The monks of Heiligenkreuz Abbey in Austria sing ancient Gregorian
chants in their 12th-century church — and then post them to YouTube.
Their technological savvy landed them a record deal, and now their
album is storming the European charts and arriving in America. Father
Karl Wallner talks to host Andrea Seabrook about balancing pop stardom
with the religious life.
And here's one of the many YouTube videos of the monks performing.
If the Summer of Love had a visual, it probably came from the
drawing pad of artist Alton Kelley. Kelley's work graced album covers
and concert posters, and has been described as art that defined a
generation. The 67-year-old artist died this week in California from
complications of osteoporosis.
Alton Kelley arrived in Haight Ashbury in 1964 with a sketchbook full of hot-rod drawings. He'd raced cars and bikes back home in Connecticut. But when Kelley met a fellow hot-rod artist from Detroit named Stanley Miller a few years later, cars and motorcycles gave way to skeletons and roses.
The two started making posters for dance concerts featuring up-and-coming groups such as The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Miller, who goes by the name "Mouse," says the work — and good times — rolled like a freight train.
At their peak, Kelley and Mouse were cranking out their elaborate posters once a week, and later expanded their portfolio to include album covers.
The Grateful Dead liked the skeleton-and-roses image the pair created for a concert poster so much that the musicians adopted it as their logo.
Some call the art a visual extension of the music. Others call it the visual for a psychedelic experience. Mouse says it was both, and that the joke between the two of them was that you had to be under the influence to understand it. But ideas, Mouse says, came from trips to libraries and art galleries. Kelley and Mouse pored over books of Gustav Klimt, Japanese poster art, and art nouveau.
Mouse says he and Kelley developed a work style that allowed them to stand side-by-side at the same art table. The pair worked together for more than four decades, and Mouse says that his work routine with Kelley never changed.
Just five months ago, Alton Kelley and Stanley "Mouse" Miller completed their last work together, a poster for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
Click here to listen to the piece that aired on All Things Considered.
In the 1940s, William Kapell was classical music's next great pianist.
He won his first competition at age 10. By the time Kapell was in his early 20s, he was famous.
In 1953, he spent 14 weeks touring Australia, playing 37 concerts. But on the return home, he was killed when his plane crashed outside of San Francisco. He was only 31.
By the 1960s, Kapell's recordings were out of print. Only the most dedicated of collectors hunted them down in secondhand stores, and William Kapell was largely forgotten.
But long before TiVo, MP3s or even cassette tapes, there was an Australian music fan named Roy Preston. He avidly recorded concerts broadcast on Australian radio, including several from Kapell's last tour more than half a century ago.
Those recordings have just been issued commercially in a two-CD set called Kapell reDiscovered: The Australian Broadcasts. Washington Post music critic Tim Page has written extensively about Kapell — he wrote the liner notes for the new album — and spoke with Andrea Seabrook about the collection.
Ever since the sweet sincerity of artists like Gordon Lightfoot, John Denver and Dan Fogelberg, singer-songwriters have been vying with elevator Muzak for the distinction of least hip in the world of music.
But at the Hotel Cafe in downtown Hollywood, singer-songwriters rule the roost. And after eight years of hard work, the small club is turning the tide of hip.
Performers have to elbow their way through the Hotel Cafe crowd to climb onto the tiny stage jammed into a nook by the front window. But since the venue opened in 2000, capacity has grown from 49 to 165.
"It was beg, borrow and steal from day one, 'cause you know initially we had no booze at all, not even beer and wine, just a coffee shop," says club co-owner Max Mamikunian. "We used to charge $5 for a bucket of ice and people could bring in their own beer. And every dime we made went back into the club in some way."
Today, the small club has sent its artists out on an international tour playing much larger venues. And on a recent night, it celebrated the first release on its fledgling record label — a CD by long-time regular performer Jim Bianco. According to Mamikunian, the club's coterie of singer-songwriters has helped put the Hotel Cafe on the map, and the success of the club has, in turn, helped launch the artists' careers.
The Hotel Cafe 2008 Tour will stop at the State Theatre in Ithaca on March 26th. Tickets for these shows are selling out all across the country so if you want to catch the Ithaca performance, get your tickets soon.
Listen as NPR's Christian Bordal visits the club where singer-songwriters still draw a crowd.
Merle Haggard has been churning out albums for nearly 40 years,
fashioning a career as an iconoclastic country-music legend and scoring
dozens of hits — including that slap at the hippie generation, "Okie
from Muskogee." Now 70, "The Hag" has just made a foray into bluegrass:
The Bluegrass Sessions features revamped versions of songs both old and new.
One of the new tracks, "Learning to Live with Myself," was written in his bathtub — or at least, according to Haggard, "There was water everywhere."
"At my age, I've learned how to live with my spouse and I've learned how to live with my beautiful children," Haggard says. "I learned how to be friends with everybody and do everything. The only thing I hadn't learned how to do was to learn to live with myself. I think that's probably the hardest thing we all have to do. We can lie to everybody else, but you can't lie to yourself."
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
That's the advice journalist and author Michael Pollan offers in his new book, In Defense of Food.
"That's it. That is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy," Pollan tells Steve Inskeep.
The implication of Pollan's advice, however, is that what we're eating now isn't food.
"Very often, it isn't," he says. "We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals, whatever, but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods."
Pollan acknowledges that distinguishing between food and "food products" takes work. His tip: "Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."
Click here to listen to the full interview and to read an excerpt of In Defense of Food.
It's a great time to be a musician. Anyone can have a home studio and
record an album, and there are more ways to distribute that album and
get it heard than ever before. In Second Stage's year-end Top 10 list, All Songs Considered
producer Robin Hilton shares the best of the great unknowns. These are
the year's best outsider artists: musicians whose remarkable recordings
went largely overlooked in 2007.
Tens of thousands of listeners voted in the All Songs Considered poll for the year's best CDs. It was tight for
much of the race, with Radiohead and Arcade Fire running neck-and-neck for first place. But in the end, Radiohead's In Rainbows pulled ahead as an overwhelming winner.
There were also surprises: Some of the year's most anticipated CDs (like Rilo Kiley's Under the Blacklight), or most popular albums (like Lily Allen's Alright, Still) barely made the top 25. Meanwhile, smaller acts like Andrew Bird wound up in the Top 10.
Click hear to see the top 25 CDs of 2007 voted by listeners just like you.
It sounds almost like a violin — but not quite.
The erhu is a traditional Chinese instrument. Ma Xiaohui says that in China, people associate it with beggars.
But Ma is a virtuoso performer on the erhu, fluent in both regional Chinese and Western repertoire. She recently spoke with Robert Siegel about her craft.
The erhu is an instrument with two long strings, played using a bamboo bow strung with horsehair. Sound projects out of the small windows on the back of the instrument's body, which is made of old redwood and snakeskin.
The right hand controls the bow. Press down, and you play one string; pull up, and you play the other.
The left hand always touches both strings. Without frets, proper intonation is difficult, but the possibilities for tonal flexibility are great.
Listen to the feature that originally aired on All Things Considered.
Richard Russo's novel, Bridge of Sighs,
is a story about unexceptional people in an unexceptional upstate New
York town. But the novel, Maureen Corrigan says, is anything but
unexceptional; it's pound-for-pound the best new fiction on shelves
today. Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls, a story about the relationships between people in a small town in Maine.
Listen to the review that aired on Fresh Air and read an excerpt of the novel here.
