Janelle Monae

“Tightrope”

John Taylor: An absolute ‘Star is Born’ moment when Janelle performed this song on David Letterman this year. It was the YouTube clip of choice in our studio that week.

Kristi York Wooten: This tiny & mighty singer may have graced the pages of Vogue magazine last April, but Janelle Monae still took time to get down with the locals at an intimate listening party for Archandroid in an Atlanta hotel lounge that same month, dancing the “Tightrope” and professing her love for Salvador Dali while I sat in awe. That was a moment, too.

Janelle Monae dances the “Tightrope” while Kristi York Wooten looks on. Photo courtesy of Metromix Atlanta. Credit: DJBing

Paramore

“The Only Exception”

Kristi: The simplicity of the lyric had an undeniable everywoman quality to it – and spoke volumes to anyone who’d ever worried about gambling on love. Loved this song.

Vampire Weekend

“Cousins”

Simon Le Bon: When I first heard this, I thought it was the Arctic Monkeys, because it’s got the same drive and rawness –– but the Maskanda guitar is a dead giveaway. Very uplifting. Vampire Weekend at their best.

Angelique Kidjo

“Move on Up” feat. Bono and John Legend

Kristi: Folks like Alicia Keys, Peter Gabriel, and Josh Groban can’t get enough of this Beninese singer’s energy: Kidjo‘s a forcefield of tenacity and positivity. This Curtis Mayfield cover does major justice to the song’s mantra of striving for a better tomorrow.

Cee Lo Green

“F*** You”

Simon: It’s all in the title!

Kristi: Another Atlanta peep. Anyone who gets up-in-arms over the profanity in this song obviously has no sense of humor. Don’t we all feel like an Atari every now and then?

Mike Snow

“Animal”

Simon: Mark [Ronson] played me this. I think Andrew Wyatt is a sublime melodist and the Ronson remix is perfect white-boy reggae.

Roger Taylor: Andrew Wyatt has to be one of my favorite singers of the last few years and he doesn’t disappoint on this piece of ska-driven indie/pop from the ‘Swedish Pop mafia.’

Usher

“DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love”

Kristi:I was much relieved when “DJ” knocked “OMG” and those lyrics (“Honey got a booty like pow, pow, pow/Honey got some boobies like wow, oh wow” Ew. Really?!) off the charts. Definitely one of the year’s most infectious choruses – from yet another ATL supastar.

I Blame Coco

“Caesar”

Simon: I was in the pool on holiday and my daughter put a record on. I said “What’s this?” She said “It’s Coco Sumner. Sting’s daughter.  You’d better like it.”  And I did.  It’s just a really good song.  It’s pure pop.

Roger: This girl really does have it in spades. Despite having some very big shoes to fill, she is really owning her music and delivering some truly unique and interesting records … this being one of them.

Kristi: I’ve been following Coco since her first YouTube appearances a few years ago, and I can’t wait until she breaks in the U.S.; she’ll be major.

Stars

“Fixed”

Kristi: The Five Ghosts was easily the best album of the year – a thoughtful, complex, and beautifully recorded mash of synths and vocals from this veteran Canadian pop band; “Fixed” was the poppy single that landed Stars on Jimmy Fallon, but dark charmers such as “He Dreams He’s Awake” are just as worthy of a listen.

Scissor Sisters

“Fire With Fire “

Roger: Soaring, unforgettable chorus from these New York ‘Discophiles’ who are standing the test of time.

Simon: These guys have a great new album out [Night Work], which really is fabulous. This one may not even be the best song on the album, but once you get it in your head you can’t get it out!

Scissor Sisters’ Ana Matronic with Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon. Photo credit: Nick Rhodes. Photo courtesy of DuranDuran.com Ana Matronic appears on Duran Duran’s new album All You Need is Now.

Keane

“My Shadow”

Kristi: I am a sucker for ballads, and Tom Chaplin‘s choirboy tenor gets me every time. I think Keane are underrated songwriters and their day in the sun is yet to come.

Kelis

“Acapella”

John: I was turned on to this song by Richard Blade. So excited to have Kelis on our new album [All You
Need is Now].  She is quite extraordinary.

Roger: One of the best dance floor records of the year. Crashing through a number of musical boundaries and landing on most DJ’s decks over the summer … surely [David] Guetta‘s best collaboration to date.

Two Door Cinema Club

“Something Good Can Work”

Kristi: The little band that could. Tourist History was one of the more exciting albums I heard this year. Teenagers from Northern Ireland who channel TV on the Radio and Big Country? I’m so there.

Foals

“Miami”

Simon: One of these hot groups, with a new album [Total Life Forever] out.  This is one I heard on the radio and just had to keep playing.

Hanson

“Thinking ‘Bout Somethin’”

Kristi: This trio’s chops are undeniable. And the video – a fun homage to the Blues Brothers (and to Weird Al Yankovic, who sits in on tambourine) – proved that these savvy vets don’t take themselves too seriously. Try not to like this song. I dare you.

Rihanna

“Rude Boy”

John: My favorite song from the Rated R album,which I loved and hated in equal measure.  “Rude Boy” is an
extraordinarily original piece of R&B pop.

Roger: This song gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘Rude Boy’ and Rihanna shows us a whole new
‘ragamuffin’ side… brilliant!

Tracey Thorn

“Long White Dress”

Kristi: My. Favorite. Female. Singer. Ever. Period.

B.o.B/Bruno Mars

“Nothin’ on You”

Kristi: Yet another ATL mainstay, this B.o.B hit had a breezy summer feel that made it irresistible. Add Mars’ smooth vocal, and you have one of the biggest smashes of 2010.

Plan B

“Stay Too Long”

Simon: South London gangster to new soul star. This is ‘Mod’ at its best.

Surfer Blood

“Harmonix”

Kristi: A cool guitar riff I couldn’t get out of my head… vaguely reminiscent of The Shins, but with an experimental twist. Plus, they’re from Florida. That’s got to be worth something.

Honorable mention: Fran Healy of Travis, Film School, Angus & Julia Stone, Cyndi Lauper’s Memphis Blues, The Secret Handshake, Corinne Bailey Rae, the return of Sade, Ben Folds, Bryan Ferry, Sufjan Stevens, and Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings.

What did you listen to this year? Please comment and tell us your faves.

]]> http://kristiyorkwooten.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/tastemakers-top-20-our-favorite-songs-of-2010/feed/ 0 kristiyork 2010-12-28-kristijanelle.jpg 2011-01-07-SLB.AM.IMG_6600v2.jpg http://kristiyorkwooten.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/catching-up/ http://kristiyorkwooten.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/catching-up/#comments Sat, 27 Nov 2010 18:26:40 +0000 kristiyork http://kristiyorkwooten.wordpress.com/?p=535 ]]> I just realized while checking out the stats for this blog that some of you are actually visiting this site regularly and by golly, I better get some updated content on here.

The truth is, it’s the holidays, and I can’t seem to keep up with the rush around me. So, for the next few weeks, I’m gonna send you over to my main website, where you can click on most of the publications I write for regularly and link to all my latest articles. I promise to have some new blogs up soon!

Happy Holidays!

K

P.S. Follow me onTwitter for the latest!

kristiyorkwooten.com

Michael Franti sings with children in East Timor. Photo Courtesy of CARE. © Josh Estey/CARE

Welcome! If you weren’t directed here from the Huffington Post, click here to read the full intro to the piece.

Below, my interview with Michael Franti, about the new Michael Franti & Spearhead album, The Sound of Sunshine, out on September 21.

Q: It’s so cool to see your path – you had your first top 20 in 2009 and now you’re #2 at AAA radio.

A: At times it feels really fulfilling – like, we spent all this time and it’s paid off. And at other times, it feels really, really weird. Some days I’ll be driving in the car and hear [on the radio], “That was Miley Cyrus with ‘Party in the USA’ and coming up next is Michael Franti!” And it just seems so freaky for me because I’m used to being mentioned in the same breath as Public Enemy or Rage Against the Machine. It’s really a great shot in the arm after 20 years of making music.  To be the new kid on the block is kind of funny.

Q: How’s it been to record while out on the road?

A: It’s been an amazing experience. We have had an incredible revolution of technology in the last 15 years. It used to be we had to go into a very expensive studio with very expensive reels and tape and work with experts – engineers and producers – in order to make recorded music. These days, you just need a laptop and some ingenuity. In February and March we were out [on the road opening for] John Mayer and we were playing all these big basketball arenas. So every day we’d set up our little studio in the locker room of these NBA teams. We’d go out and play the songs we were recording, and then come back and say,  “You know, this song’s too fast or too slow or it needs different chords on the bridge,” and we’d make those changes right there in the locker room. So, in this way, the fans really had a lot to do with the making of this record.”

Q: Can you recall one moment or song where you’re on the road recording and had a breakthrough?

A: There’s a song called “I’ll be Waiting.” That was the first song I started writing for the record, and I actually started writing it almost two years ago. I had the verses to the song all written out. The verses are all centered around this line that says, “The best things in life aren’t things.”  And I describe all these things in life that are living and breathing and feeling and loving. I didn’t have a hook for the song. There was one day, we were on tour, and I was singing another old song of mine and I kind of had this little melody that I would sing on the road that wasn’t on the record. I took it and put it in “I’ll Be Waiting.” Suddenly, the song just took off. It became this kind of endemic thing when we started playing it on the road. People would sing the song and dance to it and put their hands in the air as if they were hearing it as a song they’d grown up with, but they were hearing it for the first time. It was a really amazing thing to see a song come to life like that and have the audience respond to it.

Q: Appendix surgery was an influence on your record – how?

A: I thought the surgery was gonna be an in-and-out kind of thing, but it was a long time being sick, and I really felt like I was gonna die by the time they got me in there and figured out my appendix had ruptured. I thought, you know – I’m a tough guy – I’ll just get in there and get the thing pulled out and come back. But it wasn’t that way at all. It was really emotional. I would cry every day. I would sit there and be so grateful to be alive. I would pull my kids close to me and hug them.

I felt like I was being visited by angels. The people in my life who were there for me, were really helping me – not only on my physical journey, but spiritually getting me back together. So, there was a song that I wrote called “Gloria” for the album. I asked a friend of mine to get me a guitar, because I wanted to play guitar in the hospital, so they brought me this guitar. It had this sticker on it and it was peeling off. My friend showed it to me and I said, “Stop – there’s an angel coming out of the guitar.” And she looked at me like, “Uh, yeah, you’re on some pretty good drugs [laughs].” But sure enough, there was an outline of an angel that had been left where she had peeled the sticker off.

[Church bells sound in the distance during our interview at this exact moment.]

Wow … as church bells go off! I really felt like I was being watched over by the people in my life  – my friends, my family, people who wished me well online – sent me emails and message. I don’t believe in angels with white wings and halos. But there’s a power to music that I really do believe in, that it helps us to pass through emotional trauma. It was a really healing time for me.

Q: You are really the first musician – songwriting, outlook, activism – who blends all those aspects of your life – yoga, Power to the Peaceful, documentaries in war zones, into one cohesive package. We know who Michael Franti is and what he believes in.

A: I feel really comfortable in who I am today. I say that as a person having grown up feeling really uncomfortable. I was given up for adoption as a child. I was a black child being raised in a white family. My father was an alcoholic. Music at first was a way of escaping. Politically, too, my politics were angry. It’s easy when you look at the world to find things or people to point the finger at: “We’re enemies.” As I’ve grown as an artist, and as I’ve traveled the world, met people, and sat and played music and ate with people, I’ve found that my politics are less black and white, and I’m so left and right, they’re really people politics. There was one point when my politics were like after the corporation, after the man, after the government. But today I really believe that in order to solve problems, like climate change, for example, it’s gonna take the best scientists, it’s gonna take the resources of the corporate world, it’s gonna take the government, it’s gonna take the common sense of every day people, it’s gonna take the consumer power of everybody on the planet, and the grassroots idealism to get us even to make progress in terms of environmental issues. So, my music today is more about making bridges, more about making people feel like every day they can get up and look at these things and address them with love in their hearts.

Q: How did you make that transition from angry young man to Mr. Peace? Was there one moment in particular?

A: There are three, but I’ll put ‘em to you all in one. There was a time when I went and wrote songs about prisons and how money was being spent on prisons and not in schools. And I was invited to play in a prison, and when I got in the prison, they said, “We don’t want to hear songs about that. We want to hear songs about how much we miss our girlfriends and how much we miss our family.” I was in Baghdad, and the same thing happened. I had this song, “We Can Bomb the World to Pieces, But We Can’t Bomb it Into Peace.” When I got to Baghdad, they said, “We don’t want to hear that song, we want to hear songs that make us sing and laugh and dance.” I started to realize that that was the key to it all – to connect with people. And if you can make people laugh and dance and sing and clap and cry through a song, then you’re connecting to a place that was gonna affect people so that when they leave your show they think, “You know what? I wanna make the world a better place.” Maybe there’s something I can do at my kid’s school or I’ve never voted before, I’m gonna go vote, or something like that that would inspire people in a different way, but in a deeper way. The other thing is that I practice yoga. For me that was they way for me to really take a look at myself, examine myself. In yoga, we put ourselves in really difficult physical situations with our bodies, and we learn to breathe through it and deal with our stress and take responsibility for everything that we do. In that, I changed my politics from blaming other people to say, “What can I do?” So it’s not just can I write a song about how the world is. Maybe I could write a song about how great the world could be and then I could perform it on a street somewhere where the world wasn’t as great as it could be. Then I take my songs directly to those people and directly to those places.

Welcome to my Keane story … If you weren’t directed here from Huffington Post, click here to read my review of Night Train and blog about Keane’s tour. Below, my interview with Tim Rice-Oxley, the band’s keyboard guy and Ivor Novello award-winning songwriter.

Hey Tim! I’m extremely sad that Keane isn’t coming to Atlanta on this tour.

Tim Rice Oxley: We haven’t been there in awhile now. We

would love to come back. We need to spend more time in the States.

Here, people think of Keane as being a quintessentially British band.

TRO: We’ve always had a feel that America has embraced Keane from very early on. I’m a great lover of America. I keep saying I’m going to move there. I haven’t yet plucked up the courage … but one day.

Is it true you do a lot of traveling by train?

TRO: Yeah, we try to. We haven’t always done things that way. When we started touring, we kind of flew everywhere like everyone does. None of us enjoy the process of flying. It seems to be getting ever more miserable to go through an airport these days. When we were recording Perfect Symmetry, we’d had enough of flying, but we wanted to go to Berlin to record, and we ended up getting the overnight train to Berlin. It was such a revelation and a great bonding experience — the four of us taking off on this little adventure in the middle of the night, sitting in the bar and watching the towns of Europe go by. It really opened our eyes. You have this sense of real travel, one that’s been lost in the last 50 years since cheap air travel became the default mode of getting anywhere.

How did traveling around in trains inspire you as a songwriter? It must have, since you called the new record Night Train.

TRO: I’ve always had a love of trains. There’s a song called “Try Again” on our second album that has quite a bit of train imagery. The whole Night Train concept was borne out of a sense of adventure. That spirit came to represent that whole period of our lives last year, just kind of traveling around the world playing in support of Perfect Symmetry. Those are probably some of our happiest moments are when we were jumping on board a train in Europe or Russia or Japan or even in the States. When traveling’s such a big part of your life and you make a little change like that, it makes a huge difference.

Why is Night Train an EP? There are 9 songs.

TRO: It was a chaotic process. The whole concept of the EP came from that spirit of unplanned willingness to embrace the unknown. We were out on tour. We were in Boston, and we realized we had 3 or 4 songs that were finished but didn’t seem to fit anywhere; they didn’t feel like we wanted to save them another two years until a proper Keane record was finished. Those were the two K’Naan collaborations and “My Shadow,” and we had the idea of doing a cover of this 1980′s Japanese pop song. There was a sense of fun, and rather than saying we’ve got to stick to the plan that everyone does of a record every two years, and it’s gotta be 12 songs and it’s gotta be promoted up to the eyeballs. We got sort of carried away with it and before we knew it, we had 9 tracks. I like that, because we’re giving people more than you wouldn’t expect from and EP. I’m pleased to have that stuff out there, and it’s become much more of an event – if that’s not too pretentious a word – than we’d ever planned. It’s dong amazingly well over here in the UK. It’s been really cool.

How did you connect with rapper, K’Naan?

TRO: I know Tom was a fan of his first record, and he got me into it. We heard he was a Keane fan. So I called him up and he’s a lovely guy – very relaxed, very enthusiastic. I sent him some ideas and he loved them. The next thing we were in the studio in London and three days later we had some completely new songs, which is unusual for an English indie band.

Both K’Naan songs are great. I love “Stop for a Minute,” but “Looking Back,” with that great allusion to the Rocky theme song, is brill.

TRO: We could have certainly overthought that. It’s very much kind of in the hip-hop spirit, sampling a great hook like that. In the world of hip-hop it’s not at all unusual and pretty much a standard way of working up an idea for a song. For an indie band, it’s unheard of. Having taken the step to do that, it felt so fun and so exciting to hear. I think we felt really proud that we had the guts to do it.

Was working with producer Jon Brion really influential on you, because your sound changed around the time of Perfect Symmetry. Did you guys have a lot of the ideas of how you wanted that record to sound before you got together?

TRO: We had some building blocks, but we didn’t have the confidence to make that leap into the unknown. I guess we were worried whether we were capable of making a record that was much more eletcro – it’s very different record than the first two. With Jon Brion, having someone we respected so much and someone who had made such brilliant music come and encourage us … he was very honest about what we had done so far. He had this attitude of ” You can try whatever you want, bearing in mind if it doesn’t work, you can just delete it.” That sounds obvious, but it’s quite hard to have that spirit of being willing to make a fool of yourself in the studio. If you really do try stuff that’s uncomfortable, sometimes you just sound like an idiot at the end of it. But he gave us the confidence to realize that’s part of the fun of making a record. That’s why the great albums are as exciting as they are , because there’s a spirit of willingness to make a fool of yourself in the studio in search of those moments of inspiration.

Tell me about some of your influences, especially as the piano player.

TRO: Piano was the instrument I started out on as a child, but one of the things that made our band quite unique is that most of my influences were guitarists or electronic music like Depeche Mode or Kraftwerk, or a lot of that 1980s stuff … people like The Pet Shop Boys, and U2 and REM and Radiohead and Bowie – classic bands – people who are known for being more generally about guitars. I guess I took that sense of that kind of expansive, melodic guitar parts and used it. Rather than being about twiddly solos, it’s much more about creating sonic landscapes for the vocals and lyrics to fit into – a kind of impressionistic approach to sound. I think taking that inspiration and applying it to a piano is probably what made Keane’s sound unique. It’s a pretty bastardized approach to playing piano that would probably be disapproved of by anyone who’s been classically trained. I think it made for quite interesting results.

What about your activist work? You’ve done a lot of work with War Child, Make Poverty History, and you played Live 8. Does everybody in the band feel strongly about being involved in those kind of things?

TRO: Fans and musicians have always been so divided about whether music and politics, for want of a better word, should mix. I’ve never really understood that. I think a lot of the best music comes from a spirit of wanting to make the world a better place. There’s always room for a good old love story in pop music. But that in itself comes from wanting to make the world a better place. When I was growing up, U2 were the band who influenced me the most. Even now, 20 some odd years later, I still pretty much hero worship them. I remember seeing Bono onstage and finding the stuff that he was saying much more eye opening and inspirational and stirring than anything I was seeing on the 9 o’clock news on the BBC.  As a teenager, it was something I could connect to, much more than what the gray-haired guy on the TV from the House of Commons was saying.  I’ve always felt that if you’re given that stage, you have an amazing power to do good. I’ve never understood why people look down on that. War Child especially, we’ve had a relatively longstanding relationship with. If you can just turn up and play music and somehow actually do some good, it’s pretty easy to do that.

How does it feel to be back on the road again?

TRO: We’re the best we’ve ever been as a live band. We’ve just finished a UK tour with a lot of outdoor shows. We’ve really grown in confidence. The fact that the EP – - something that was thrown together pretty loosely and pretty quickly — went to number 1 over here [in England] gave us a real injection of confidence. And all of the sudden we have a few more crowd favorites in our catalog than we had a few months ago. We normally have a little acoustic section in our show, too. I think Tom is the best frontman on the planet now. I really want people to see that. I hope anyone who comes to see us has a really amazing night, because we’re not happy unless they do.

Below is part of my interview with Rolling Stone columnist Rob Sheffield about his new book, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran. The interview’s heavily edited, because we were having way too much fun … and because I generally acted like a dork.

His books are great, and if you haven’t read Love is a Mixtape yet, you should buy it when you click on Amazon to buy Talking to Girls About Duran Duran.

(By the way, if you weren’t redirected to this page from Huffington Post, then click here to read my review of the book, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, in order for this interview to make sense.)

……..

Kristi: Hey Rob! I’m so excited to talk to you. I found out that the day the book is coming out just happens to be the 25^th anniversary of the first time I met John Taylor!

Rob: No way! Two Days after Live Aid. Oh my Gosh. That is incredible. What was it like meeting John Taylor?

Kristi: Well, of course we were good little girls from Greenville (SC). I was sixteen. And we ended up at a party with Power Station (goes on and on …)

Rob: Congratulations! That was really prime John Taylor, too, when he was into those Toreador hats.

Kristi: And wearing those long floor length duster coats. A year before 9 ½ Weeks.

Rob: That’s right!  “I do What I Do.” He was always being filmed from above. He knew that was a good angle. He could roll his eyes up to the camera. Sometimes he’d wear that wide-brimmed hat and sort of peek up. Shameless!

Kristi: Did you ever see Power Station on Miami Vice? I think they were friends with Don Johnson.

Rob: No, I’ll have to go YouTube that. Man, it makes sense they would show up on Miami Vice – that sounds almost too perfect.

Kristi: Now on to your book. It’s a book about the 1980s and where’s Live Aid? Did I miss it?

Rob: It’s funny, I don’t have Live Aid in there and it was such a huge day. It’s still really drilled into my skull. I remember walking around that day and it was broadcasting everywhere you went. I remember I woke up and my alarm was playing the Sting and Phil Collins duet.  I watched it off and on during the day, then went for a walk, and went to a barbecue at a friend of my family’s. It was really funny, everywhere we went, Live Aid is what we were hearing. Because they didn’t release any of it or show any of it until years after the fact on VH1 Classic or anything like that, but everybody still remembered it so vividly. Did you see Duran Duran when they reprised their act on Live 8? They were great. There was this great moment where Simon made this little speech, “If we all put our hands together, across the world – we can make a statement to change the world.” Then they started playing “Girls on Film.” Awesome. This is why they are Duran Duran. They have no fear at all. They do not hold back in a moment like that.

Kristi: I have to ask about Duran Duran. Do guys really like them? Do you really like them? It’s true they held the key to your universe, but …

Rob: Yes, I love them. I loved them even when they were unbelievably uncool to like. One of the first things I wrote about them in print was a review of one of their records for the Village Voice in 1990. Liberty.

Kristi: That’s a good record.

Rob: I like that record. I was just listening to side one of Notorious on vinyl today. They seem to have a great sense of humor about themselves. But they were funny, because that was an aspect of their appeal. On a musical level – and I heard their songs on the radio long before I saw their videos – they were really adventurous in terms of bringing disco elements and punk elements together in a pop way. They were great and innovative, musically.

Kristi: The first time you heard “Hungry Like the Wolf” – it was like, “Oooooooh…” you knew it sounded new and different. You knew it was going to be culture-altering, whether you were along for the ride or not. I love the chapter titles in the book and the fact that they’re song titles. Duran Duran’s “All She Wants Is” is the final chapter. It’s funny how you can encapsulate popular culture in four words that make up a song title.

Rob: It’s weird how nothing connects to that moment like a song, nothing connects to that memory like a song. For some reason, that’s where memories seem to be stored, on a cultural level as well as an individual level. That’s something that I always find awe-inspiring. For instance, this weekend, Fourth of July weekend, I watched Hot Tub Time Machine three times. It’s on On Demand now and they let you have it for 24 hours. It’s funny how much of setting the time period comes down to music. When these guys are having their flashbacks to 1986, it’s the music rather than the fashion or the TV or the movies or aspects of pop culture, that rivets the moment. It’s a Hollywood movie, so there are jokes about Hollywood movies from that period and jokes about Rambo III and Red Dawn and stuff. But the soundtrack is how they set the scene.

Kristi: I have a theory that our generation — that we are really the only the people who owned the music in their lives in terms of those memories and that match-up. Our parents’ generation had big songs in common, but much fewer than we did because their access to radio and TV. We had access to the right amount. Yet, the people who are younger than us have a glut of media – they have too much, too many cable channels and internet radio and satellite and YouTube. They have too much and it’s too scattered. They don’t have the touchstones that people who came of age in that time span that we did. I think your books are part of that era and capture that for sure.

Rob: Thanks. I think you’re right about that. We had what seemed to us like an explosion at the time. There were so many more bands than there had ever been before and so many more ways to hear them. A lot of it was the way MTV sort of forced the radio to claim more kinds of stuff. And you could suddenly get access to all this music that was esoteric. You didn’t have to go to the ends of the earth to hear Altered Images or Burning Sensation or Grandmaster Flash. You had Martha Quinn bringing it to you.

Kristi: Let’s get to the bottom of the Paul McCartney chapter. Are you portraying him as the John Taylor figure in the Beatles?

Rob: Totally, totally, totally. That’s part of Paul McCartney’s longevity as well as Duran Duran’s longevity: they respect the passion of the girl fans. They’re happy to have boy fans. But ultimately, we know we’re second-class citizens. We know that Duran Duran could exist without us. They’re glad to have us around, but we’re not why they’re there. They’re there for the girl fans. That’s something Duran Duran has in common with Paul McCartney and that’s why they still inspire such huge devotion and loyalty among their fans. It always interests me how much the passion of the girl fan is what drives music. The passion of the girl fan invented The Beatles, invented Elvis, David Bowie, Michael Jackson. It’s really amazing how some artists respect the girl fan and some artists don’t respect the girl fans. Some artists, even when they have the girl fans, they’re just hoping to move on to the boy fans. It was strange how bands that got huge making new wave records for girls wanted to start making hard rock records for boys.

Kristi: Will there ever be reconciliation in the universe? Will girl fans and the bands they love ever get respect?

Rob: It’s interesting because, I guess I think of the girl fans as a discerning and sophisticated audience. It was always very traditional for male rock fans to think of the girlie pop fans as being gullible, easy to con, but that was just a sexist way of looking at it, especially if you look at so much of the crap that these boy fans were listening to at the time. Like if you were a dude who liked the Scorpions and Journey and REO Speedwagon, you would look down on girls who liked Stacey Q or Ray Parker, Jr. or Toni Basil. But you would have to be a pretty partisan Scorpions fan –- and I’ll admit I’m a Scorpions fan — not to concede that the girl fans were picking their music at the very least as shrewdly and with as much sophistication as the dudes who were into “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” But it’s always been weird the way the girl pop fan audience gets disrespected by the artists it bestows stardom upon.

Kristi: Could a girl have written this book and get the respect that you will inevitably get?

Rob: That’s a tough question, I don’t know.

Kristi: So, what’s next for you?

Rob: One thing that always astounds me on a daily level is how intensely people respond to music on an emotional level. And I guess that’s what I’ll keep writing about. It’s one of the ongoing mysteries of the universe that I can never get my head around. It’s something unexplainable. Why does music have such an intense effect on us in terms of traveling through time and bringing us back to a place? It’s funny, because I’m not a musician. I’m a fan, and the fan’s response to music is something I’m astounded by. I’m always astounded by what people like and what people adopt, and they hear themselves in the song and say, “Yep, that’s me.” I respect the musician’s perspective on it, but the guy who wrote the song is usually is the last person whose opinion I’m interested in. Especially with the 1980s, which at the time was considered temporary and frivolous and people were openly mocking the idea that these bands would last or that any of these records would even be remembered.

Kristi: Did you always know you would write books about music?

Rob: Writing about music exposes you and makes you more vulnerable than writing about anything else. It’s odd that that’s so close to the heart of things. It’s an element of life – everybody has their songs, no matter what their songs are and no matter where their songs come from. It’s a scary thing to do in some ways. First something’s popular, then there’s the backlash, then there’s the ironic or pseudo-ironic reclamation, like “Oh I like that band,” and then people are over that and then they’re just like – “Oh, that was just music.”

Kristi: So you really have never met Duran Duran?

Rob: No, but having met Duran Duran fans that hugely influenced the way I listen to music … it’s like what I was saying earlier about the musician’s opinion is not the one I’m most interested in, and that’s the case with Duran Duran. Talking to a Duran Duran fan is, to me, more exciting than talking to the actual band would be, just because what different people bring to the music – I’m always astonished that that never runs out of surprises.

Below, my favorite performances of the day. They’re not all musically great, but the memory is perfect. Comment below and let me know your faves, too!  (Click here for CNN’s special report today, including an interview with former MTV VJ Mark Goodman.)

“Something Good Can Work” by Two Door Cinema Club

“Voice in the Chorus” by Hanson

“Saturday Sun” by Crowded House

“Long White Dress” by Tracey Thorn

“She Needs Me” by Fyfe Dangerfield

“Looking Back” by Keane feat. K’naan

“The Only Exception” by Paramore

“I Can’t Get Enough” by Rooney

“Do As I Say Not As I Do” by Ed Harcourt

“Fixed” by Stars