this is super-old news in the d.c. blogosphere by now, but i wanted to write about it anyway: as of yesterday around noon, local station 99.1, WHFS, was totally and unexpectedly turned into a salsa-carribean music station. yup.

this isn't really sad news for me, as i rarely listen to radio any more. i mean, i guess i'll have to fix the preset stations in my car, but that's about the biggest incovnenience it'll cause. but i do want to credit HFS for two great things it did for me:

1) it turned me on to radiohead. when "the bends" came out nearly a decade ago, i was hardly what you'd call a music fan. i owned no CDs, had never been to a live concert, and couldn't place half the bands shown on MTV. but when i heard "high and dry" one day on HFS during the winter of '95, i was immediately hooked. i bought "the bends," listened to it three times a day, and officially commenced my ten-year obsession with radiohead, which in turn has really affected my life in a lot of other positive ways (travels experienced, friends made, new music exposure, british musicians stalked, etc).

2) this is also radiohead-related, but so what: during the tibetan freedom festival at RFK stadium in 1998, radiohead's performance was canceled due to lightning. several friends and i were making a disappointed trip home, listening to HFS, when a cryptic announcement came on air; it announced something to the effect of a secret concert that night at the 9:30 club, featuring one of the bands that had been lightening'd out of the TFF. "karma police" then started playing, and the whole thing wasn't so cryptic anymore, and we hauled ass to the 9:30 club and just made it in the door. which in turn led to one of the greatest concert moments of my life: michael stipe and thom yorke singing "lucky" together. i assure you, it was totally orgasmic.

anyway, DCist has a post with a big ole comment thread here; frank ahrens, former resident of our apartment and go-to radio guy for the post has a chat here; some other post guy will have another chat about HFS here at 2pm; and Heres a Hint has a good post that reflects a lot of my feelings about HFS and radio in general here.

Oh hell yes. Pitchfork is reporting on an upcoming They Might Be Giants tribute album featuring acts like the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players and Frank Black.

But what's really got me bouncing off the walls is the news that one of my current favorite bands is considering a cover of my all-time favorite TMBG song, "Birdhouse In Your Soul". For those unfamiliar, BHIYS is an epic and uplifting existential rumination sung from the point of view of a canary-shaped nightlite. It's also a phenomenal pop song. Here's hoping everyone's favorite Jersey pharmaceutical clerks/rock gods have the good sense to keep their version true to the energetic original. Nothing's more disappointing than having a good band half-ass a cover by giving it the "sensitive" treatment with a few acoustic guitars and twenty minutes of studio time.

I'm pretty excited about the rest of the album, too. I can't think of another act band as perfectly suited to the tribute treatment as TMBG. It'd be silly to deny that the two Johns are great songwriters; unfortunately, the sad truth is that much of their best work is locked away behind their nasally voices and synthesizers-can-do-everything approach to production. TMBG eventually assembled a real band for John Henry, and while I love tracks like "Subliminal" and "AKA Driver", ever since the musicianship improved they've only rarely attained the combination of abstract cleverness and precise pop construction that characterized earlier songs like "Ana Ng". Having others revisit that earlier material might help these guys get the credit they deserve.

guess what? opening approximately 32 browsers in firefox and refreshing each of them at the rate of 100x per second scores you two wilco tickets for wednesday, february 23! RAR!