uglyredhonda

85% of the people who think Cash's version is the best didn't know it was a Nine Inch Nails song the first time they heard it.

MapleMusic: North Bay tix ?

mrs jesus said it first and best, but just to elaborate: The AOB copies that are floating around in the US are from Canada. Several chains have picked up leftover stock from Canada and spread them throughout the US. I'm not entirely sure why, but maybe they figure it's better than leaving them in a warehouse. BM is the only MG album that has been released in the US. Some chains (like Media Play) have carried other MG albums, but they were all imported from Canada.

Matt will probably never appear on American TV. BM is the only MG release available in the States, and it's no longer in production. No reason to go on American TV if there's nothing to promote.

Sorry if that seemed a little terse. I should drink more coffee.

1) When you schedule a tour, it doesn't always fall into perfect place. You call around to venues and promoters to see what you can book on certain days, and take what's best available. More often than not, if a performer skips a town, it's because no promoters or venues in that town were interested in booking them or the dates simply weren't available. 2) He's playing five shows within an hour's drive of you, and you're whinging because he's not playing a show five minutes away? I think that may be the best answer: he's already playing five shows within an hour's drive. Good lord, I drive farther to hang out with a couple of friends than you would to drive to the Oakville show. 3) Why do people always take a town skip as that the band or performer personally hates them or their town? Ah, yes, reason number three: he hates you. Personally. You should be considering yourself lucky to have your choice of five shows. (Albeit, two of them have already sold out.) There are some out there who are going to have to make a long drive for the one show kinda near them.

"When the Levee Breaks" is a good ten minutes by itself. ;)

Unfortunately, they only offered it as part of the pre-order for In a Coma. I wish they would just add it outright.

He is... your father.

Hahaha - just noticed this picture was taken at 102.1 the Edge in Toronto. ;)

Pearl Jam didn't sign to Sony/BMG in Canada? They're on J Records (Sony/BMG) in the US. I think the US record for an indie label is currently N'Sync's No Strings Attached. (At the time, Jive Records was still an indie label.)

do tell, what exactly IS the 'Canadian lifestyle'?

3/23 Edmonton show on Ticketmaster.

Ahh, dammit. I knee-jerked and didn't look to see where you were from. /"yeah, you heard me" suddenly doesn't sound so funny //i suck

I disagree with that entirely. I think the problem was that BM was the right record for 1999 and the wrong record for 2001. There was that shift towards the end of '99 when rock went aggro, and MGB wasn't part of that. BM recalled that late-90s alternative sound, something that was getting less and less airplay in the 00s. I think Atlantic (and probably the band) thought selling BM in the States would be easy, given it's track record in Canada, and discovered that it needed more of a push to break through all of the Bizkit-rock of the period. Everybody looked at each other and decided it wasn't worth the effort. Plus, if you're going to criticize the American market for not "getting" MGB, what about the Canadian market that failed to "get" either AoB or Avalanche? /yeah, you heard me

Without Rush, there's no Hum. Then again, that may not mean much to most folks. ;)

He's a big MGB fan. The band in his head was playing "Everything is Automatic".

It's more of a rock remix. The guitars (and the organ) are more prominent, and the clock sound at the beginning is much louder. The bass levels are dampened a bit, too. More compression all around. Honestly, I like the US mix of HTB better. I think the remix makes the song sound more manic. I think it's the one thing I like about the US version. I hate the rest of the remixes, though. Chris Lord-Alge ruins snare drum sounds in his mixes.

That guy didn't make History Teacher, he's just offering copies of it to people. What the original guy did was illegal. Technically, the "new" copies are illegal as well. It doesn't matter whether you charge or not - the distribution of copyrighted material without consent is illegal. It just happens that Matt doesn't seem to mind, so long as nobody profits off of it.

The trick is that it's not entirely the label - those are all part of the same group of folks. Feist and two of the members of Stars have at some point been part of the Broken Social Scene collective. Also, Feist is now signed to Interscope in the States, so she's got that extra market power behind her. Canadian indie music fever = post Arcade Fire curiosity. Canada is the next Seattle. ;)

If you're going to do a tour of a country, it's undeniably useful to have a supporting label in that country to provide financial support for the tour. At the moment, Matt has no US label, so any tour expenses would have to be covered out of his own pocket. He did play a show in Buffalo last fall, but it was a one-off. If he decides to do the whole solo acoustic thingy, I think there's an outside shot of seeing a few US dates. But I think that's only if he really enjoys the tour. I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for him to show up in Indiana, though. If he ever does US shows, it will undoubtedly only be a handful of shows in specific cities, not a full-scale national tour.

A) Nickelback had had one (very) minor single in the US when BM was released there ("Leader of Men"). "How You Remind Me" didn't hit US airwaves until that fall. So claiming that Nickelback was popular in the US at the time is pretty much false. B) Columbine happened a full two years before BM was released in the US. It was probably a factor in Atlantic's decision to censor the song titles, but to say that the Columbine tragedy was still going on at the time is untrue. C) Matt didn't add the Columbine clips to the ASR video. Kyle Davison did. Matt didn't even know about it until he received complaints about the usage. D) Where do you get this stuff? NOBODY in the US boycotted MGB. By and large, nobody heard about MGB in the US. There were no complaints or backlash about the song - Atlantic made that decision on their own. E) Atlantic Records has NOTHING to do with Universal Music. Atlantic was a division of Time/Warner. Universal in the US declined to sign the band, so they went with Atlantic.

Breaking the US also requires a much bigger effort than Atlantic or the band put into it. Our Lady Peace toured the entire country several times before anybody knew who they were. As far as I know, MGB only played a handful of cities in the US, and I don't know how hard Atlantic pushed "Hello Time Bomb" to radio. I can't say for sure, but it seemed like the band lost interest in pushing through the US. Of course, Atlantic may have lost interest first. And Matt conceded that he wasn't particularly interested in "playing the game". Labels like their artists to be outspoken, but only after they become popular. (It helps keep their name in the media.) Anyway, further effort in the US probably would have delayed AoB, which I'm sure the band were ready to release. /all speculation

Other I don't know that MG would support the idea, but they could have pushed more of the older songs at the same time they were pushing "Oh Be Joyful". (I say that not knowing if radio still plays the older tracks semi-regularly.) Remind people why they would want to buy the thing. Run commercial spots on regular tv - like a montage of the various videos. (I say that not knowing if they did such a thing.) The folks who would buy the thing aren't the folks watching MuchMusic, and probably haven't been in a music store in a while.