Follow hunky I’m From Rolling Stone star and ROLLING STONE video dude Pete Maiden as he comes face to face with the big names at music’s biggest weekend.

A recent poll suggests that 80 percent of television viewers will not be tuning in to the 2007 Grammy Awards on Sunday. And this makes us…sad. Love them. Hate them. But you musn’t ignore the Grammys. Sure, the award show proves time and again that it’s out of touch with music on a number of levels (see below). Sure they drag on for hours, leaving you practically catatonic and drooling into your Cheetos during Bob Smith’s twelve-minute acceptance speech for Best Pan Flute Album Performed by a Left-Handed North-Umbrian award. Yes, the jokes are lame, the applause is forced and everyone in the audience seems to be counting down the minutes before he or she can start getting wasted/smoke a cigarette/gouge his or her eyes out with a fork. But really, this is not a new phenomenon. Have the Grammys ever been fun to watch? Save a few stellar performances in recent years (Prince with Beyonce, the White Stripes), it’s almost always been a race to the finish-line, a means to an end. And that end is the water cooler, around which we rally to praise or disparage the winners and losers, rehash the evening’s poignant or ridiculous moments and, of course, analyze the year’s latest fashion victims. In the age of Tivo, it’s easy to blow the less exciting portions of the show (that’d be about 80 percent of it), but for the full experience, one must soldier through the whole mind-numbing shebang. (more…)

He’s already won three Grammys, but when geek poster boy “Weird Al” Yankovic’s 2006 disc Straight Outta Lynwood was nominated (for Best Comedy Album and Best Surround Sound Album), it still felt like a victory for white and nerdy dudes everywhere. Here, he chats with our Andy Greene about the distinction.

Where were you when you found out you were nominated?

I was sitting on the couch downstairs in front of my laptop, refreshing the main page at grammy.com every 10 seconds until the link to the nominations showed up. Yes, I’m fully aware of how pathetic that sounds — I just get very excited about the whole Grammy thing.

You’ve already won three. Is it still as exciting?

Well, it’s hard to compete with the first time you win a Grammy because after that, you can legally affix the phrase “Grammy Award-winning” to the front of your name. And when I won my last Grammy in 2004, it was my first Grammy win in fifteen years, so that was a pretty big deal for me too. But trust me, it never gets old. I promise to be extremely excited every single time I ever win a Grammy.

Were you surprised by the surround sound nomination?

That did come a little out of left field — I would have thought that outside of the Comedy category, I might have had my best shot with Best Short Form Video (for “White & Nerdy”) or Best Pop Collaboration (for my duet with Kate Winslet). But I’m thrilled to be recognized for my work on the surround sound mixes, because I’m very proud of the way they turned out. It’s also the first time my engineer Tony Papa has been nominated (I’ve been working with him since 1982)… so I’m very happy he’s getting props from the Academy as well.

What lengths did you go to insure that the surround sound was extra good?

After we finished the stereo mix for each song on the album, Tony and I would formulate a plan on how to give dimensionality to the 5.1 mix. When the mix was extremely dense and complicated (as it was for my Brian Wilson homage “Pancreas”) it allowed for parts to breathe more, because tracks could be isolated or featured more than in the stereo mix. We found that we could also have fun moving instruments on more than one axis at once – which meant that we could have footsteps or bird calls or weird sound effects flying diagonally across the room. I’m so happy with the way that the 5.1 mix for “Pancreas” turned out that I really consider that the definitive version of the song.

Do you have a surround sound stereo at home?

I had a home theatre system, but after I finished “Straight Outta Lynwood,” I decided to upgrade and got myself a dedicated surround sound system with 5 identical high-end speakers, just for listening to music mixed in 5.1. I’m not sure how much of a selling point the whole “surround sound” thing was for my last album, but I sure got a kick out of doing it, and I look forward to continue working with that format in the future.

You’re up against Alan Parsons, who engineered Abbey Road. Think you can take him?

Well, Alan’s amazing, of course, and the rest of the nominees in the category are no slouches either. Really, I’m just very happy to have been nominated at all, because comedy albums rarely get any kind of real respect from the recording community. But you know, even though the context was comedy, it was very challenging because we were working with a dozen different musical genres on this album — everything from gangsta rap to polka – so it was very gratifying to me that the voters were able to appreciate the underlying craft of what we were doing. (more…)

Among the megawatt stars at the Grammy awards ceremony this Sunday will be a little band you’ve probably never have heard of. But if you’ve seen Little Miss Sunshine you’ve heard its music. In fact, after years of toiling in relative obscurity, Denver-based quartet Devotchka may finally be getting the recognition it deserves. The group, which has been honing its idiosyncratic breed of Eastern European dance and folk-inflected indie rock for a decade, was hand-selected to provide ten of the fourteen tracks on the film’s soundtrack, and has earned a Grammy nomination in the process. “We were on tour somewhere between Wyoming and Idaho when a friend called and said we were nominated,” says Devotchka frontman Nick Urata. “I was shocked.”

Devotchka snagged the Little Miss Sunshine gig when the film’s directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris heard one of the band’s songs on powerhouse radio station KCRW and began scouting the foursome for possible soundtrack work. “They came to a couple shows without telling us,” Urata says. “Then they called me up and we became friends.” During production, Dayton and Faris gave the cast iPods filled with Devotchka albums. Greg Kinnear, who stars in the film, became a fan. “He came by the studio a couple times while we recording,” Urata says. “He even played some glockenspiel on a couple tracks.” (more…)

Grammys mania offically starts now. The award show doesn’t air til this Sunday, but we’re counting down the days with Grammy coverage all this week. First order of bidness: a mixtape featuring artists nominated in the Big Four categories (that’d be Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist). *Note that the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose Stadium Arcadium was nominated for Album of the Year, is not represented on our mix due to bureaucratic red tape.

Listen to the entire Grammys mixtape

“Be Without You” [Listen]
Mary J. Blige
(Record of the Year, Song of the Year)

“You’re Beautiful” [Listen]
James Blunt
(Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best New Artist)

“Not Ready to Make Nice” [Listen]
Dixie Chicks
(Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year)

“Crazy” [Listen]
Gnarls Barkley
(Record of the Year, Album of the Year)

“Put Your Records On” [Listen]
Corinne Bailey Rae
(Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best New Artist)

“Waiting on the World to Change” [Listen]
John Mayer
(Album of the Year)

“Dani California”
Red Hot Chili Peppers
(Album of the Year)

“Sexyback” [Listen]
Justin Timberlake
(Album of the Year)

“Jesus, Take the Wheel” [Listen]
Carrie Underwood
(Song of the Year, Best New Artist)

“Run It” [Listen]
Chris Brown
(Best New Artist)

“Hide and Seek” [Listen]
Imogen Heap
(Best New Artist)

>>Listen to every nominated song, watch every nominated video and browse complete artist pages for every nominated artist, with album reviews, the latest news and more in our complete Guide to the Grammys.