XL Recordings

It's tough to know what indie rock touring is like unless you've actually roughed it cross-country in the back of a dingy van, hitting up questionable diners at 4 a.m. and sleeping wherever you can. But the new book/DVD set The Art of Touring is here to give laymen a multimedia simulacrum of life on the road.

Published by Yeti (which is run by Pitchfork contributor Mike McGonigal), the 156-page tome was edited by former Erase Errata member Sara Jaffe and former Electrelane guitarist (and Pitchfork contributor) Mia Clarke. It features artwork courtesy of the likes of Devendra Banhart and members of Times New Viking, the Ponys, and Au Revoir Simone, written pieces from Le Tigre's Johanna Fateman and Matmos's Drew Daniel (also a Pitchfork contributor) and more, and photography courtesy of Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, and Explosions in the Sky's Munaf Rayani, just to name a few. The DVD is filled with live and backstage footage of the Ex, Mecca Normal, Erase Errata, the Jeffrey Lewis Band, Electrelane, and others.

Even better, a third of the profits from the sales of the book will be donated to the Musicians' Emergency Fund administered by the Jazz Foundation of America.

The Art of Touring is out now. Check out a few pages from it below:

Electrelane's Emma Gaze:

Au Revoir Simone's Annie Hart:

Photo by Alyssa De Hayes

-- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Athens' Georgia Theatre, a longtime center for the Athens music scene, suffered extensive damage in a fire this morning. There were no injuries, but the entire building was destroyed except for the exterior. The cause of the fire isn't yet known. The venue was set to play host to a number of bands during next week's Athfest.

-- Shunda K, a member of the Tampa-based dance-rap crew Yo Majesty, has parted ways with Domino Records, Yo Majesty's label. She's also released two new mixtapes for free download. One of them, The Best Eva Written: OutKast, features Shunda spitting over OutKast instrumentals. The other, Kollaborations, consists of team-ups with artists like Peaches and Tha Pumpsta.

-- On August 4, Secretly Canadian will release Creaturesque, the sophomore album from Seattle indie-poppers Throw Me the Statue. West Coast indie go-to guy Phil Ek produces.

-- August 28-29, the 25th incarnation of the Street Scene festival will take over San Diego's East Village. This year's lineup includes M.I.A., Modest Mouse, the Dead Weather, Devendra Banhart, Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, Band of Horses, Girl Talk, Mastodon, No Age, Deerhunter, and, um, the Black Eyed Peas.

Photo by Beck/Drew Brown, front page photo by Autumn de Wilde

When most of us have extra spare time on our hands, we end up zoning out in front of "Daisy of Love" reruns or rereading Watchmen for the billionth time. Beck, on the other hand, challenges himself to record cover versions of entire albums as quickly as possible. Different strokes, I guess.

Over the next month, Beck will be overhauling his website, and one of the features will be something called Record Club, in which Beck ropes in various musician friends to record an entire album in a day. For the purposes of scrappy immediacy, nobody will rehearse or arrange anything beforehand.

After that day of furious recording, Beck will slowly let the record out into the world via his website (as well as the websites of the other musicians involved), uploading a new song once a week. He'll kick this party off with The Velvet Underground and Nico. That's an ambitious start! Will Beck attempt the Nico vocal parts himself? We'll find out!

Future Record Clubs will involve friends-of-Beck like Devendra Banhart, MGMT, Jamie Lidell, and producer Nigel Godrich. Here's hoping they give 8Ball & MJG's In Our Lifetime a shot.

Hey y'all!!! Check out my dear friend Lauren Dukoff's AMAZING and BEAUTIFUL new book "FAMILY".FAMILY

Photo by Lauren Dukoff

After pulling off an R-rated, tropicalia-style cover of Oasis's "Don't Look Back in Anger" a few years ago, Devendra Banhart is airing out his Noel and Liam fan-dom once again. This time, he offers a trippy remix of the stomping kiss-off "(Get Off Your) High Horse Lady" from the Manchester stalwarts' 2008 LP, Dig Out Your Soul. Pink Floyd-y synths ahoy.

You have to register to download the remix at Oasisinet. Or, there's also this thing called Google.

In other Devendra news, the singer has completed his new album, though no release date has been set just yet. He's got a couple summertime gigs coming up: June 29 at the Hollywood Bowl with Brazilian legend Gilberto Gil and August 23 at San Francisco's Outside Lands Festival. He does not have any tour dates lined up at the moment.

Devendra Banhart has remixed Oasis at the band's request.

Freak-folkies aren't greedy. For the most part, they're happy with a campfire and a few questionable substances. Many members of the acoustic underground have once again put their efforts towards a worthy cause. Buck Curran of the Maine band Arborea has curated and produced Leaves of Life, a new compilation that benefits two nonprofit groups, the World Food Programme and Not on Our Watch.

Devendra Banhart, Marissa Nadler, Anni Rossi, and Alela Diane all turn in tracks. Nalle's Hanna Tuulikki drew the cover (above). Leaves of Life will be out June 23 on Borne! Records. Tracklist below.

Leaves of Life:

01 Alela Diane with Mariee Sioux: "The Cuckoo"
02 Rio en Medio and Israel Cilio: "Mary"
03 Fern Knight: "Our Mountain the Mother"
04 Marissa Nadler and Black Hole Infinity: "Dead Wives Club"
05 Devendra Banhart: "Hotel St. Sebastian (demo)"
06 Arborea: "Son of the Moon, Daughter of the Sun"
07 Micah Blue Smaldone: "The Clearing"
08 Larkin Grimm: "The Butcher"
09 Mi and Lau: "The Funeral, The Pray"
10 Mica Jones: "Best Life"
11 Starless and Bible Black: "All the Finest Beams"
12 Cursillistas: "Mothers Taught"
13 Silver Summit: "Oaks"
14 Big Blood: "Sick With Information"
15 Eric Carbonara: "Sundown at Parakeet Park"
16 David Garland: "Splinter Heart"
17 Magic Leaves:...

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Devendra Banhart, The Orb, Etienne De Crecy, Murder City Devils, Busy P and a DJ set by The Chemical Brothers have been added to the lineup of this year's Coachella Festival.

Gnarls Barkley, My Morning Jacket, LCD Soundsystem and Devendra Banhart are among the artists contributing to the upcoming charity compilation 'Causes 2'.

Photo by Lauren Dukoff

Devendra Banhart's handful of covers have always stood out to me more than any of his trippy originals. One-offs like "Fistful of Love" and "Don't Look Back in Anger" highlight his vocal nuances without letting him float around in the stratosphere. He needs these songs' rigid structures, and in turn he can loosen them from their original context and completely reshape them.

Such is the case with "Forget About Him", from Chapter Music's upcoming Loving Takes This Course: A Tribute to the Songs of Kath Bloom (don't miss Bill Callahan's contribution to the same record). The upbeat tempo and plucky accompaniment of the original belie its romantic hopelessness, and Bloom makes lines like "Guess I'll have to die to forget about him" sound devastating but not overdramatic. Banhart's cover sounds a bit tongue-in-cheek at first, thanks primarily to the spacey effects and his hammy croon. But his misdirection is a sign of humility: Knowing he can't improve on the original, he doesn't even try to communicate resignation and instead makes loopiness a symptom of a broken heart. His cover is a heartfelt valentine to its writer, right down to his final words: "Thanks, Kath!" Indeed. (via Naturalismo)

MP3/Stream:> Devendra Banhart: "Forget About Him"
[from Loving Takes This Course - A Tribute to the Songs of Kath Bloom; due 03/14/09 on Chapter Music]