most soloists fall prey to the natural reaction which is to pour all their best ideas into the first project. That's cool until you're faced with coming up with a second and perhaps a third record. Yet sometimes the process can reverse itself, and after a fallow period a songwriter can recharge, again have something to say, and they come through with a late season masterpiece.
Robert Baird  |  Jun 19, 2007  |  2 comments
With increasing frequency, a litany of strange packages began arriving in my mail recently. Inside were, and continue to be, a series of very strange discs, entitled, Rockabye Baby!, that purport to be rock tunes made into lullabies. My first reaction? Smoking crack, as well all well saw in the 90's, can be a terrible, terrible thing.
Robert Baird  |  Jun 17, 2007  |  0 comments
WILCO: Sky Blue Sky
Nonesuch 131388 (CD). 2007. Wilco, prods.; TJ Doherty, eng.; Jim Scott, mix; Bob Ludwig, mastering. AAD? TT: 51:18
Performance *****
Sonics ****

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