There are certain songs that immediately take you back to a certain period of time. Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science" has that effect on me. When I hear the opening strains of the snake charmerish synth, I'm transported back to my childhood home, watching Thomas Dolby on the psychiatrist's chair. Today, Thomas Dolby is running a successful online game and is readying the release of a new album (
A Map Of The Floating City, due October 25th). Despite his busy schedule, he was nice enough to sit down with us and discuss the new album, his online game, his past collaborations, the early days of MTV, how MTV gave his career a boost and nearly killed it, and Jessie J.
You're working on your first album in over fifteen years. How's it coming?
It's coming very well. It's more or less done and about to go off to manufacturing.
How would you describe it?
It's got a lot going on. I've been making it for nearly fifteen years. [laughs]
Actually, it hasn't been fifteen years in the making but it's been a couple. It really started when I moved back to the UK from California. There are three sections to the album, and they're quite distinct flavors. The first is called
Urbanoia and has a city backdrop. I'm not really a city person. I get quite uncomfortable in cities and I can only take them for a couple of days at a time.
Amerikana is a fond recollection of the twenty-two years that I lived in the States. I became very enamored with Roots American culture, which in the UK tends to get a bit of a bad rap. But it has an authenticity to it, an indigenous quality to it which I really admire. I think the songs in
Amerikana, although they nod in the direction of folk and country and even bluegrass in the case of "Toad Lickers," are clearly narrated by an Englishman on his travels. I think a lot of American folk music is passed from one person to another around the campfire, so they're all travelers, so I'm just one of those people passing through.
The last section,
Oceaneer, is about returning to England to where my heart is. I have three kids and they were born while I was living in the States. To bring them back to my homeland and watch them take it all in was a very important milestone in my life, so I've been very happy and inspired since I've been back here. I have a wonderful environment here, I live right on the North Sea and I work in a converted lifeboat which is where I am this moment. [spins camera around and shows the view out of a porthole] It's right in the garden of my house, so it's a very cool place to work. It's powered by a wind turbine and solar panels, so I feel good about that as well.
20. The Jon Stewart Show
Chag: I don't even know why we're having this discussion. Debbie, excuse me, DEB-O-RAH Gibson was a musician and songwriter. "Only In My Dreams" is three-and-a-half minutes of pure sugary pop perfection. When "Foolish Beat" topped the charts, Gibson became the youngest person ever to write, perform, and produce a Billboard #1 single. She did this before she graduated high school. Tiffany, on the other hand, rose to fame by covering tunes by The Beatles and Tommy James & the Shondells.
For this week's Your Say Hump Day, we've got an easy one for you. We want to know when you think MTV died, when it stopped being classic MTV.
This list of our favorite Duran Duran songs was originally published on Culture Brats on August 24, 2010. We're bringing it back because Duran Duran was such a staple on early MTV. We even included a few tracks from Thank You, which was foolishly named the Worst Album Of All Time in a 2006 Q magazine poll:
