Van Morrison
Sir George Ivan Morrison OBE, better known as Van Morrison, is a Northern Irish singer-songwriter and record producer. His professional career began as a teenager in the late 1950s playing a variety of instruments including guitar, harmonica and saxophone for various Irish showbands, covering the popular hits of that time. Van Morrison rose to prominence in the mid-1960s as the lead singer of the Northern Irish R&B band Them, with whom he recorded the garage band classic "Gloria", his solo career began under the pop-hit oriented guidance of Bert Berns with the release of the hit single "Brown Eyed Girl" in 1967. After Berns's death, Warner Bros. Records bought out his contract and allowed him three sessions to record Astral Weeks. Though this album garnered high praise, it was a poor seller. Moondance established Morrison as a major artist, he built on his reputation throughout the 1970s with a series of acclaimed albums and live performances, he continues to record and tour, producing albums and live performances that sell well and are warmly received, sometimes collaborating with other artists, such as Georgie Fame and The Chieftains.
Much of Morrison's music is structured around the conventions of soul music and R&B, such as the popular singles "Brown Eyed Girl", "Jackie Wilson Said", "Domino" and "Wild Night". An equal part of his catalogue consists of lengthy, loosely connected, spiritually inspired musical journeys that show the influence of Celtic tradition and stream-of-consciousness narrative, such as the album Astral Weeks and the lesser known Veedon Fleece and Common One; the two strains together are sometimes referred to as "Celtic soul". He has received two Grammy Awards, the 1994 Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, the 2017 Americana Music Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting and has been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2016, he was knighted for services to tourism in Northern Ireland, he is known by the nickname Van the Man to his fans. George Ivan "Van" Morrison was born on 31 August 1945, at 125 Hyndford Street, Belfast, Northern Ireland, as the only child of George Morrison, a shipyard electrician, Violet Stitt Morrison, a singer and tap dancer in her youth.
Morrison's family were working class Protestants descended from the Ulster Scots population that settled in Belfast. From 1950 to 1956, who began to be known as "Van" during this time, attended Elmgrove Primary School, his father had what was at the time one of the largest record collections in Ulster and the young Morrison grew up listening to artists such as Jelly Roll Morton, Ray Charles, Lead Belly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Solomon Burke. Those guys were the inspiration. If it wasn't for that kind of music, I couldn't do what I'm doing now."His father's record collection exposed him to various musical genres, such as the blues of Muddy Waters. When Lonnie Donegan had a hit with "Rock Island Line", written by Huddie Ledbetter, Morrison felt he was familiar with and able to connect with skiffle music as he had been hearing Lead Belly before that. Morrison's father bought him his first acoustic guitar when he was eleven, he learned to play rudimentary chords from the song book The Carter Family Style, edited by Alan Lomax.
In 1957, at the age of twelve, Morrison formed his first band, a skiffle group, "The Sputniks", named after the satellite, Sputnik 1, launched earlier that year by the Soviets. In 1958, the band played at some of the local cinemas, Morrison took the lead, contributing most of the singing and arranging. Other short-lived groups followed – at fourteen, he formed Midnight Special, another modified skiffle band and played at a school concert; when he heard Jimmy Giuffre playing saxophone on "The Train and The River", he talked his father into buying him a saxophone, took lessons in tenor sax and music reading. Now playing the saxophone, Morrison joined with various local bands, including one called Deanie Sands and the Javelins, with whom he played guitar and shared singing; the line-up of the band was lead vocalist Deanie Sands, guitarist George Jones, drummer and vocalist Roy Kane. The four main musicians of the Javelins, with the addition of Wesley Black as pianist, became known as the Monarchs.
Morrison attended Orangefield Boys Secondary School. As a member of a working-class community, it was expected he would get a regular full-time job, so after several short apprenticeship positions, he settled into a job as a window cleaner—later alluded to in his songs "Cleaning Windows" and "Saint Dominic's Preview". However, he had been developing his musical interests from an early age and continued playing with the Monarchs part-time. Young Morrison played with the Harry Mack Showband, the Great Eight, with his older workplace friend, Geordie Sproule, whom he named as one of his biggest influences. At age 17, Morrison toured Europe for the first time with the Monarchs, now calling themselves the International Monarchs; this Irish showband, with Morrison playing saxophone and harp, in addition to back-up duty on bass and drums, toured steamy clubs and US Army bases in Scotland and Germany, of
It's Saturday
"It's Saturday" is the name of the fourth single by alternative rock band Marcy Playground. It was titled "Teenage Hypochondriac" but was changed before the release date of the album. Although nowhere near as successful as the band's earlier smash hit "Sex and Candy," "It's Saturday" managed to hit number 25 on the US Modern Rock Charts; the lyrics of the song share common themes with the poem "Sick" by Shel Silverstein. "It's Saturday" – 3:15 The music video for the song features the band members underneath the covers of a gigantic bed and reappearing in the beds of other sleepers. One scene shows them crawling into the bed of Pope John Paul II, it was directed by Peter Christopherson. Lyrics of this song at MetroLyrics
Zog BogBean – From the Marcy Playground
Zog BogBean – From the Marcy Playground, was an album, self-produced and recorded by John Wozniak in his bedroom studio with some help from his then-girlfriend Sherry Fraser and her brother, Scott. A small run of CDs were self-released by Wozniak, they remain difficult to find to this day. "Our Generation" and "Dog And His Master" would appear on Marcy Playground albums. As of April 2009, Zog Bogbean is available for download at Marcy Playground's official site as well as other outlets such as iTunes. All tracks written except where noted. John Wozniak Sherry Fraser Scott Fraser Official Myspace Page Official Website Official Facebook
All Media Network
RhythmOne is an American company that owns and maintains AllMusic, AllMovie, AllGame, SideReel and Celebified. The company was founded in 1990 by popular-culture archivist Michael Erlewine. RhythmOne offices are located in San Francisco and Ann Arbor, United States, several other locations across the country. All Music Guide was launched in 1991. In 1994 the All Movie Guide was launched and in 1998 the All Game Guide; the company was founded in Michigan in 1990 by Michael Erlewine. With the All Music Guide the aim was to " discographic information on every artist who's made a record since Enrico Caruso gave the industry its first big boost", which launched in 1991, they expanded with the All Movie Guide in 1994, the All Game Guide in 1998. Moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1999 to take advantage of the "rich talent pool". AMG was a business unit within Alliance Entertainment Corporation from 1996 until early 2005. Alliance was acquired in 1999 by a multibillion-dollar fund based in California. Macrovision announced on November 6, 2007 that it had agreed to purchase All Media Guide for a reported $102 million.
For a time, all of the guides were controlled by Rovi's nameservers and combined access to the All Music and All Movie Guides was provided via AllRovi.com from 2011 until 2013. In 2013, Rovi sold consumer access of the content to the newly established All Media Network, LLC, but retained control of licensing the content to other businesses; the overall website is allmedianetwork.com. Rovi sold the consumer access to them to newly established All Media Network, LLC in 2013, while retaining ownership and maintenance of the content itself; the AllGame section of the site was shut down on December 12, 2014. On April 16, 2015 Blinkx Plc acquired All Media Network and rebranded the website under the new unified RhythmOne Group banner. AllMusic is an online database which provides access to information about songs, musicians and musical styles alongside staff-authored news, biographies and recommendations; the content was published in book form in 1991 as the All Music Guide, is now available to the public for online reference and information as well as available via licensing for point-of-sale systems, media players, online music stores.
RhythmOne produces the AllMusic guide series that includes the All Music Guide to Jazz and the All Music Guide to the Blues. Vladimir Bogdanov is the president of the series. AllMovie, launched in 1994 as the All Movie Guide, provides access to information about actors and filmmakers with staff-authored news, reviews and recommendations, it offers limited information about Television productions, focused on those released on DVD. Like AllMusic, this content is available via licensing to point-of-sale systems, media players, online stores. AllGame was active between 1998–2014 as the All Game Guide, it offered information and reviews about many console, hand held, PC games released in the US; the site started in February 1998 with the goal of becoming the most comprehensive game database available. In a farewell message on their site, the staff noted that they "didn't all know what we were doing in those early days but it was an exciting time to be helping build an online game database before the Internet exploded with numerous websites dedicated to video games."
SideReel, launched in 2007, is a TV community site which provides information about TV shows and episodes. Celebified offers celebrity news and interviews and started in 2012. RhythmOne's database was set up by Vladimir Bogdanov to hold the information of Erlewine's many lists. Information in the database is licensed and used in point-of-sale systems by some music retailers, includes the following: Basic data: names, credits, copyright information, product numbers. Descriptive content: styles, moods, nationalities. Relational content: similar artists and albums, influences. Editorial content: biographies, rankings; the company claims to have the largest digital archive of music, including about six million digital songs, as well as the largest cover art library, with more than half a million cover image scans. The AllMusic database is used by several generations of Windows Media Player and Musicmatch Jukebox to identify and organize music collections. Windows Media Player 11 and the integrated MTV Urge music store have expanded the use of AllMusic data to include related artists, reviews and other data.
All Media Network licenses large databases of metadata about movies, video games, audio books, music releases from Rovi Corporation and publishes them online for consumer use. This includes credits, staff-written biographies, reviews and recommendations as well as categories such as theme or mood. Rovi makes this content available for point of sale systems in stores globally, for CD and DVD recognition in software media players such as Windows Media Player and Musicmatch Jukebox, for providing content for a variety of websites including iTunes and Spotify. All Media Guide sold print compilations of its information. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, senior editor of AllMusic List of online music databases Official website
Daniel Powter
Daniel Richard Powter is a Canadian musician. He is best known for his self-penned hit song "Bad Day", which spent five weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. Powter grew up in Vernon, in the Okanagan-Shuswap region of British Columbia, alongside Tyrone and Susan Powter; as a child, Powter played the violin at the age of 4. He changed to piano at 10 years old after a group of children destroyed his violin. Suffering from dyslexia, Powter had trouble in university reading music, dropped out at the age of 20 in order to pursue his own musical career, learning all songs by ear and recording new melodies that he created, he started writing songs. Powter met producer Jeff Dawson in 1997 and released his debut studio album, I'm Your Betty, on June 21, 2000; the album, limited to a small print, contains ten songs, two of which—"More Than I" and "Negative Fashion"—were featured on the television show Higher Ground. Powter's first single, "Bad Day", was first released in Europe in mid-2005, in advance of his second album, Daniel Powter.
Warner Bros. Records submitted the single for commercials, it was subsequently chosen by Coca-Cola as the theme song for an ad campaign in Europe; the song achieved heavy airplay in most European countries, peaking at number three on the overall European airplay chart. It reached number one on national airplay in Germany, number one on the singles charts in the Republic of Ireland and Italy, number two in the United Kingdom—where it stayed in the top ten for thirteen weeks—and number three in Australia. In the United States, "Bad Day" was used extensively on the television series American Idol in its fifth season. Powter sang the song live at the end of the final show of that season on May 23, 2006; the song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, Adult Top 40 and Adult Contemporary charts, making Powter the first solo Canadian male artist to top the Hot 100 since Bryan Adams in 1995. The song reached number one in Powter's homeland, Canada. On May 31, 2005, Powter released his first extended play known as "Free Loop."On July 2, 2005, Powter performed at the Berlin installment of Live 8, a simultaneous group of concerts in nine countries intended to raise awareness of poverty in Africa and put pressure on world leaders for aid.
"Bad Day" came in fifth in the British Record of the Year 2005. In 2006, Powter won in the New Artist of the Year category at the Canadian Juno Awards, was nominated for Best International Breakthrough Act at the BRIT Awards. "Bad Day" was nominated at the 2006 Billboard Music Awards for Hot 100 Single of the Year, was named Billboard magazine's song of the year in 2006. At the 2007 Grammy Awards, Powter received a Best Male Pop Vocal Performance nomination for the song; the subsequent singles from Daniel Powter – "Jimmy Gets High", "Free Loop", "Lie to Me" – were released in different parts of the world, each failing to match the success of "Bad Day". "Free Loop" was deemed chart ineligible in the UK and failed to chart in the U. S. though it reached the top forty on the Adult Contemporary chart. Following the release of "Lie to Me", "Jimmy Gets High" was to be the fourth single from the album in the UK, but its release was cancelled. A new track called "Love You Lately" was released as the next U.
S. single, preceding a re-release of the album Daniel Powter, cancelled. Powter was never able to have another major hit after "Bad Day" and never cracked the U. S. Hot 100 again. In March 2008, a song by Japanese singer Haru featuring Powter, "Find My Way", was released. In September, Powter released his third album, Under the Radar; this was the same year in which he embarked on the Wolfbaggin' Tour, joining the likes of Alphabeat and Lil Chris. Powter performed piano on tracks for what was scheduled to be Marcy Playground frontman John Wozniak's solo album, Leaving Wonderland...in a fit of rage, but the album was released under the band's name. Powter was still given credit for his contributions to the song "Gin and Money". On March 16, 2009, Powter performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in December 2009, Powter was named as the decade's top One-Hit Wonder by Billboard; the magazine describes one-hit wonders as acts whose second hit did not reach the top 25. Powter's notoriety is unmistakable.
On January 1, 2010, he performed O Canada at the NHL Winter Classic. In that same year, he released his greatest hits album, Best of Me, with it, recorded three new songs and a new version of the title track to go along with'Bad Day','Jimmy Gets High','Next Plane Home' and his other singles. Only one was released as a single:'Lose To Win.' On December 1, 2010, Powter made a tribute to English singer and songwriter John Lennon with his cover version of Happy Xmas. This single was released in the UK and Japan. Powter again failed to re-capture the success of "Bad Day." In 2011, he took a hiatus. On April 10, 2012, Powter's new single "Cupid" was released to Canadian iTunes stores. Powter's latest album, Turn on the Lights, was released in July 2012. On June 13, 2012, Powter made a tribute to L'Arc-en-Ciel with his variation of the song Stay Away. On December 5, 2012, Powter was featured in a song with Japanese singer May J. titled "Back To Your Heart". On the 18 he released the single "Christmas Cupid", a Christmas version of his song "Cupid".
On April 10, 2013, he released "Crazy All My Life". On June 5, Powter announced on Twitter that he was working on a new album with Jeff Dawson, who co-produced most of his songs in the
Indie rock
Indie rock is a genre of rock music that originated in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s. Used to describe independent record labels, the term became associated with the music they produced and was used interchangeably with alternative rock; as grunge and punk revival bands in the US and Britpop bands in the UK broke into the mainstream in the 1990s, it came to be used to identify those acts that retained an outsider and underground perspective. In the 2000s, as a result of changes in the music industry and the growing importance of the Internet, some indie rock acts began to enjoy commercial success, leading to questions about its meaningfulness as a term. Sometimes used interchangeably with "guitar pop rock", in the mid-1980s, the term "indie" began to be used to describe the music produced on punk and post-punk labels; some prominent indie rock record labels were founded during the 1980s. During the 1990s, grunge bands broke into the mainstream, the term "alternative" lost its original counter-cultural meaning.
The term "indie rock" became associated with the bands and genres that remained dedicated to their independent status. By the end of the 1990s, indie rock developed several subgenres and related styles, including lo-fi, noise pop, slowcore, post-rock, math rock. In the 2000s, changes in the music industry and in music technology enabled a new wave of indie rock bands to achieve mainstream success. In the early 2000s, a new group of bands that played a stripped-down, back-to-basics version of guitar rock emerged into the mainstream; the commercial breakthrough from these scenes was led by four bands: The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives and The Vines. Emo broke into mainstream culture in the early 2000s. By the end of the decade, the proliferation of indie bands was being referred to as "indie landfill"; the term indie rock, which comes from "independent," describes the small and low-budget labels on which it is released and the do-it-yourself attitude of the bands and artists involved. Although distribution deals are struck with major corporate companies, these labels and the bands they host have attempted to retain their autonomy, leaving them free to explore sounds and subjects of limited appeal to large, mainstream audiences.
The influences and styles of the artists have been diverse, including punk, post-punk and country. The terms "alternative rock" and "indie rock" were used interchangeably in the 1980s, but after many alternative bands followed Nirvana into the mainstream in the early 1990s, "indie rock" began to be used to describe those bands, working in a variety of styles, that did not pursue or achieve commercial success. Aesthetically speaking, indie rock is characterized as having a careful balance of pop accessibility with noise, experimentation with pop music formulae, sensitive lyrics masked by ironic posturing, a concern with "authenticity," and the depiction of a simple guy or girl. Allmusic identifies indie rock as including a number of "varying musical approaches compatible with mainstream tastes". Linked by an ethos more than a musical approach, the indie rock movement encompassed a wide range of styles, from hard-edged, grunge-influenced bands, through do-it-yourself experimental bands like Pavement, to punk-folk singers such as Ani DiFranco.
In fact, there is an everlasting list of subgenres of indie rock. Many countries have developed an extensive local indie scene, flourishing with bands with enough popularity to survive inside the respective country, but unknown elsewhere. However, there are still indie bands that start off locally, but attract an international audience. Indie rock is noted for having a high proportion of female artists compared with preceding rock genres, a tendency exemplified by the development of the feminist-informed Riot Grrrl music of acts like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, 7 Year Bitch, Team Dresch and Huggy Bear. However, Cortney Harding pointed out that this sense of equality is not reflected in the number of women running indie labels; the BBC documentary Music for Misfits: The Story of Indie pinpoints the birth of indie as the 1977 self-publication of the Spiral Scratch EP by Manchester band Buzzcocks. Although Buzzcocks are classified as a punk band, it has been argued by the BBC and others that the publication of Spiral Scratch independently of a major label led to the coining of the name "indie".
"Indie pop" and "indie" were synonymous. In the mid-1980s, "indie" began to be used to describe the music produced on post-punk labels rather than the labels themselves; the indie rock scene in the US was prefigured by the college rock that dominated college radio playlists, which included key bands like R. E. M. from the US and The Smiths from the UK. These two bands rejected the dominant synthpop of the early 1980s, helped inspire guitar-based jangle pop. In the United States, the term was associated with the abrasive, distortion-heavy sounds of the Pixies, Hüsker Dü, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr. and The Replacements. In the United Kingdom the C86 cassette, a 1986 NME compilation featuring Primal Scream, The Pastels, The Wedding Present and other bands, was a document of the UK indie scene at the start of 1986, it gave its name to the indie pop scene that followed, a major influence on the development of the British indie scene as a whole. Major precursors of indie pop included Postcard bands Josef K and Orange Juice, significant labels included Creation and Glass.
The Jesus and Mary Chain's sound combined the Velvet
Shlomi Lavie
Shlomi Lavie is an Israeli-born American-based drummer, best known as the drummer for Marcy Playground. He had been playing with various other bands, including Nanuchka and Electro Morocco in New York City, with The Magical Mystery Tour, a Beatles tribute group, Habiluim in Tel Aviv. Lavie joined Marcy Playground in late 2008, he was referred to lead singer John Wozniak by bassist Dylan Keefe's wife, one of Shlomi's best friends. Wozniak was impressed with Lavie's talent, Lavie soon joined the band.'Electro Morocco is a four-piece band based in Brooklyn, NY, which can best be summed up as a mixture of energetic electro beats with a Middle Eastern flavor, a pop edge and some retro rock. Nanuchka is a New York City based group composed of Lavie, bassist Yula Beeri and guitarist Roy Gurel. Shlomi Lavie's myspace Van Goose Website
