Cotton Road
Laura Kissel’s “Cotton Road” follows the production cycle of a global agricultural commodity through the stories of US farmers, migrant laborers, cotton merchants, Chinese textile workers, and consumers, illuminating the global trade in cotton and the connection between workers in the United States and China. At the nexus of this story of labor, economics, and consumerism is a small cotton seed, planted in a field in South Carolina in late spring. Though the story originates in a cotton field, it culminates at a discount store with the sale of mass produced cotton clothing. “Cotton Road” travels from farm to factory to reveal this industrial story: planting and harvest, mechanized ginning, the transportation of 420,000 bales through the port of Savannah and across the ocean to Shanghai. Once in China, cotton bales are conveyed to factory cities, transformed from bale to textile, from textile to product and exported as cotton commodified into clothing, back to the American South.
RPM Challenge: 2008
by robin hilton
The RPM Challenge is held every February, which means its organizers diabolically picked the shortest month of the year for everyone to complete their album. I began last year’s challenge in earnest, but came down with a debilitating bout of the flu before I could finish. But here are a few of the tracks I came up with. There’s a lot I would have done differently if I’d had more time:
“I See Everything At The Same Time”
“I Can’t Do Everything For You”
“You Wake Too Soon”
This year’s RPM Challenge, to produce one album in one month, begins this Sunday.
The RPM Challenge: 2007
by robin hilton
The challenge: write and record an entire album in one month. Here are a few of the songs I came up with the first time I took the challenge, in Feb. 2007:
“Hold on John”
“Moving On”
“Morning Tiger”
(“Morning Tiger” was co-written by Mike Katzif)
The Art of Collaboration
by robin hilton
I’ve been working off and on with a friend of mine on some music. We’ve both been trying to write songs on our own and while I’ve come up with a few things I’m happy with, I’m the most surprised by the work we’ve done by collaborating.
My friend wrote a spare, country-flavored tune called “Imitators.” To him it was an intimate, reflective, mostly upbeat meditation on our search for identity and meaning. But I saw the potential for a lot of darkness. So I produced a completely different take on the song, taking his stripped-down, swinging tune and turning into a borderline creepy, electro-pop song with a wash of fuzzy guitars.
“Imitators” Before (original version by Mike Katzif):
“Imitators” After:
Open Secret
by steve lickteig
What if everything you thought you knew about yourself was wrong? Who your siblings were? Your parents? Even your heritage? Now imagine that everybody knew the truth except you. Open Secret tells the true story of how a farm boy from Kansas discovered who his adoptive family really was, his connection to the Holocaust and why it took 30 years to uncover the truth.
Watch the trailer:
Big in Japan
by robin hilton
Every year thousands of Americans pack their bags and move to Japan. They go in hopes of making it big in one of Japan’s most lucrative industries… English. Desperate to learn the language, Japanese schools, businesses and government agencies offer small fortunes to just about anyone who can help teach English. No experience necessary. The Americans who flock to Japan each year make up one of the more eclectic if not strange and often comical subcultures of our nation’s social landscape. While many are well-educated with the best intentions, a large number are complete misfits drawn to Japan by the low qualifications and high pay of the English teaching industry. This documentary profiles this unique subculture and explores the surreal world that surrounds them in Japan.
Five Eight: The Greatest Band That Never Was
by robin hilton
A dispatch from Athens, Georgia, on Five Eight, a promising local rock band who’s yet to make it big. But that could change with the band’s latest release, The Good Nurse. It’s a personal album for one of the band members, who wrote most of the songs after suffering a nervous breakdown and later surviving several illnesses in his family. The first pressing of the album sold out in a week.
One Family And A Kansas Town
by steve lickteig
Funded by a grant from the Kansas Humanities Council, One Family and a Kansas Town tells the story of the Rightnar family who moved to Lebanon, Kansas–the exact center of America–to try and save the town from economic decline. Their plan wasn’t popular.
The Worst Decade For Pop Music: The ’80s
by robin hilton
To know me is to know how much I loathe pop music from the 1980s. To be sure, there was plenty of incredible music written then. But most of what wound up on the radio was just unbearable. I got together with All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen, NPR Music producer Stephen Thompson, and former Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein to see what they thought:
Great Unknowns: 2008
by Robin Hilton
It’s impossible, really, to pick any one band as the year’s best, particularly when you’re talking about great unknown artists. But I get paid rock star wages to make the call. For 2008 it was a band called Sun Lux.
