Now! is the time to stop buying those comps. Seriously.

Now! 30, as in the 30th installment of the popular Now That’s What I Call Music! compilations, was just released and sold 146,000 copies in one week.

This news immediately brings to mind two questions. First, how in the hell have 30 of these things been made? And second, who are the 146,000 people dumb enough to buy Now 30?

The answers to these questions are actually rather simple, but they point to a deeper issue. Basically, 30 of these compilations have been made because they continue to sell, and they continue to sell because fans of soulless pop music are the most vapid type of music fan, and hence will buy anything with an exclamation point and a good beat. But that’s a gripe for a different column.

My real issue with Now still existing is that, in an age where we can download entire catalogues of records in under a minute or buy individual songs on iTunes, thereby making your own hits compilation, this series of pop song collections is utterly and completely irrelevant to the music scene. What's more, you can actually go to the Now! website and stream the compilation in its entirety, meaning that anyone willing to shell out 17 bucks for the actual disc may be the last person in the country to discover the internet.

But it wasn’t always that way.

Now! actually debuted back in 1983 in England as a 30-song double vinyl, but even then the idea wasn’t new — hits collections had existed since the early 1970’s. The series exists in Mexico, China, Czech Republic, Poland, Portugal, Israel, New Zealand and Greece, where the title roughly translates to “Now These are the Hits Today!” They’ve long served the purpose of encapsulating Top 40 radio in one place — all the catchiest pop hits of the last few months on one record, no waiting around to hear them on MTV or the radio.

Even in 1998, when Now! debuted in the states it was arguably relevant. Napster was big, sure, but the downloading scene certainly wasn’t as saturated as it is today. Looking at the track list is particularly entertaining, too — remember “Never Ever” by All Saints? Fastball, K-Ci & JoJo, Aqua, Marcy Playground and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies all show up too.

Inexplicably, so does Radiohead. Seriously, Thom?

In seventh grade, when I was king of the Bar Mitzvah party dance floor circuit, I actually won a copy of Now! 2 (which included the New Radicals’ still-underrated “You Get What You Give”) at a middle school dance when the DJ asked students to have a dance-off. And at time, it was a pretty cool prize.



If I was the same 13-year-old winning Now! 30 today, though, I doubt I’d be as thrilled. With the incredible amount of access we have to music, the fact that I could burn my own version of Now! from iTunes, without any songs I didn’t like, in a few minutes, the compilations just seem unnecessary.

Now by no means do I condone downloading mass amounts of music and stealing from deserving artists, but the songs on Now! compilations are so ubiquitous in the pop music lexicon they’re basically public property. Why spend money on a compilation that has pop songs you more than likely have on iTunes already? For the cover art and liner notes?

It seems pop music consumers have begun to catch on. While Now! 5, to name just one, sold over four million copies and Nsow! 7 sold 621,000 copies its first week, as access to music increased, the series’ sales have dropped pretty dramatically. Now! 30, with 146,000 first week sales, is one of the series’ least successful.

Still, folks, come on now. Make your own, better mixes of your favorite hits. Plus, any establishment that would put Nickleback on a compilation, like, say Now! 30, is one that doesn’t deserve your support.

A Conversation with Andrew Bird

Andrew Bird has an incredibly soft voice.

When he speaks, his words are slow and crisp, each sentence clearly well thought out. The music that emanates from the multi-instrumentalist, then, seems to make sense — delicate, detailed and beautiful.

With his latest record, Noble Beast, Bird takes listeners on a musical hike through enchanted woods, complete with violins, guitars, hand claps and, as appears on so many of his records, whistled melodies.

Since Bird left his first gig — as a member of the swing revivalists Squirrel Nut Zippers — he’s been making music that floats between folk, rock and old-world jazz and blues.

Bird recently spoke to Gravity Rides Everything about music, his decidedly un-rock ’n’ roll life and the liquid state of songwriting.

Gravity Rides Everything: How much of what you write never makes it into a song?

Andrew Bird: I started off writing 25 or 30 songs for a record and cutting half of them. But that became such a heartbreaking process. Now I tend to take the same 10 or 11 songs and record them in like 10 different ways, putting them in different lights. Sometimes I’m writing three different songs at first and I realize they’re the same song. I put them together and cut off the fat.

GRE: Your songs often transform greatly from one live show to the next. How do you put together a set list?

AB: You’re tempted to do whatever worked the night before, but you have to work against it. Once you repeat the night before, there’s the potential for getting in a rut. When you’re playing every night, it’s a lot to ask of yourself, but you have to work to make the set more precarious.

GRE: Do you look back on your time with the Squirrel Nut Zippers nostalgically?

AB: It was pretty exciting to be a part of that. I was 22 or 23 playing for over a thousand people a night and hanging out with a hard-living, Southern, eccentric group of people. But it was a double-edged sword, because years after that, my own original stuff and the promoter of the show would say, ‘Come on, daddy-o, come down for a swing lesson.’ But my music had nothing to do with that scene.

GRE: What factors pushed you toward a completely solo career apart from [your former band, Andrew Bird and the] Bowl of Fire?

AB: Hitting the road really hard with five people and no support — all sleeping in one hotel room if we could afford it. And the pressure of being the host of a large band, and also just creatively not wanting to delegate parts to other musicians with their particular taste. I was writing bass lines in pizzicato in an octave pedal and playing whatever felt natural, not thinking like a bass player at all. There were no rules all of a sudden. I was just doing what I’d suppressed.

GRE: Where are you most at home — writing, recording or playing live?

AB: Playing music live is the most honest. A close second would be when I’ve a new song in my head. It can be very gratifying — the time before you bring it to anybody. It’s like this cool secret. Then the moment finally comes to show it to an audience, it’s a pretty special thing.

GRE: Do you carry around a recorder to get new melodies in your head?

AB: No, I figure if it’s worth remembering, it’ll come back. Especially with melodies — I like things to stay in a liquid state in your head for as long as possible. They stay more interesting there. Once they get out of your head, they start to solidify. That liquid magma state is the key to new songs.

GRE: So what’s next for you?

AB: A good solid year of playing shows almost every night. I don’t want to call it work, but it’ll be very demanding. I’m about my health like I’m about to do the Tour de France, putting myself on a specific training and diet regimen. It’s not the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle exactly. If I did indulge in that, well, I just wouldn’t make it.

Really, Billy? Smashing Pumpkins hold drummer auditions

The Smashing Pumpkins, how I remember them blissfully.

Just this week, Billy Corgan, the one-time rock god of The Smashing Pumpkins, announced that he’d be holding auditions to find a new drummer for his somehow-still-existing band.

As in, you could be a pimple-faced 15-year-old high school band geek today and the drummer of a multi-platinum and formerly awesome alt-rock band tomorrow.

The recent development in The Pumpkins’ devolution into rock’s longest running joke formed after original drummer Jimmy Chamberlin quit the band, leaving Billy Corgan as the sole original member. Unsurprisingly, Corgan was quick to let the public know he’d continue to truck on.

As a former Pumpkins junkie ho long ago played the band’s opus Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness so much that the cassette tape actually wore through and snapped, I must say that I’m really bummed.

This is just the latest in disheartening news to spring from the Corgan camp since the band began to unravel back in the late 1990s — and the slow, painful process of watching the Pumpkins rot has been a difficult pill to swallow.

Here’s a scene: The big family Hanukkah party, held in my grandparent’s basement, and there are no fewer than 15 separate piles of presents scattered along the walls. Each grandkid gets one, and, as a general rule, the piles vary in size depending on how much each set of parents wants to show off their wealth to the rest of the family.

Well, the Jacobs brothers tended to have the smallest pile of gifts while our cousins’ would consist of several boxes the size of small cars stacked atop one another. Usually, this dichotomy would bum me out, the sensitive 9-year-old that I was.

But this year — 1995 it was — I knew that my best gift was the smallest — the double-cassette of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, by the coolest band in the land, The Smashing Pumpkins.

My young mind rationalized the Pumpkins as the coolest band ever using the following logic:

1. The guitar riff of the song “Zero” sounds like the most violent car chase ever.

2. The band had a cute, blonde bassist who had an apostrophe in her first name.

3. I thought I was the only person in the world to realize that Mellon Collie really meant melancholy, which basically means infinite sadness.

4.“Bullet With Butterfly Wings” was brutal and loud, but “1979” was soft and pretty — such dexterity!

5.The one-two punch that begins tape two, “Where Boys Fear to Tread” and “Bodies,” will blow your speakers and terrify your parents.

6.The video for “Tonight, Tonight” was a total mindf**k.

And so it went, for several years, that The Smashing Pumpkins were everything to me. I picked up the band’s earlier work (“Cherub Rock” is killer) and buzzed my hair off. Whether this was to emulate Billy Corgan or not, I can’t remember, but I looked like a penis and grew it back as quickly as I could. Several Hanukkahs later, I even received the five-disc B-sides collection box set and carried it around like a lunchbox.

But I was no blind follower, and when The Pumpkins began to decompose, so did my adoration for them. First came Machina/The Machines of God in 2000, a record that was about as memorable as the pysch class you slept through today.

Then came the first breakup — during which a few band members actually made some decent work. Guitarist James Iha’s A Perfect Circle work was solid, and Zwan, the band including Corgan and Chamberlin, was at least passable.

Bassist D’arcy Wretzky, on the other hand, was arrested for buying a whole bunch of crack. Oops!

But then began the long climb toward both a reunion and the notion that Billy Corgan is batshit insane.

In 2005, the dude took out a full-page ad in the Chicago Tribune begging his old band to rejoin him. It worked, sort of, but the resulting album Zeitgeist (featuring only Corgan and Chamberlin) was anything but, and the band began a freefall into irrelevance.

Corgan’s statement that The Pumpkins would only release singles, not albums, because, “People don’t even listen to it all” made him sound like a bitchy child. Maybe people just didn’t listen to all of your record, Billy.

And now, with Corgan living out his notorious reputation as a weird and egomaniacal control freak, he’s attempting to hold on to the spotlight for just a few more minutes by holding public drummer auditions. Seriously, send your bio, picture and a video to pumpkinsdrummer@gmail.com, and it could be you.

The whole thing stinks of desperation and is the nail in the coffin of the credibility of a once-fantastic band.

So, though I don’t have the money or shamelessness to take an ad out in The Chicago Tribune, Gravity Rides Everything will have to do.

Please, Billy, stop dragging your good name through the mud. Continue to make music, sure, but quit the childish stunts, quit the lame excuses. Iha, who just formed a band with Taylor Hanson, is more respected than you.

Enough is enough, man, and it’s time to know when to gracefully bow out.