White Antelope
Robin Pecknold is more widely known for his Fleet Foxes stuff, but he appears to have a solo project as well, covering folk songs. To call it a solo project may be exaggerating things slightly, because there’s little evidence of this being much more than a name given to a MySpace page so he can post a couple of solo versions of stuff he just fancied recording. Maybe not, of course, there could be more to it than that.
I’m no great Fleet Foxes fan, I have to confess. I think they have a few utterly gorgeous tracks and a lot of pretty unremarkable ones, as far as I personally am concerned, but this stuff I really do like. Pecknold certainly has an utterly beguiling voice, and when singing these classic old songs he imbues them with a loveliness all his own.
False Knight on the Road was originally a Fleet Foxes b-side, I believe, and I’ve included that here, along with Silver Dagger, and a couple of other versions of that song. I’d be mildly but pleasantly surprised if there were any plans to take this any further, but it’s the kind of project which doesn’t need to be any more than this kind of small, low key exercise. Lovely, lovely stuff. There are a couple more to be enjoyed on their MySpace page, if these tickle your fancy.
White Antelope – False Knight on the Road
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
White Antelope – Silver Dagger
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Silver Dagger
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Bob Dylan & Joan Baez – Silver Dagger (Live 1964)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
i like his jacket.
Getting to the heart of the matter, Euan!
this is lovely, but i love the Fleet foxes. such pretty guitar…
since when was i sponsored by Strongbow…
I think it’s about time that all the effort you personally put in to keeping Strongbow at the forefront of the UK cider market should be recognised!
Do i get free Strongbow….?
Of course!
I like his beard/hair
I like his guitar strap.
So we’re all agreed, he looks great.
yes. though he looks like he has big ears.
he looks like matthew lillard (with a beard and long hair)- the guy in scream who is really annoying and turns out to be one of the killers.
I’m actually thinking I might get a guitar strap like that. I’ve only got a plain black one at the moment, and it’s kinda dull to be fair.
I didn’t want to get a tacky nasty novelty one, but that one’s actually quite stylish.
Jesus. Fucking. Wept.
i was thinking of getting a nice red jacket. and wishing i hadn’t cut my hair.
I was going to cut my hair but am now having second thoughts.
My guitar’s blue, do you think a strap like that will look good?..
I would perhaps go for a grey patterned guitar strap, grey goes with anything.
So, perhaps something with that ethnic sort of pattern to it, but with a grey base-note to the colour scheme?
Hmm… That might work.
Boys, if this is what you define as looking good, you need to cut the cider in favour of Charlie Miller and some shopping hours.
Now back to proper music chat and stop pretending you have sartorial concerns or taste.
Is it a jacket? It looks like more of an anorak to me.
I assume by Charlie Miller you don’t mean the mediocre central midfielder who used to play for Glasgow Rangers?
i sat beside him on the plane to bruges last year. He orderd 2 beers for the last 25 minutes of the journey.
It’s a good anorak. I want one.
Am I the only one thinking Mrs. T is praying Matthew won’t stop shaving and cutting his hair?
i’m gutted i did!!!
i’m so proud that i had nothing to do with this shite
Euan, even Bart has seen the error of his ways and is starting to re-grow the impenetrable ginger bush which masquerades as his face.
Tart, stop it.
heheh, so she does keep you shorn and shaved!
and where the hell did this come from? “Exploiting vulnerable young musicians since 2004″
sneaky sneaky, mr. young!
for once tom, for once.
Oh yes, I meant to comment on the new strap line. Splendid stuff.
I take it you’ve sent a link to Mr. A’s record label representatives?..
Tart, it comes from the fact that Samamidon’s label sent me an email the other day accusing me of “exploiting young musicians”. There’s a bit more to it than that, and we’re still talking, but it should be resolved soon enough.
Christ, that sounds a bit much!
Ach it’s bloody ridiculous. Still, we’re nearly sorted, I think.
I have to say that when I saw it I laughed and thought it was a genius tag line. Sounds a lot more sinister. Hope they’re not giving you too much grief.
Plus, I thought all you did was promote their artist!!!
I think we should get a petition together for all the young musicians Matthew has explioted to sign.
Ooh! Ooh!
We should get T-Shirts made!
“I’ve been exploited by Toad”
Well there’s a clause in the release form which allows me to use the work for my own commercial purposes should I so choose. This is, of course, perfectly reasonable because I have always allowed artists to use it for their own commerical purposes whenever they’ve wanted to, but they see that as exploitation.
I emailed back trying to explain why I didn’t think it was an unfair clause and that I was happy to remove it, if they were happy to forego the same right, and instead of responding to that suggestion I got another email about how they weren’t prepared to let me use it for commercial purposes under any circumstances.
It’s just someone who’s been in the industry too long having a knee-jerk reaction, I guess, so it’s silly, but maybe not as malicious as it seems.
Nevertheless, it’s pretty bloody annoying when you think that both her and her bands are professionals making a wage and I am an amateur doing all this in my spare time, at my own expense and occasionally to the detriment of my full-time job. And yet I am the one doing the exploiting.
Still, a clear reminder of the need to get all my work legally protected as a matter of urgency.
seems like they are being unreasonable. i don’t understand all this nonsense to be perfectly honest. surely the session he did for you can only be of benefit to him no matter what you do with it? Jeez, I’d let you stream the whole Kays album before it was released just to help it get heard if it meant it would raise our profile. record labels seem to be a little twit like.
You also nned to check whether bands have the right to sign a contract with you if they’re already on a label.
I mean, I work for a large organisation, but I don’t have the right to sign contracts with third parties on my company’s behalf.
thats true dylan.
I reckon Dylan is correct. Most artists who are signed will have a Exclusivity clause in thier contract.
But if the artist is willing to be recording in a way such as a ToadSession then their shouldn’t really be a problem. All it does is promote the artist.
They are probably just a bit pissed that no one told them before it happened
Surely then the label should take that up with their employee – the artist – who may have breached the terms of the existing contract they mutually hold, rather than the innocent third party who recorded some promotional material in generous good faith.
fuck em with a big stick
Well I was very close to just deleting the whole thing actually, but that benefits no-one.
take it down Toad, then press up CD’s with a nice cover and sell the fucking things on ebay…..jesus this makes me mad
i hope the narrow-minded cow reads this…..get your head out of your tight arse!!!!
I don’t understand why people make such a fuss, it’s not like you were going to put a McDonalds logo or something in the corner. The only possible commercial purposes you could use this for would be to promote yourself, and at the same time promote them.
Where does common sense come into it all?
I’m in the middle of updating my legalese following the recent upgrade to studio-time sessions; for last Tuesday’s recording I had to get the band to also sign WOXY’s release (to clear/license airplay/limited podcasting in the US). Now that’s a document & a half.
also…..my beard fucking rocks at this moment in time
but does your hair tom? and do you own a red anorak?
Dav – common sense is all well and good, but there are a lot of exploitative bastards in the music industry, so I don’t blame her for wanting it tied down.
Her mistake is more in persistently thinking that I have some crazy agenda to monetise our stuff, despite the fact that I offered to remove the clause, providing they relinquished their right to ever try and commercially exploit it themselves.
It’s also something of a grey area. As far as they are concerned it is all Sam’s because it’s him playing songs and him being interviewed.
I see it somewhat differently because it represents thousands of pounds worth of my equipment, hours and hours of my time, my bandwidth and account fees and so on at Vimeo and my web host, and several hours each of work, for nothing, from Dylan, Neil and Fiona.
The truth of course is somewhere inbetween – it ‘belongs’ to both parties to varying degrees. All she’s really achieved is to go from a situation where we could both potentially put these recordings on a CD release at some point in the future, to a point where neither of us can, courtesy of a massively shrill argument. This strikes me as utterly futile and completely pointless, but if that’s the way she wants to be then it makes little difference to me in the long run, however angry I might be at her accusations of exploitation at the moment.
Again, it just comes back to the need for all this paperwork to begin with. This is a lot of work for me, and for the rest of the people who help out, and it needs to be protected so that it isn’t at the mercy of people like this and whatever screaming fit they choose to throw.
Broken Records and Alela Diane make me particularly nervous, because they have just signed deals with pretty major labels (just for distribution in Alela’s case, but the distributors are often the worst of the lot) and some clueless legal hack in a beige cubicle could easily come after their Toad Sessions waving a big stick.
It’s all about guilt-by-accusation at the moment, with no need to prove anything, so by the time I explained to YouTube or whoever that I wasn’t actually doing anything illegal, my account could well have been deleted just by dint of the accusations themselves. Copyright law is great: might makes right, irrespective of pesky little things like facts.
Ooh, multi-paragraph mentalism!
Why does someone have to own every fucking thing? Why can’t people just share stuff? Fucking lawyers. Oh, wait…
Well that was the reasoning beforehand – we all get together to make this material, then if either the bands or I can make money selling something which is already available for free, then good luck to either of us.
The only way a Toad Session is valuable to me is as a part of a larger body of Toad Sessions, which is entirely down to our hard work and hence should be something I should be able to use to recoup some of the expense incurred. Fair enough.
The only way it’s valuable to the artist is as a part of their body of work, and therefore something I should let them exploit, which I do, should they so choose.
Like I said, she’s been in the industry a long time and, frankly, it shows.
who else does she represent?
No idea. Bedroom Community records, whose name is clearly something of a marketing tactic rather than an actual description.
All this came about, it must be remembered, because they got in touch with me to ask to use the Toad Sessions for marketing and pubicity purposes to which I said “Of course, that’s what they’re there for, help yourself.” Please do use all my material, all that stuff I’ve worked away at for hours and hours, use it free of charge, and then lecture me about exploitation. Genius. Ah well, I’ll just try and get it all sorted and put it behind me and just remember not to ever deal with them again.
It’s sad though, because I was really proud of that session. I thought it came out really well, and now I just kind of resent it. I remember that week I kept coming into work bleary-eyed and useless because of having gone to bed at four or five in the morning, and I feel just a little bit foolish for making all the effort. Well done for taking all the enjoyment and satisfaction out of something really nice.
Actually, I’ve just had a look at Bedroom Community’s website, and I’m not convinced they are withered old professionals.
Regrettably, they actually seem like precisely the sort of grass-roots organisation who should be forging allegiances with similar entities, such as Song, By Toad, instead of picking fights with them.
Numpties.
This whole state of affairs is depressing me.
Aye, I’m probably a bit naive and trusting about all these things but I do think that at some point trust is the bottom line, trust that you’ll be acknowledged for all your fine work and a trust that you aren’t going to release these recordings at detriment to the labels earnings. It is a bit naive but I believe its an attitude that is mutually beneficial to all parties.
Dylan, I don’t know for a fact, but I get the impression they have been doing well and expanding and that she has come in, with her sixteen years of industry experience, to get things on a more organised and professional footing.
Also, I can understand their motivations in not wanting other people to film them playing and cut them out of the loop – there’s a lot of it around at the moment.
What got my goat the most was a/ the exploitation rubbish and b/ the fact that after I offered to mutually withdraw from the opportunity to commercialise the material and she still kept insisting that I wasn’t allowed to commercialise it. Okay, dear, that’s fine. I’ve already said that’s fine. Calm down and stop pretending that I’m the bloody enemy.
all this legal bullshit is what is wrong with the music industry.
Dav & Euan – you are right in some ways, but there are a lot of people, be it over-enthusiastic fans on the internet, or rapacious corporate entities, who will exploit you quite badly if you go entirely on trust.
Ultimately, you need to protect yourself. They think they need protecting from me, which is just silly, but they aren’t wrong in the impulse to make sure that they aren’t going to be ripped off.
mmm, i agree to a certain point. but i don’t think legal agreements are necessarily a good thing. they themselves breed this mistrust and the acusations levelled at you. verbal agreements are legally binding too (though difficult to prove) and involve more respect or a simple written agreement between parties on how things work would be fine too. If I’m honest, who gives a flying fuck if somebody else makes money from your venture?? My reasons for starting mini50 are not for personal gain, its to help people get there music out there that I think deserve to be heard. If you decided to take one of my artists stuff and make money from it, provided it was being heard by a wide audience I would assume people would be buying the records anyways so we all benefit. In the case of the Sam Amidon toad session, I can see no reason why this would be a bad thing for you, Sam or his label. I just don’t understand this world sometimes.
Well as soon as you give up your day job and try and make a living out of music I think your perspective changes quite a lot.
yeah, perhaps. though i know rich from gizeh records feels strongly about these things and his day job pays him very little. i think this woman has missed the whole brilliant point of the toad sessions completely. shame on her.
like i said…fuck em with a big stick, i’m not buying anything of theirs until they lighten up with you…shame i was kinda getting to like the Sam guy
tom’s right. it drives people away. sam’s playing sneaky pete’s as well next saturday and i was considering going. i might still go but it kind of leaves a sour taste in the mouth. however, i’m not sure not buying his stuff or going to see him just to get at the label is the right approach as i fully want to support the artist. fucking them with a big stick might be the way though tom. i like it.
there has to be some form of a line from the artist themselves, he can’t just sit there and go this has nothing to do with me, if he does then he hasn’t got any balls……and shouldn’t have done the session in the first place….
i agree. but perhaps he doesn’t even know? that’s quite feasible. i hope he doesn’t know anyways. i think that would make it even worse.
Sam’s a nice guy. I’ll still go along – The Stormy Seas are playing after all.
And when I invited Sam to do the session I told him that the whole thing was available for free on the internet for everyone, not for profit, so he may well think I am shifting the goalposts on him, despite the fact that it wasn’t me who requested the form to begin with. I just sent them a standard BBC session release form when they asked for one.
Like I said though, they could have profited from the recordings too in any case, and even after I offered to remove that clause – provided they reciprocated – she continued shouting.
She just seems to come from this ‘internet is the enemy and everyone’s out to rip us off’ mindset, which turns even reasonable discussions in officious, antagonistic nonsense.
i don’t care if he is a nice guy……
you’re lots of things Matthew, i won’t list them here cos it might a)embarrass you b) annoy you….
….however, no one can say you don’t have a passion and a drive for the ‘music’….which it seems, these people are lacking
Go on Chutters! List them!
Sam’s myspace page has the Toad Session video of Pretty Fair Damsel posted. Look.
http://www.myspace.com/samamidon
Dirty fucker. Exploiting a helpless blogger in that fashion.
Haha! Got ‘em!
The Bedroom Community website links to Sam’s MySpace, Sam’s MySpace links back to Bedroom Community website.
The Bedroom Community website also has a shop where you can buy Sam Amidon’s records, and by doing so provide commercial reward to Bedroom Community and Sam Amidon.
Bedroom Community have decided to engage in a dispute over the commercial rights to the Sam Amidon Toad Session as intellectual property, but as it it has not been settled as to whose intellectual property they represent.
Yet you can argue that Bedroom Community are already using the Toad Session for their own commercial gain, when their right to do so has not been ascertained.
You’ve got ‘em over a barrel, mate.
oh Lordy why did I ever ask! Well, it would be nice to think that it was a dispute over property, Dylan. But it’s not really…. It’s a dispute over the right to transmit music which belongs to a company via contract. The labor involved in the product is never included in valuing the result; the video is valued according to how much profit it can garner the company. And therefore having complete control of the transmission of it is their only goal and desire.
Sorry but Marx was right on a lot of counts xoxox
Now Matthew can you make it so my website addy is automatic when I use my phone to comment here?
Hmmm..
That would – I imagine – depend on the agreement Bedroom Community have signed with Sam Amidon, and whether they have worldwide publishing rights over the songs themselves, or whether they have distribution rights to the performances and recordings Sam Amidon has provided for their sole use.
from what it sounds like….i’m with Tart on this!
and it sounds like a bunch of cunts
If Tart’s right – and she may well be, she does have a good track record
– it would mean that Bedroom Community own the rights to the songs themselves, as they can be written down on manuscript paper; as little blobs and squiggles on five horizontal lines.
Therefore anyone wanting to use any performance of them, or release a cover version, would need to approach Bedroom Community for permission to do so.
If Sam Amidon has made recordings of the songs, and only submitted those recordings for distribution by Bedroom Community, the technically the rights to the songs themselves (as they can be written down) would remain with Sam hiimself, and he tacitly gave permission for Matthew to use the recordings of them he captured by performing the songs in front of a camera in Matthew’s living room, aware they were being recorded.
Well they’re protecting their interest in selling music and if anyone threatens their profit on that (letting people hear without paying THEM) they call foul. It’s sickening, I know.
It’s not about ownership of any songs, it’s about controlling the market wherein music is purchased.
Go to the elbo.ws page, click on “forum” on the upper right. Find the post “apparently I infringed on YouTube copyright” and see what Adam Beggars has to say. (sorry can’t cut and paste with the damn phone)
Oh and triple post mentalism!Eeek. Ok going to work now xoxox
Tart’s right, to a large degree, it’s not about protecting their income, it’s about control.
As soon as I would have to enter into licensing agreements with fifteen different bands in order to produce, say, a CD with the Best Of The Toad Sessions on it in order to make back a couple of hundred quid against the £5k or so we have spent on kit, never mind the hours, it just isn’t going to happen.
So no-one makes anything, and therefore clearly they are not protecting their own income at all, they are just attempting to damage mine. This kind of fuss is primarily derived from a fear that it happens without their say so, irrespective of the nonsensical place we end up in as an alternative.
People the world over seem terrified of the idea that they may have contributed to someone somewhere making money, but not them. In millions of scenarios, like this one, that is just fucking childishly stupid, but overall it’s not a stupid impulse.
There is, of course, an outside chance that the Best Of The Toad Sessions, by some fluke of unbelievable weirdness, becomes a massive money spinner instead of just a chance for a hundred people to bung me a fiver as a thank you for all the hard work, which is what it would be in reality. In that case it takes on a rather different complexion.
So I am not sure I think their instinct to protect the value of their contribution is crazy, I just think it’s woefully misapplied in this case.
To make matters even more funny, she’s just emailed me saying that my imaginary Best Of CD would be out of the question, but the NME embedding the video on their website is fine, as if that was obvious. The NME is a profit-making commercial enterprise, who make money on their site by selling ads based on pageviews, and they attract pageviews by their content, and they are using my content, therefore, to make money.
That’s fine, though, apparently. Hilarious.
I presume we’re talking about Niamh Burke-Neff here, who’s listed prominently on the ‘about us’ page on Bedroom Community’s website as the label’s manager.
If so, a quick Google search reveals an intriguing character; regularly appearing ni searches as a music publicist, Ms. Burke-Neff is a veteran of battles over music and money in Austria, Ireland and the US, and someone – if you’ll forgive my conjecture – whom trouble seems to follow around.
That was incredibly confusing. I was just tricked into dling something by The Men they didn’t hang.
Thanks for the songage!
Aside: Surely exploitation is incredibly edgy, and thus something to which we should all aspire?
Voldermania – sorry, did I mix up the links? I thought I’d labelled them properly. Never mind, you can’t go wrong with a bit of TMTCH.
And you’re right, fuck it, maybe I should be making exploitation more of a mission statement.
Dylan – that’s the lass.
uh huh?
i’ve just added another to the list?
Sorry Chutters. I deleted the comment. I don’t mind people discussing the rights and wrongs of stuff in this thread, but I don’t want personal abuse. Partly because it won’t help anything, but also because we really don’t know anything about the woman, so one annoying conversation isn’t a lot to go on. I’m as annoyed as you, I promise you, but I can to some degree see where she’s coming from.
can you?
i can’t……and Sam is off my Xmas card list….Matthew, you’re not going to rip off/exploit anybody, and if you did, I’d be the first person knocking on your door. Music is about life, emotion and the other, you’re helping them getting it out there and just cos a modicum of success their go into control overdrive…..yes they need to make a living but a little perspective here please!
Love
Tom
Well can you imagine if he put one of his Toad Sessions on a B-Sides compilation and I didn’t get a cent? Personally, I wouldn’t give a shit, but I can imagine people getting snotty about it.
I might be more affronted if it were a famous band, maybe, just because they would be more of a commercial exercise to begin with. I don’t mind supporting Sam with some free recording and video work, but I would object to making a contribution to a bigger label’s expenses tab, for example. But I think that might be a very wooly distinction.
I am doing all those videos for Broken Records for free, remember, but 4AD are definitely big enough to pay for that kind of thing. Not that I’m complaining, of course, because I love the lads and I loved doing those videos, but you see what I mean about it being more a question of scale and extent than one of something being absolutely right or wrong.
It comes back to what you say about having a little perspective.
Recording of shows for non-profit trading is allowed and encouraged, provided you send a master copy of the recording to: Ekonomisk Mgmt / 1608 N. Milwaukee Ave – ste 401 / Chicago, IL / 60647. All rights to anything recorded, audio or video, remain Andrew Bird’s.
Straight from Andrew Birds website…..that’s pretty cool information to know!
This is what I’m thinking will apply to Sam, even if it has been legally ascertained yet.
I would be very surprised if Sam has signed a contract with Bedroom Community that specifies that the rights to every performance he ever does anywhere of anything belong to them. Instead I would be inclined to believe they have international distribution rights for the All Is Well album, and that’s about it.
The thing is; none of the songs he performed at the Toad Session are actually on All Is Well. One track – unless I’m mistaken – was an on-the-spot improvisation for fuck’s sake.
So given those as facts, the rights to the performance would remain with Sam, any dispute over ownership and distribution of the recordings would be between him and Matthew, and nothing to do with Bedroom Community.
I doubt Sam even knows all this is going on. I suspect that Niamh Burke-Neff has stumbled over the Toad Sessions while googling Sam’s name one afternoon, and taken it upon herself to start a fight.
well lets see what happens when someone tells Sam……thats right nothing!