Pop Quiz: Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Pop Quiz: Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Aidin Vaziri | What a difference a major heart-wrenching breakup makes. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs sold 500,000 copies of their 2003 debut album, "Fever to Tell," Karen O would appear onstage every night ripping a knit replica of her intestines out of her silver leotard and screaming like a banshee. On the New York dance-punk group's latest album, "Show Your Bones," however, the half-Korean, half-Polish singer is spilling her guts in an entirely different way. Having smashed through two serious relationships (with Liars singer Angus Andrew and film director Spike Jonze), O makes an unexpected dash for sincerity on the new disc with quieter but no less intense songs such as "Gold Lion" and "Cheated Hearts." This time it's for real.


Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Q: What's your favorite breakup album of all time?
A: Well, the one I was listening to in my breakups recently was "Imagine" by John Lennon. "Jealous Guy" was pretty much played on repeat every night and morning when I woke up for three months or something. If it wasn't actually playing out of a speaker then I was humming it.
Q: Which person do you relate to in that song, John or Yoko?
A: I don't know. I guess the guy, whoever the voice was singing.
Q: The "I didn't mean to hurt you" guy?
A: Exactly.
Q: Did you sometimes mix it up with the Roxy Music version?
A: No. You know, Roxy Music's version, I tried it out a few times, but it didn't do it for me. Maybe down the line a little bit. I needed the real thing.
Q: If you feel up to it, I'd love to hear you do it at some point.
A: It would be my pleasure. I just can't give you a specific time or place. Are you Asian, by any chance?
Q: Yes. I mean, no.
A: You don't have any Asian in you?
Q: I wish!
A: I'm trying out my, what would you call that, my ethnic radar?
Q: That's amazing because if you go back enough generations, everybody is Asian. So technically, yes. Maybe if the music thing doesn't work out you can be like an ethnic psychic.
A: Yeah, but in parentheses, "Only if you're Asian."

Cheat Sheet: Colin Hay

Cheat Sheet: Colin Hay

The lead singer for Men at Work -- who, by the way, wasn't even born in the land down under -- lives in L.A. these days and has even appeared on a sitcom: Aidin Vaziri | Colin Hay is the former lead singer and songwriter for the '80s Grammy Award-winning group Men at Work. Men at Work -- weren't they a bit like Duran Duran with bad haircuts? Er, not really. But the Australian group sold 10 million copies of its debut album, "Business as Usual," and scored nearly as many hits as its British counterparts in the early '80s with singles such as "Down Under," "Who Can It Be Now?" and "It's a Mistake." Its videos were also all over MTV, even though they prominently featured Hay's mad stare and championed the disgusting Aussie condiment Vegemite. So what's he been doing for the past 21 years? Men at Work called it quits in 1985 and two years later, Hay released his solo debut album, "Looking for Jack." Its lead single, "Hold Me," just managed to graze the top 100. Since then, he's relocated to Los Angeles, released seven more discs, including 2003's "Man at Work," and played semiregular residencies at intimate West Hollywood hipster hangout Cafe Largo. "I play there as an interim thing until I figure out my next plan of attack," Hay says. It's also where he met Zach Braff. Wait, do you mean Zach Braff, as seen on TV? Exactly. The "Scrubs" actor approached Hay about using his song "I Just Don't Think I'll Ever Get Over You" in a movie he was working on. That film turned out to be "Garden State," and the song appeared on its Grammy Award-winning soundtrack, alongside cuts by the Shins, Thievery Corporation, and Iron and Wine. In his monthly Esquire column, singer John Mayer breathlessly proclaimed Hay's track "without a doubt my favorite song of the year."

Review: Elefant

Review: Elefant

Elefant "The Black Magic Show": Aidin Vaziri | Elefant's previous album, "Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid," was such a pale imitation of the Strokes' "Is This It" that it actually felt like something new. Sadly, the trick doesn't work the second time around. The introspective '80s British pop influences that bubbled under the foppish New York band's debut have been cast aside for a tougher, leaner sound on "The Black Magic Show," as sharp riffs and mechanical beats move to the fore while singer Diego Garcia unfurls a set of lyrics so ridiculous you could swear he swiped them from Kajagoogoo ("Kiss me like they do in movies/ Modern child of the night," he deadpans on "Lolita"). A couple tracks that pick up where the first disc left off, like "Brasil" and "Don't Wait," offer some hope but mostly the magic is gone.

Pop Quiz: Cassandra Wilson

Pop Quiz: Cassandra Wilson

Aidin Vaziri | Cassandra Wilson doesn't follow rules. She's a jazz singer who covers Van Morrison and the Monkees. She did an entire album dedicated to Miles Davis, a trumpet player. And on her latest, "Thunderbird," the Grammy winner teams up with producer T Bone Burnett, who is best known for his work on Elvis Costello's "King of America" and the bluegrass-heavy soundtrack of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Sometimes it pays to go against the grain. The disc is drawing some of the best reviews of her career. We talked to Wilson, 50, by phone in her native Jackson, Miss., where she recently returned to care for her ailing mother.

Cassandra Wilson
Q: Your production company is Electromagnolia. T Bone Burnett's recording studio is called Electromagnetic. You had no idea, did you?
A: Yes, that's the truth. We didn't discover it until we started working together. But it was several things. We were wearing very similar sunglasses on the very first day of recording. He would put his sunglasses down and I would put mine down, and somehow I picked up his sunglasses because they looked like mine. It was little things like that. He would wear his hat to the studio and I would park my cowboy boots next to his hat. It was interesting how all these synchronicities were popping up.
Q: Has your life always been like that or is it just like that with him?
A: No, it's always been like that. I think life is like that for everybody, and it's just a matter of noticing it.
Q: Or, more likely, just that T Bone wears women's glasses.
A: No. These were Persols. They're men's sunglasses.
Q: So once he determined you weren't trying to swipe his specs you got on well?
A: It took us a while, I think, to become comfortable around one another. I have a great deal of respect for him, and I think I had a certain distance because of that. It took us a minute to really get comfortable with each other. But once that kicked in, it was really a great, great time.

Live Review: James Blunt

Live Review: James Blunt

Blunt is his name, and he is not subtle: Aidin Vaziri | For most sensitive singer-songwriters, entertaining a roomful of chattering, beer-soaked housewives is a teeth-gnashing affair. For Blunt, it had the opposite effect. He turned into a raging extrovert. The tousle-haired singer bounced around, cracked random jokes, locked eyes with the wedge-heeled beauties at the foot of the stage, climbed on the speakers for a spastic guitar solo and performed more than one song in front of a giant dancing monkey. Under the watchful eye of Linda Perry -- the songwriter behind Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" and Pink's "Get the Party Started," who signed Blunt to her Atlantic Records imprint after seeing him at the South by Southwest music festival three years ago -- he played the ballad-heavy "Back to Bedlam" in its entirety, demonstrating that in an emergency, the album could conveniently double as a general anesthetic. The best parts of the British Army officer turned international singing star's 75-minute set were nervy covers of the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind" and Slade's "Coz I Luv You," songs that suggested he would be better off if he stepped away from the piano and dove into the mosh pit.

Pop Quiz: David Gilmour

Pop Quiz: David Gilmour

Aidin Vaziri | David Gilmour could have taken the easy way out. After last year's once-in-a-lifetime Pink Floyd reunion with drummer Nick Mason, keyboard player Richard Wright and bass player Roger Waters at the global charity event Live 8, he could have spent a few weeks on the road with the old gang and watched his bank account swell even larger. Instead, he's forsaken cheap nostalgia for a new solo album, "On an Island," his first since "About Face" in 1984, and decided to play small theaters on his own.

David Gilmour
Q: Have you ever been tempted to make a two-minute punk-rock record?
A: No. I think a lot of things do influence me, but the influence mechanism is as such that these things dive into your brain and bury themselves into your subconscious and you're never quite sure where and how they're going to emerge. I don't think I really take direct influence.
Q: "Dark Side of the Moon" is one of the best-selling and most loved albums of all time. What would you change about it?
A: Oh, there's nothing I would change about it.
Q: What, you don't have George Lucas Syndrome?
A: Nope. We worked on it until we thought it was pretty well perfect. If one were to go change it, whatever you might add would be something you take away as well.
Q: It's like going back in time to the era of dinosaurs and stepping on a butterfly. The world would be totally different. There would be no laser light shows.
A: Exactly.

Review: Pink

Review: Pink

Pink "I'm Not Dead": Aidin Vaziri | The title, "I'm Not Dead," isn't so much a joke as a public service announcement. Pink's previous album tanked so hard that even recalling its title takes more thought than it got while it was out. The good news is she's over the angry punk thing and has returned to the angry confessional rock thing that fueled her breakthrough CD, "M!ssundaztood." So much so that she has seemingly re-created it note for note with a) the fun pop song that makes fun of Britney Spears ("Stupid Girls"), only to lure you into listening to b) the streaky mascara songs about escaping her dysfunctional family ("Runaway," "I Got Money Now"), which leads to c) the duet with the Indigo Girls in which she imagines being on a walk with George W. Bush and singing, "You've come a long way from whiskey and cocaine!" ("Dear Mr. President"). Didn't she do that last time? It's good to have her back anyway.

Pop Quiz: Richard Ashcroft

Pop Quiz: Richard Ashcroft

Aidin Vaziri | Richard Ashcroft knows how to make a comeback. After taking off a few years to start a family, the former lead singer of the Verve (the British band best known for its 1997 hit "Bitter Sweet Symphony," which in its video saw the singer strutting down the street and knocking people out of the way) crashed Coldplay's set at Live8 in front of more than 3 billion people. Chris Martin introduced him as "the best singer in the world," and no one believes that more than Ashcroft himself. His confidence remains undiminished on his third solo album, "Keys to the World." Later this month he supports Coldplay on a series of East Coast dates.

Richard Ashcroft
Q: So that was pretty nice of Coldplay to give you a big chunk of its Live8 time slot.
A: There are many, many different ways you can see it. There are a lot of different levels. There are a lot of trade-offs and dimensions that you have to be aware of before you can see it purely on that level.
Q: How does it look from where you're standing?
A: Yeah, it is incredible. In cynical record company terms, they would have been hammering home their new hit single in front of 3 billion people, and they gave me that time. But also, they were going on after Paul McCartney and U2. Yeah. I think, in Chris' head "Bitter Sweet Symphony" is one of the tunes that stands with that other generation of people.
Q: If that's how you feel, why have you agreed to open Coldplay's shows in America?
A: Why am I opening for them?
Q: Yeah.
A: Quite the simple fact that I'm going to be playing to 30,000 people straight away. That's it. There's no deep thought about it. As far as how many people know my name in America, that would take me all year.

Review: Morrissey

Review: Morrissey

Morrissey "Ringleader of the Tormentors": Aidin Vaziri | Morrissey has gotten nearly as good at disappointing his fans as Prince and R.E.M. Having edged back to respectability with his 2004 release, "You Are the Quarry," the former Smiths leader goes a step further on his eighth solo album, "Ringleader of the Tormentors," where his newfound love of sex ("There are explosive kegs between my legs," he intones at one point) and his same old distaste for right-wing ideals explode with stately melodic urgency. Recording in Italy with famed glam-rock producer Tony Visconti (T. Rex, Bowie), he's given his dreary rockabilly sound an extreme makeover, and in tracks like "You Have Killed Me," "Life Is a Pigsty" and "Dear God, Please Help Me" (with regal string arrangements by Italian film composer Ennio Morricone) has produced at least a few new classics in his canon. That's saying a lot for the man who wrote "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want" and "How Soon Is Now?" It's not the complete return to form his followers may have been banking on (someone please pass along Johnny Marr's phone number), but after the anticlimaxes of the past decade, such as 1995's "Southpaw Grammar" and 1997's soulless "Maladjusted," it's as good as anyone could have hoped for. It seems like all he needed was a good shag.