Morning Shorts: Barbara Manning

Writing from vacation in Seattle, and heading to Vancouver tomorrow. By utter coincidence, we ended up staying in a hotel in the Queen Anne neighborhood, where the diner food is plentiful and the wonderful Easy Street Records, with its Tower-esque painted album cover murals and rotating sign, made me remember how much I'm gonna miss record stores when they're gone. I picked up several discs I hadn't seen in DC but hadn't been devoted enough to order, including Meg Baird's Dear Companion and Jana Hunter's There's No Home, as well as last year's Kind of Like Spitting/Lemuria split and Hefner's recent live album Maida Vale. Meanwhile, I couldn't help but notice that Drag City, as if to hammer home the increasing fetishism of physical music collecting, is hawking a new Bonnie Prince Billy EP, Strange Form of Life, for a hefty $12.99, despite the fact that the EP tracks are Daytrotter Session songs, which are legally free online. But the packaging is nice...

Pitchfork reports on Jana Hunter tour dates.

Barbara Manning has a new box set reissue out, Super Scissors (buy it), which collects remastered versions of Scissors and One Perfect Green Blanket along with 24 bonus tracks and extensive liners. And for all those that wonder about the economic realities of being a beloved indie singer-songwriter, an interview with recent college grad Manning in the San Francisco Chronicle is a must-read.

MP3: Barbara Manning - Scissors (acoustic demo)

Leonard Cohen talks to Harp about lots of topics, most tantalizingly for fans of a certain age, the prospect of a tour: "Those anxious for Cohen to record his own work again should be pleased to learn that the film’s concert sequences have inspired him to consider touring in support of his next album, tentatively set for release later this year. “Yes, yes,” he confirms. “I haven’t been out since ’93. The years went by and I thought ‘I’ll never go out again.’ But every so often you do have that itch. You’ve heard that saying in rock ’n’ roll, they don’t pay you to sing, they pay you to travel. But you forget about that stuff. The actual concerts are always compelling. If you’ve got good musicians, and you’re playing, and people know the songs, and they want to hear them live, it is a wonderful thing. And so I’m drawn to that.”"