Should Have Enjoyed It
February 14th, 2008
The Llamas track “Should Have Enjoyed It While It Lasted” is featured in the season finale of the hit NBC show Friday Night Lights, which you can view online if you feel so inclined.
Marry Christmas from Origami Llamas
December 25th, 2007Origami Llamas Wed in Private Ceremony
Sat Dec 22, 4:45 PM PT
LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Rockers Lara von Haught and Rob Hauer of the Origami Llamas were wed in a small private ceremony in downtown Los Angeles today. The exclusive guest list included close friends and family as well as a number of celebrities, artists and fashion luminaries. To mark the occasion the group has finally made available on its website the full, unedited version of the track “You Think You Deserve This (But You Don’t)” from their first proper full-length album Dud which was released earlier this year on musicthing.org to universal critical acclaim. The track features vocals by Lara von Haught and lyrics by Steve Martin.
Don’t Be Cruel
September 4th, 2007
People have been wondering about the “abridged-ness” of the track “You Think You Deserve This (But You Don’t)” on the Origami Llamas album, Dud. Are we coyly holding back part of a “free” album for some nefarious purpose? What’s the deal? Well, the deal is that the song takes its lyrics from a short story by the legendary comic genius Steve Martin. Apparently the Llamas were messing around in the studio one day with a track called “Fonda You” when drummer/keyboardist Lara von Haught spontaneously recited “Cruel Shoes” over the middle instrumental section. The combination worked well and the group recorded the track properly as a standalone piece while working on the album, deciding to worry later about whether or not they would be able to release it. In the weeks leading up to the launch of musicthing and the “street date” for Dud, and ever since actually, we have tried continuously to contact Steve Martin and get permission to release this creation into the wild in its entirety. So far we haven’t had any luck. But we’ll keep trying.
myspace
September 2nd, 2007we finally got a myspace page up for musicthing today.
Thanks!
August 1st, 2007It’s hard to believe it’s been a month since we launched the musicthing!
To say things have been working better than we expected would be an understatement. We’ve had close to 15,000 visitors since the site went up and we’re on the way to 1,000 downloads of the Origami Llamas album Dud. Hopefully those 1,000 copies are multiplying on file-sharing networks as we speak.
Thanks to everyone who wrote, signed the declaration of musical independence, donated cash, bought a t-shirt or just came in to look around. The response has been very positive. There is more to come so stay tuned.
This isn’t going to be as hard as we thought.
Music wants to be free.
Not Letting the Elevator Bring Us Down
July 4th, 2007
It’s weird to be in scramble-mode, helping finish a website that’s all about how music should be free, and then to discover you were on the same wavelength as none other than the Purple One himself. There are so many entertaining things about this story, not the least of which is this warm and fuzzy gem from Paul Quirk of the ERA, the UK’s Entertainment Retailers Association: “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday.” That’s a little like threatening passengers on the Titanic who’ve decided to swim for it instead of staying behind to bail. (Nice use of “Artist Formerly” though: very clever.)
What’s most interesting about this story is the way it illustrates the fact that artists, even artists of Prince’s stature, just don’t make that much money from CD sales. The record stores? Yes. Things like this freak them out because it represents lost revenue, even though they’d probably be using a new Prince disc as a loss leader to get people into the stores. But to Prince those little pieces of plastic have more value as a promotional item. Artists are given no real financial stake in the sale of their album and then the labels and retailers wonder why someone like Prince doesn’t care if he sells any records.
But look at all the press he got, especially the press mentioning his upcoming 21 night stand in London. Prince knows those concerts are where the real money is…for him if not the record chains.
