Tag: itunes

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New Joni album out yesterday…

Just found out this evening that Joni Mitchell‘s new album, Shine, was released yesterday. So a quick scout around the interwebs revealed that it was on iTunes, but only in those grisly low res DRM’d M4Ps that they sell on there, so balls to that. amazon.com now have a download store, and so long as you use a US billing address, it’s fine to buy from it with a UK CC/debit card. Hurrah! How smug was I feeling to get the album for the equiv of £4.50 ? very smug indeed until I found out that the album is also on Emusic!!! Balls, I could’ve had it even cheaper… Ah well, it’s lovely – I is listening to it now. Stripped down affair, with very little guitar, lots of piano, pedal steel and words about how we’re all screwed – environmentally, politically, globally. Cheerful stuff, and utterly gorgeous. Proper review will arrive when I’ve had a chance to fully digest its majesty.

The one question though, is: what the hell is Joni doing on Starbucks label? After her quitting the industry over its inherent venal nastiness, it’s contempt for creativity and slave wages, she signs for a company who have a very chequered track record on workers rights, and see music as the background to coffee drinking… But it’s a minor quibble, given that SHE’S BACK! WITH A GREAT ALBUM! HURRAH!

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new album! new album!

OK, this album has been a VERY long time coming – the Calamateur Vs Steve Lawson album was actually recorded two years ago, and it’s taken this long for us to get round to releasin’ it!

For those of you who haven’t heard about it before, it’s a collaboration between myself and Scottish singer/songwriter/sound experimentalist Calamateur AKA Andrew Howie. Andrew’s music blends gorgeous acoustic singer/songwriter-ness with odd noises and late-era Radiohead squeakiness, and on this project it’s mixed in with my loopy ambient stuffs, some proper bass-playing (including the gorgeous sound of my Rick Turner fretless acoustic) and a load of my programming and tweaking. It’s tough to remember now who did what, cos we’ve nicked enough ideas off each other over the years…

The official release date is October 1st, but it’s actually available to download now via cdbaby (where you can listen to a minute or two of every track and buy it for) and via itunes (where you can listen to 30 second clips.

And of course, it’ll be up in the StevieStore before too long as well.

Please go and have a listen at cdbaby – it’s a project I’m really proud of, and I’ve been a huge fan of Andrew’s stuff for years – we’ve known each other for over 15 years, and he even bought my Fender jazz off me 10 or 11 years ago, and went to college to study bass before finding his own path through lo-fi loveliness.

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More ways to download… hurrah!

Those magical wonderful peoples at cdbaby.com have started doing download sales direct from their site – hurrah! If you want to get mine, you can go to my main page at cdbaby.com and if you click on any of the solo albums, you can get them there for just $10 downloaded (and the files are 200k MP3s, so considerably higher quality than iTunes.

The duo albums aren’t up there yet, but I’m going to look into sorting that out fairly soon…

And don’t forget that you can get the 3 Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline albums from my online shop for just £2.50 (that’s $5!) each… Go on, you know you want to!

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OK, how does this work??

So last night I was importing ‘Stranger’s World’ by the wonderful Patty Larkin from CD into iTunes. For some reason the CD wouldn’t read on my iBook (about 1 CD in 4 doesn’t…), so I hooked up my external drive to my desktop PC (now safely installed in new house) and burnt it on there. took external drive, hooked it back up to iBook, sync’d iPod, and listened to said album… now here’s the inexplicable weirdness – for some reason there are bits of one or two of my tunes scattered in amongst the MP3s – you get 30 seconds of ‘Dear Diary’ by Patty, followed by a load of something off one of the Lessons Learned albums… then back to Dear Diary… WTF??? How the hell does that happen? How have I managed, by sheer force of narcissistic will, to pollute other people’s lovely music with chunks of my own lovely bass noises??? that surely doesn’t make sense?? Geeks? Bueller? Anyone?

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Jeff Schmidt's new album…

The bass-heads amongst you may well have heard of Jeff Schmidt – he’s a solo bassist from the States, and has just released his debut album, Outre. It’s a lovely record, most of it on piccolo bass in a similar ball-park to Michael Manring and Trip Wamsley, with a fair amount of influence from the nu-acoustic guitar crowd – Don Ross, Michael Hedges, Preston Reid etc.

Jeff’s also a regular at the masterclass that I give in Northern California each year in January, but the reason I’m blogging about it – other than it being a lovely album that you should hear – is that he’s previewing it via a Podcast which you can subscribe to here for free – Jeff’s pretty good at dissecting what he does and why, so the podcast will make for interesting listening for any musician, not just bassists (he doesn’t sound much like a bassist anyway… ;o) You can find the podcast on iTunes as well, just do a search on ‘jeff schmidt’.

Oh, and if you want to buy the download of the album you can get it here for the ridiculous price of $7 – that’s what I did, and it sounds great…

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Grace And Gratitude Sold Out!

Grace And Gratitude is, I think, sold out on CD. I’ll have a look and see if I can find any more copies, but at the moment, it looks like the ones I’ve just put in envelopes to send out to people who’ve ordered them are the last ones I’ve got! How bizarre… I’m sure I’ll find a load of copies under someone’s bed somewhere in the world at some point, and be able to sell those on, but for now, I’ve taken it down from the online shop.

Of course, it’s still available as a download, and also from iTunes, should you want it! And hopefully I’ll repress soon enough – I like it too much not to have it available on CD. Oh, there are probably a couple of copies available via Cd Baby if you want one…

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Duke Special video for 'Freewheel'

here’s the video to ‘Freewheel’ by Duke Special – Duke Special, AKA Pete Wilson, is a genius. Pure and simple. I’ve known him for years, been listening to him play since he was in dreadful bands he’s rather forget ever existed, and now he’s on the brink of a major breakthrough. Go and buy the single, or download it from iTunes or wherever. He’s great. Go on, do it!

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All four solo albums up on iTunes

Finally, I’ve succumbed to the digital revolution and all of my four solo albums are now available on itunes. The following links work if you’ve got itunes already installed on your computer –

this goes to my artist page there, with links to all four album downloads

And Nothing But The Bass
Not Dancing For Chicken
Grace And Gratitude
Behind Every Word

I also found a handful of copies of And Nothing But The Bass on CD while I was in the US – if you want one of those, email me and we’ll sort it out. They are £10 each including worldwide P+P.

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Review on iTunes…

Just got my first review posted on iTunes since the albums went up there last week –

“For anyone who is skeptical about the solo bass genre, this album is a fine example of a bassist who gets it right. Rather than simply riffing or playing fast and high, Lawson approaches the genre as a composer first, and this is what makes this work so satisfying to listen to. Highly recommended. 5 stars.”

Which is nice! If you’re an iTunes user, why not go and post a review yourself? In your iTunes program, click on ‘store’ do a search on ‘Steve Lawson’ and then click on either Grace and Gratitude or Behind Every Word, and post lovely things about them, please! It’d be a most satisfactory christmas present… ;o)

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