Pages tagged “peter buck”

R.E.M. may have gotten its musical mojo back with its latest record Accelerate earlier this year, but it seems it lost something else along the way.

[Above: Peter Buck]

Merge Records, home to many of indie rock's finest (such as Arcade Fire and Spoon) is celebrating its first 20 years with a special box-set project called SCORE! The North Carolina-based independent label was created in 1989 by Superchunk members Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance to help release music for their band and to help out their musical friends.

[Above: Lee Ronaldo and James Joyce]

We keep our ears pretty low to the ground where literate music is concerned, so news of producer James Nichols' project using James Joyce's poetry sent our wee minds a-reeling. The author of Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegan's Wake has inspired popular music for years—Jefferson Airplane, Lou Reed and Van Morrison are only three of the most famous Joyce-referencers—but rarely has he received such extensive treatment this side of the high art/low art seesaw.