1M: Corduroy Is My Guinea Pig

April 10, 2009 8:28 PM

This inaugural episode of the new Metafilter Music Podcast supplement is hosted by cortex and features an interview with and music by Corduroy, as well songs from lovermont, chococat, micayetoca, and The World Famous. It runs just under 36 minutes.

direct link

Songs featured in the podcast, in play order:

00:00 - Improvised banjole theme by Corduroy (podcast exclusive!)
00:30 - Stars by lovermont (her first post!)
04:01 - I Said It All by chococat, part of April's 2-chord challenge
06:45 - Naming Everything by Corduroy
15:40 - Apfel Augen by Corduroy
25:31 - King of Carrot Flowers, a Neutral Milk Hotel cover by Corduroy & friends
27:50 - Kimo by micayetoca
30:59 - There Is No by The World Famous

A few other personal Corduroy favorites that didn't come up in the podcast:

Whoop Heet
Hobbes (yeah, I'm pretty sure that's a Mythbusters promo in the background)
Bury Your Tracks
It's Time to Get Up

And, like most of The Kids Today, Corduroy has a myspace page.

posted by cortex to MeFi Podcast at 8:28 PM (60 comments total)

If you're surprised that this exists, see this recent Metatalk thread that sprang up out of discussion in the Episode 39 post for some backstory.

I've never really done an interview before, and Corduroy has never really been interviewed before, so it was sort of Amateur High-Five hour. I had a good time talking with him and putting together the mix for the podcast, so I think this is something I'll go ahead and try to do regularly—ideally in "off" weeks between the main Mefi podcast episodes.

Any thoughts, suggestions, etc. about this one specifically and about future Music podcasts in general is very much welcome.
posted by cortex at 8:33 PM on April 10

Just to head off some of the editorial talk -- for the first few music episodes, we're running this in the main normal podcast feed. If it becomes officially "a thing" we can split it off into its own podcast feed and keep it out of the normal mefi podcast feed (personally I like the music ones mixed in, but time will tell).

I just listened to this in the background while I edited some video I shot today and it sounded great from end to end.
posted by mathowie at 8:37 PM on April 10

Woooo!! Thanks!
posted by rtha at 8:38 PM on April 10

ooooooh I totally want to do my own MeFiBrarian podcast now too!
posted by jessamyn at 8:42 PM on April 10 [1 favorite]

I'm up to the interview, and it's pretty awesome so far.
posted by boo_radley at 8:45 PM on April 10

YES
posted by danb at 8:47 PM on April 10

YES!
posted by iamkimiam at 8:49 PM on April 10

Oh that was weird. I hadn't refreshed the page for a couple minutes, but am disappointed to find that posting a comment stops the music. There's no way around that one though I imagine.
posted by iamkimiam at 8:50 PM on April 10

Oh! We added a thing to Music threads that warns against that, but I'm not sure if we added it to Podcast threads.
posted by cortex at 9:01 PM on April 10

Very nice!
posted by frenetic at 9:02 PM on April 10

Oh and a self-link but I think it's relevant (and might be helpful), I've got a script that I use to mash my Sellout Central podcast together.

I just point it at a bunch of WAVs and it jams it all together. YMMV.
posted by frenetic at 9:04 PM on April 10

Ha! Very surreal feeling. I'm super honored to have been the guinea pig, and I'm really looking forward to listening to other interviews! I think in the future, a neat feature would be the musician being interviewed performing a song live. Also, definitely keep doing the ambush intro music.

A couple things I wanted to mention in the interview, but all those first time jitters got in the way of: MuFi has really been an amazing place for me. For some reason I wasn't all that nervous posting my first song and, looking back on it, I really had no reason to be. Just a supportive, genuinely interested group. I've only showed a couple songs to a couple high school peers, so having this outlet has been really important to me. So I just wanted to say thank you to everyone for listening.

One other thing: someone needs to interview Cortex, too!
posted by Corduroy at 9:18 PM on April 10

YAY!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:34 PM on April 10

I'm done now.

YES.

Corduroy, you got a pretty interesting range of genres going on. Thanks for the interview.
posted by boo_radley at 9:39 PM on April 10

This is awesome. Stars is fantastic, and this is totally, totally needed, appreciated and welcomed. And thanks for the tip iamkimiam. This is really great, because I had kind of lost the black (music) as a place to click through to.
posted by cashman at 10:45 PM on April 10

I like the extra material, too. Nice touch for a prolific artist.
posted by boo_radley at 10:54 PM on April 10

I like!
posted by Dumsnill at 11:04 PM on April 10

Thanks! Much appreciated!

jessamyn: "ooooooh I totally want to do my own MeFiBrarian podcast now too!"

Do it!
posted by defenestration at 11:22 PM on April 10

This format absolutely works for me, and I'm not one to listen to the radio very long.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 11:30 PM on April 10

Awesomeness indeed. I also vote for interviews for chococat, flapjax, and frenetic.

I would actually love it so much if MeFi came out with its own set of podcasts, much as How Stuff Works or "This week in [blank]", except so much more epic. It's listening to the MeFi podcast that got me into podcasts in general to begin with.
posted by Phire at 12:06 AM on April 11

This is really really awesome and truly hope it continues.
posted by ORthey at 12:16 AM on April 11

nthing flapjax, and putting in an early request for a Miss Lynster interview.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 6:14 AM on April 11

Corduroy was a great selection for the first interview. Because his songs are good and because ever since he started posting songs he got people involved. Those of us who post regularly at Music go through different periods (sometimes we are more active, sometimes less, sometimes we post and participate in the comments, sometimes we just leave the song there) and I remember when he came in and started asking for feedback it was like a breeze of fresh air. Also, no matter how technically challenged he insists he is, his songs are really, really good.

Thank you very much for putting the time into making this happen, cortex, it's really cool and it feels really natural. Now, tell me something, how difficult would it be to have in one of the episodes, instead of a one-on-one interview, a round table with five or six MefiMusicians? There's free software like Skype that allows for conference calls. And I know it may be chaotic and complicated, but it would be a very cool way to have a bunch of people who have been interacting for a while and who have never actually heard each other talking in the same conversation, talking about it.

That's just an idea, but what I actually wanted to say was: a) good call having Corduroy b) thank you very much for putting it together.
posted by micayetoca at 7:28 AM on April 11

Now, tell me something, how difficult would it be to have in one of the episodes, instead of a one-on-one interview, a round table with five or six MefiMusicians?

It's not impossible at all, but it is a couple different flavors of difficult:

1. 5-6 people on a live call (which Skype can do, or 5 at least, last I checked they had some bullshitty platform specific limit where some platforms support 10-way calls and others only support the original 5-way limit, maybe that's improved now?) is a lot of cross talk and messiness. Which could be charming, and could be managed anyway through some extra formal structure on who is talking when, but it's a lot of corralling to do, especially without the visual cues that come with e.g. a round-table discussion in person.

2. Editing that is less slick than with just 2 or 3 parties, because it wouldn't be possible to split out each voice as a separate part in a large call the way we currently do it. We use a Skype plugin called "Call Recorder" that takes a skype call that the user is on and records it as a 2-sided conversation: the user's audio, and the rest of the call.

With a 2-person call, that's super easy—I end up with my track and Corduroy's, and if I need to do a quick duck on one or the other of our tracks during some crosstalk or to make an edit cleaner, no sweat.

With a 3-person call like we do for the main podcast, each of us has to be running Call Recorder so we can each get an isolate vox track ourselves, split out from the "the other two" track each of us ends up with. We take that and use the isolated vox for each to edit the thing together.

Larger calls would require everyone to have Call Recorder, which aside from being a little cumbersome would also mean cash in hand, since it's like $15 bucks for the individual version, and that seems kinda silly to ask someone to do just to talk on skype one time.

BUT! Not impossible, and maybe worth a try some time if we can find a context to make it happen. I mentioned structure, and that could be the key: have something specific that 4-5 people are going to talk about, more or less in turns. Discuss a particular interesting song recording as a group, or have everybody talk about one of their favorite (recent or not) tracks where those are the tracks on the podcast as well.
posted by cortex at 7:49 AM on April 11

Moderator podcast ...supplemental.

*beedee beep*
posted by The Whelk at 8:04 AM on April 11 [2 favorites]

This is a great way to draw people into the music portion of the site. I clicked on one of Corduroy's songs, then clicked on someone's playlist which contained that song, and now I'm listening to their whole playlist.

I like the playlist format. Can you put a playlist on this page? maybe "songs related to the songs discussed on this podcast", or something. That would be a nice feature.
posted by metastability at 8:41 AM on April 11

It's not impossible at all, but it is a couple different flavors of difficult:

Yeah, everything you said makes sense. I was thinking about it from the completely naive angle of just recording the conversation live however it comes out, but yeah, thinking practically it would be too much of a mess.
posted by micayetoca at 8:43 AM on April 11

Can you put a playlist on this page?

Oh, hey, that's a good idea. I don't really know how to wrangle the playlist stuff and pb is I think doing something other than coding this weekend so it won't appear like magic probably, but that's probably worth doing.
posted by cortex at 8:56 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]

Another good interviewee would be Karlos The Jackal, though you'd probably need 14 episodes just to go through his instrument collection.
posted by micayetoca at 9:35 AM on April 11

I could make him write and perform a fifteen-second-long song on, and about, each of them.
posted by cortex at 9:47 AM on April 11

I'm listening right now and I love it! Thank you thank you!
posted by rtha at 10:52 AM on April 11

someone needs to interview cortex, too!

I vote cortex interviews cortex about cortex, in high Glenn Gould style!
posted by roombythelake at 12:17 PM on April 11

I really enjoyed this and think it's a great lazy-person's sampling of mefi music - like metastability, it got me clicking around. I always mean to check out mefi music more - so the spoon feeding is perfect. The interview was great, too.
posted by madamjujujive at 1:56 PM on April 11

Thank you! I've only been visiting MeFi music for a short time, but it's wonderful, and this is wonderfuller.
posted by amtho at 4:50 PM on April 11

I really enjoyed this and think it's a great lazy-person's sampling of mefi music - like metastability, it got me clicking around. I always mean to check out mefi music more - so the spoon feeding is perfect. The interview was great, too.

Not to be all "This" but, um, This.

In other words: Hey, neat!
posted by Sys Rq at 5:35 PM on April 11

I could make him write and perform a fifteen-second-long song on, and about, each of them.

Heh. I'd have to spend half a day tuning everything, of course. And it's like painting a bridge -- once I'm done, the ones I started with are out of tune again.

This podcast is pretty great. I didn't realize Corduroy was so young!
posted by Karlos the Jackal at 1:25 AM on April 12

This came out really really well, I have to think about some suggestions for small tweaks but I really enjoyed the way you did this.

Thanks a lot for making this a reality!
posted by rollbiz at 7:34 AM on April 12

Lovermont, that was extraordinary ... more, please!
posted by jbickers at 8:55 AM on April 12

This is great, thanks cortex.
posted by Pants! at 9:13 AM on April 12

Love it! I need to spend more time getting to know MeFi Music! Thank you!

And I dig Bonnie 'Prince' Billie, but the Palace stuff my favorite Oldham. Especially Viva Last blues.
posted by sadiehawkinstein at 10:28 AM on April 12

By the way, I just wanted to add that two of the songs that Cortex linked to have newer versions on my space. And I would absolutely love to be your friend, since I have eight, including Tom.
posted by Corduroy at 10:22 PM on April 12

Tom is a hell of a guy.
posted by cortex at 10:30 PM on April 12

He certainly gets around.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:49 PM on April 12

I thought so, too, until he started showing up in my house before I had gotten home, and eating my Nutella straight from the container.
posted by Corduroy at 10:52 PM on April 12

Well, MySpace y'know... fulla riff raff.

just sent you a friend request
posted by flapjax at midnite at 12:58 AM on April 13

This is great. And I am blown away that one of my track was included. MeFiMusic is full of incredible talent and I love the podcast idea and format.
posted by The World Famous at 12:27 PM on April 13

I finally got around to listening to this, and I'm glad I did. More please!
posted by languagehat at 1:57 PM on April 13

Also, cortex, would you mention a song by request on one of the future episodes? There's this song by Hoopo that for whatever reason went largely unnoticed but is really good and, more to the point, the lyrics are almost biographical for a lot of us who post songs at MM. What do you say?
posted by micayetoca at 4:20 PM on April 13

Yeah, I can totally see that getting some play. Has a real last-track feel.
posted by cortex at 4:38 PM on April 13

You are a star. Thanks.
posted by micayetoca at 4:56 PM on April 13

Thank you so much for putting this together. It's perfect.
posted by odinsdream at 6:06 PM on April 13

I'm a little late to this party, but I wanted to say this is fantastic. Corduroy, nice interview, and nice songs! You have a great catalog of music here.

Thanks for making the music podcast happen, cortex. Thanks, too, for including my song in the inaugural edition — that was one helluva surprise!
posted by lovermont at 1:18 AM on April 14

"ooooooh I totally want to do my own MeFiBrarian podcast now too!"

I'm not even a librarian and I would totally listen to that. Inner-workings, behind-the-scenes stuff is always awesome. Plus, librarians are one of those groups that tend to be lumped into a rigid archetypal pigeonhole type dealy and it would be nice to get to know y'all as individuals with varying opinions on DDC/LCC.

I'm not a praying man, but hot damn, my hands be a-claspin'!

(Please do not mistake the preceding enthusiasm for sarcasm. It's genuine. Do it!)

Also: The World Famous track sounds like a lot of the stuff I used to do in AudioMulch back when it was still in beta and therefore free. As such, me likey.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:20 AM on April 14

Fab! Thanks, cortex and Corduroy.

Corduroy, this was my intro to you/your music. I am impressed.

I am currently on a not very fast cable connection, and I don't spend the time I used to in MeFi Music.... you've made me homesick!
posted by jaruwaan at 7:27 PM on April 14

Great job, guys!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:28 PM on April 14

Could we get this to not be in the main podcast feed? It's not that I don't love the music here so much that it hurts, but well, I just like things separate.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:49 AM on April 15

blue_beetle, did you read this?

(Personally, I like the idea of having them mixed in. I mean, it's not like there are so many MeFi podcasts that it'll be overloading my subscription list.)
posted by danb at 9:38 PM on April 16

Great stuff, I especially like Stars. Thanks!
posted by lmm at 3:57 AM on April 19

Great music, great interview, good job all around, thank you for doing this and please make more.
posted by sleevener at 6:44 AM on April 22

Hey, this is a great idea that gets the word out on the musical corner of the site. It was good to hear the interview, and I loved listening Apfel Augen again.
posted by umbú at 7:55 PM on April 26