HAPPY DAYS ARE HEAR AGAIN

WOULD THAT NOT BE NICE: How prescient of me to schedule dinner with Glassnote’s Daniel Glass this week before a show with the label’s new signing Little Green Cars. How exciting it will be celebrate Mumford & Sons’ #1 debut, with first-week sales exceeding 600,000! How rare to have a band capable of exceeding the promise of its critically and commercially lauded first record with an even stronger sophomore release! Think about it, how many bands with successful debut albums come back with a superior (and more successful) follow-up? Besides Mumford & Sons’ Babel, my mental inventory recalls only Interpol’s Antics as an example of a sophomore record that outsold and had better press than the band’s debut. If there are others, I’m sure you’ll tell me… For three weeks, either the Lumineers or Mumford & Sons had the #1 song at the format, with the other at #2, again making history with two independent releases topping the charts! With the right “team” in place, a hit song can go to #1, even with a minimal budget and a skeletal staff of one or two. Every record has its “arc,” and the key is to be able to connect the dots and spread information in a timely manner. Add dates are moot, except for internal traffic control purposes. UNLESS the song is a one-listen smash, launching an indie record at radio without some sort of base is nearly impossible. You can’t expect anybody to care about the record in a vacuum. The Lumineers’ “Ho Hey” was already a huge song for KNDD and a proven hit at Triple A when it was initially worked at Modern Rock. AND the single was selling on iTunes from assorted syncs and airplay. Yes, many (most) of you still questioned the “fit,” until it became abundantly obvious that your listeners LOVE this band and that “Ho Hey” would be your biggest song of the summer. Ah, magic… I believe with every fiber of my being that Blondfire’s “Where the Kids Are” also possesses that certain “it factor” that will ultimately make it a big hit. It’s currently #8 on the AltNation countdown, and Jim Richards put the song in rotation in both Chicago and NYC. Luckily, the band has Rob Goldklang in their corner, and his track record is unbeatable… My favorite two hours of the past two weeks were spent in Lesley James and Tom Butler’s windowless office at CD102.5 for their weekly music meeting. Oh yes, I left with an add (Grizzly Bear’s “Yet Again”—procured even before the band’s Top 10 sales debut last week at 40k!) AND I’m now an obsessive Django Django fan (whose “Default” was the highest scoring song in the meeting). We can’t take CD102.5 or WEQX or any other indie station for granted, lest they go the way of WFNX and others before them… During my recent radio visits, I’ve noticed that most PDs have offices without windows (so they won’t escape?) and that they listen to music at the lowest volume discernible to the human ear. C’mon radio people, music is GOOD again! Even the worst dubstep (redundant) is better than the rap/rock era we lived through. You could be programming sports soon, so TURN IT UP!… Dennis Blair and John DiMaio are the format’s puppet-masters, delivering just the song you didn’t know you needed, at the EXACT moment you do. They were the architects behind the rise of female leaning pop, delivering hit after hit from Florence + the Machine, and then Of Monsters and Men, and then, of course, with Gotye, followed by Youngblood Hawke. As I predicted many months back, just as the format was reaching saturation with high-testing pop songs, BAM, the boys offer the antidote with a new Soundgarden single, which was added everywhere. I worked with Soundgarden during the SST/A&M years, and am ALWAYS happy to hear them on the radio. Ah, balance… Remember that decade where every column I wrote mentioned Phantom Planet, a band I loved as though they were paying my salary. Lead singer Alex is back with a new band, JJAMZ, whose latest single “Suicide Pact” has been on “repeat” in my car for the past week. So good!… SONG TO HEAR: Grizzly Bear’s “Yet Again” (the radio remix!)…. Unabashed fandom: Divine Fits, Band of Skulls, Garbage, Django Django, The Civil Wars, The Darkness, Family of the Year and Christy Taylor.