Bright Eyes, Beck on List

Bright Eyes' Lifted or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground is among the "Long List" finalists for the 2003 Shortlist Music Prize. The Shortlist Prize was initiated three years ago to honor albums of artistic merit that registered below 500,000.

The Long List includes albums picked by the Shortlist panel, which includes musicians Dave Matthews, Mos Def and Tom Waits, and filmmakers Cameron Crowe and Spike Jonze. Among other albums picked for the Long List are Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, Beck's Sea Change and other rock records like Grandaddy's Sumday, the Mars Volta's De-Loused in the Comatorium, Wire's Send, Spoon's Kill the Moonlight and Soundtrack of Our Lives' Behind the Music. Common's Electric Circus, Dead Prez's Turn Off the Radio and David Banner's Mississippi (The Album) are among the hip-hop selections. Soul and blues are represented by Solomon Burke's Don't Give Up on Me and the Black Keys' Thickfreakness. Carrie Rodriguez and Chip Taylor's Let's Leave This Town and Gillian Welch's Soul Journey represent for folk/country.

The panel will whittle the list down to ten albums by the first week of September. The winning album will then be announced on October 16th at the Shortlist Music Prize award show at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles.

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Song Stories

“Is It True”

Brenda Lee | 1964

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."

More Song Stories entries »

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