“How far does your road go? Oh no, you don’t know.”

Hey everyone. As you might have noticed, Everybody Talking has been rather sporadically updated in the past few months with pretty much nothing but show reviews. I’ll attribute this partially to my own laziness, but also to an unexpectedly high volume of non-music things happening in my life. Regardless, starting today I’ll be returning to more regular updates with news and editorial-type things. Show reviews for a ton of exciting things will continue through the summer, as well as festival coverage! In July I’ll be at Chicago’s Pitchfork Music Festival as well as the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, reporting back with photos, reviews and whatever else is interesting enough to print.

For today though, some thoughts on a fascinating new Modest Mouse documentary from Pitchfork.tv and that NPR intern everyone is so angry at. As a followup to their ‘making of’ documentary on the classic Flaming Lips album The Soft Bulletin, Pitchfork.tv released this week a similar piece on Modest Mouse’s still stunning 1997 LP The Lonesome Crowded West. The forty-five minute film combines old concert and tour footage of the band with newly recorded interviews from all members, producers and others involved in the record’s recording. The result is a fascinating journey through the early years of Modest Mouse, and a new insight to the inspiration behind this particular album. Lonesome Crowded West was my first Modest Mouse record, and has since remained my favorite. Much like its appropriately titled predecessor, This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About, Lonesome Crowded West is a quintessential road record. Even as I sit here listening to it in my basement, it makes me want to pack up and leave on a road trip to nowhere specific. If ever there were a perfect album to soundtrack an aimless journey through the highways and back roads of the United States, this would be it. Fittingly, much of the documentary focuses on this aspect of the album. The impact of touring as a young band and the accompanying senses of freedom, adventure and discovery are discussed at length, and strike a particular chord for me. Stories of driving up and down the west coast in a beaten-up old van with a group of friends and playing shows every night make a part of me want to drop out of college immediately and start a band. The rest of me knows that’s as unrealistic a goal and as ridiculous an idea as I could possibly have at this stage of my life. I suppose the closest solution, then, is to live vicariously through bands like Modest Mouse. I can think of no better place to start than this stellar documentary, which you can check out here.

In larger indie-sphere news this week is growing controversy of a rather ridiculous nature over a blog post by an NPR intern, which addresses the moral quandary of being a college student with a sizable digital music library that one hasn’t paid for. The gist of the post is that Emily White, like innumerable others her age (which consequently happens to be my age), doesn’t feel particularly terrible about having music and not paying for it. The piece sparked a response by former Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery, which is roughly six times the length of the original and details the various ways in which artists are hurt more by filesharing than most music consumers realize.

Being a college student of roughly the same age and position as Ms. White (frequenter of shows, college radio DJ), this whole controversy hits close to home for me. I can’t say I fully disagree with either side, but I think both fail to grasp the full scope of the issue. I have to admit to a discrepancy in my own music collection between physically purchased and digitally obtained holdings. It’s a similar discrepancy to that which exists in the music libraries of pretty much every single person I know. Part of my interest in this issue stems from the fact that White’s blog post has conjured up such a large response, not only by Lowery but by numerous other artists through blogs and Twitter. Is this some sudden revelation? Are people really not aware of the level to which music piracy has permeated my generation? Nothing I read in White’s NPR post seemed shocking or even out of the ordinary to me. Literally 95% of the people I know consume music this way: downloads, mixes from friends, ripping borrowed CDs, etc. The fact that it’s common practice doesn’t make it right, but why all the response to this particular girl? Her story is not a unique one.

In this sense, I totally sympathize with White. She loses me, though, on the issue of ‘convenience.’ Perhaps this is where I differ from the majority of my peers, but convenience is not an issue in the purchasing of digital music. Just about every independent label I can think of has a totally reasonable, simple system for purchasing digital music. Lowery is 100% correct in stating that inconvenience is an excuse for not paying. I don’t think it’s fair for him to claim that the majority of people who download rather than purchase adhere to that excuse, however. Speaking for myself, a student with a low income (when I have an income at all), my music downloading is not motivated by laziness or an unwillingness to compensate the artist; it’s motivated by a blatant lack of funds. The vast majority of my disposable income funnels directly into records, concert tickets and band shirts, but it’s hardly enough to keep up. My options are: a.) stop listening to new music and discovering new artists (since according to Lowery, legal streaming services like Spotify and Grooveshark are no good either), or b.) download and continue discovering new artists whose shows I will end up attending and whose records I will eventually buy. Lowery fails to recognize the values of piracy. If I downloaded endlessly and never purchased a record or went to a show, sure, I wouldn’t be doing anyone any good. But the case for me, and for many others in my position I think, is that downloading is our method of discovering new music. It’s very likely that I would never have gotten into music at all if I hadn’t downloaded albums by Spoon, Wilco and Ted Leo somewhere around my freshman year of high school. Five years later and I own near-complete vinyl discographies from all three. This entire side of the piracy issue, the fact that it actually does lead to an increased interest in music which eventually does lead to artist income which wouldn’t have existed otherwise, is a consistently ignored part of the conversation. I can’t claim to speak for a majority of music consumers my age, but when I read condemnations of piracy as being massively detrimental to artist income, I feel like there is another perspective to be heard. Not all of us gleefully steal without remorse or an intent to compensate. Just my two cents.