Final Score: A Look Back at the 2011 Music Predictions

by Tim McMahan

Because many of you (most of you) center your lives around my annual music predictions (and why wouldn’t you?) I’m starting the process early this year by recapping last year’s predictions. Look, if I haven’t got it right yet, I’m not going to in the next two weeks (Hang in there, Courtney). So with that, let the scoring begin:

2011 Music Prediction: Apple will announce that iTunes now lives...

Red Light Special: Inside the Sandbox

by Tim McMahan

I could see the blue-and-red strobe lights erratically pulsing in the distance as I drove down Leavenworth Street Saturday night looking for a place to park my POS Geo Tracker where it wouldn’t get gutted. Four, maybe five police cruisers had surrounded a convenience store just down the block past the building that houses The Sandbox. I tried not to look as I slowly glided by the hysteria, but...

Column 353: The 7-Year Itch

by Tim McMahan

With this column, Lazy-i turns 7. Since it began in The Reader Dec. 2, 2004 (with an interview with fresh young singer/songwriter Willy Mason, who had just signed to brand new label Team Love Records) a lot has changed. Some might say things have changed for the better (Never has there been more music available by more bands than right now); many would say they’ve changed for the worse (It’s...

The Spotify Rebellion and Sting’s Vision of the Future

by Tim McMahan

This will be remembered as the year music went to the cloud, with Amazon, Google, Spotify and most recently, iTunes Match presumably changing the landscape in terms of how we listen to new music.

With that in mind, Wired.com recently posted a story with the headline: "200+ Labels Withdraw Their Music From Spotify: Are Its Fortunes Unravelling?" In it, Wired reported that music distributor...

Cursive’s Mind Meld, Replacements’ Old School, Hoshaw’s New Tattoo

by Tim McMahan

Before we get started, Happy Thanksgiving from Lazy-i. Here's hoping you got plenty of good music in '11 to be thankful for. I know I did.

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I’ve read the description of Cursive’s just-announced concept album, I Am Gemini, a half dozen times and it’s still disturbing. The story: Twin brothers separated at birth, one good and one evil, have an unexpected reunion that “ignites a classic...

News: Gus & Call, MAHA, Capgun Coup, Cursive & The Replacements

by Tim McMahan

Before we start plowing through the year-end minutia that will be inundating us for the next month and a half, here are some "newsy" items that have been dying to get squeezed into the column before they fall between the cracks.

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Gus & Call (former members of Bear Country) announcing that they will have a residency at Slowdown throughout the month of December was, by itself, a big...