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U2 Setlist Update

04/14/2005 Glendale Arena - Glendale, Arizona

Love And Peace Or Else, Vertigo / Stories For Boys (snippet), Elevation, The Cry, The Electric Co. / Send In The Clowns (snippet) / I Can See For Miles (snippet), An Cat Dubh, Into The Heart, City Of Blinding Lights, Beautiful Day / Blackbird (snippet), Miracle Drug, Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, New Year's Day, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bullet The Blue Sky / The Hands That Built America (snippet) / When Johnny Comes Marching Home (snippet), Running To Stand Still, Pride (In The Name Of Love), Where The Streets Have No Name, One
encores: Zoo Station, The Fly, Mysterious Ways, All Because Of You, Yahweh, 40

04/15/2005 Glendale Arena - Glendale, Arizona
City Of Blinding Lights, Beautiful Day / In God's Country (snippet), Vertigo / Stories For Boys (snippet), Elevation, Gloria, The Ocean, New Year's Day, Miracle Drug, Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, Love And Peace Or Else, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bullet The Blue Sky / The Hands That Built America (snippet) / When Johnny Comes Marching Home (snippet), Running To Stand Still, Bad, Pride (In The Name Of Love), Where The Streets Have No Name, One
encores: The Fly, Mysterious Ways, All Because Of You, Yahweh, 40


Not U2

STRATEGY
"Strategy is about choice. The heart of a company's strategy is what it chooses to do and not do. The quality of the thinking that goes into such choices is a key driver of the quality and success of a company's strategy. Most of the time, leaders are so immersed in the specifics of strategy - the ideas, the numbers, the plans- that they don't step back and examine how they think about strategic choices. But executives can gain a great deal from understanding their own reasoning processes. In particular, reasoning by analogy plays a role in strategic decision making that is large but largely overlooked. Faced with an unfamiliar problem or opportunity, senior managers often think back to some similar situation they have seen or heard about, draw lessons from it, and apply those lessons to the current situation. Yet managers rarely realize that they're reasoning by analogy. As a result, they are unable to make use of insights that psychologists, cognitive scientists, and political scientists have generated about the power and the pitfalls of analogy. Managers who pay attention to their own analogical thinking will make better strategic decisions and fewer mistakes." See the April issue of Harvard Business Review for the full article...

MUSIC

Fiona Apple's third album, Extraordinary Machine, looked like it was headed for the pop scrapheap. Completed in May of 2003, it was rejected by her label, Epic Records, on the grounds that the songs weren't sufficiently commercial to justify the expense of their release. After Apple failed in her attempt to write a more salable single, the album was mothballed-destined to be mythologized by devoted fans but otherwise forgotten and unmissed.

But a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion. Last year, two songs from Extraordinary Machine were mysteriously leaked onto the Internet. Then the leak became a flood. In January of this year, a Seattle radio DJ named Andrew Harms began playing the other album tracks, which were quickly bootlegged and uploaded to the Web. Harm won't divulge the source of the songs, leading some to speculate that the leak was due to (extraordinary) machinations by Epic. Harm denies this. Also in January, a 21-year-old Apple fanatic named Dave Muscato mounted a campaign through the Web site FreeFiona.com urging Epic to release the album. He and his cohort collected signatures, mailed foam apples to Sony-BMG headquarters (Epic's parent company), picketed outside the building, and raised money online to fund their effort. The campaign continues, despite the fact that all 11 album tracks (and several alternate versions) have been widely available on the Internet since mid-March. The album has essentially been released: The only thing missing is the $15.99 price tag.

Epic, meanwhile, has had little to say on the subject. It hasn't responded to the Free Fiona campaign and refuses interview requests. In February, the label issued the elliptical statement: ''It's our understanding that Fiona is still in the midst of recording her next album and we at Epic Records join music lovers everywhere in eagerly anticipating her next release.''

On Epic's behalf, the Recording Industry Association of America has begun cracking down on Web sites offering the songs for download. Much of the abundant press and blog coverage has attempted to shoehorn this Cinderella story into another glass slipper: that of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The similarities are striking. Wilco's album was likewise rejected by its label, Reprise/Warner, and the band was dropped. After buying back its masters, Wilco streamed the album online, where it was embraced by fans and critics alike. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was ultimately released, to much acclaim, by the boutique label Nonesuch Records (ironically, another Warner imprint) in 2002.

But Yankee Hotel Foxtrot isn't a useful precedent. For one thing, it was a much bigger cause célèbre than Extraordinary Machine is shaping up to be. Fiona hasn't been dropped by her label, and she hasn't even stated publicly whether she cares if the album is released or not. Wilco's standard for success is also much different than Apple's and Epic's. Despite universal plaudits, endless rehashings of the David-versus-Goliath story, and a feature film about the album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has sold only 517,000 copies to date. That's a big number for Wilco, but for an artist with Apple's track record-1997's Tidal sold 2.7 million copies and 1999's When the Pawn ... sold 917,000-it would be a major disappointment.

Which brings us to the question: Just how well would Extraordinary Machine sell? It's easy to get the impression the public is clamoring for it. On March 18, Wired News ("Fiona Apple Is Cookin' on the Net")reported that "at any one time about 38,000 users in the United States are downloading songs from Extraordinary Machine." This is an astonishing number, and one that has been widely parroted. It would translate to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of downloads a day-a groundswell of interest any label would be foolish to ignore.

If only it were real. Wired News' source for the number was BigChampagne, an online media measurement company that serves as a kind of Billboard chart for the surreptitious world of file sharing. But according to BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland, the figure actually refers to the number of people in the United States who were "sharing" the songs on the major P2P networks at one time-that is, making at least one track from the album available for download-not the number actively uploading or downloading the songs.

This is a far humbler figure, especially when compared with equivalent numbers for successful major-label releases. As of April 7, 3,994,837 people were sharing songs from Hot Fuss by the Killers; 5,179,675 people were sharing songs from Green Day's album American Idiot; and 8,024,713 people were sharing songs from 50 Cent's The Massacre. Obviously, this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. These other albums have all benefited from lavish promotional campaigns and extensive airplay on MTV and commercial radio.

But the degree of the interest in Extraordinary Machine is even modest when compared to last year's big Internet phenomenon, The Grey Album by Danger Mouse (also unreleased and circulated exclusively on the Web). Whereas 278,327 people were sharing material from The Grey Album at its peak in April 2004, Extraordinary Machine topped out at 46,759 in March-less than one-fifth that number.
These numbers aren't comprehensive, but they do give a sense of the relative interest in Apple's album. "Given that Fiona Apple is a veteran who has released two previous albums, I think the online audience looks like her core, not like a popular audience," says Garland, who regularly advises radio stations and record labels about file-sharing trends.

It isn't difficult to see why. Extraordinary Machine is a wonderfully complex album. By turns whimsical and solemn, it's full of topsy-turvy cabaret tunes, banging piano parts, and smart, sometimes clunky lyrics. The producer, Jon Brion, ornaments the songs with quirky, cinematic arrangements reminiscent of his soundtrack work on I Heart Huckabees and Punch-Drunk Love. In other words, Extraordinary Machine is just the sort of adventurous, critic-pleasing album that's nearly impossible to sell to a mainstream audience.

One song, "Please, Please, Please," even seems to anticipate Apple's troubles at Epic. She sings: "please, please, please, no more melodies/ they lack impact, they're petty/ they've been made up already ... / but me and everybody is on the sad, same team/ and you can hear our sad brains screaming/ give us something familiar, something similar/ to what we know already, that will keep us steady." You can just imagine how it must have sounded to Epic back in 2003. This was when the young, husky-voiced, piano-playing beauty Norah Jones was riding high on five Grammy Award wins and more than 5 million album sales.

And, at the same time, Epic's own young, husky-voiced, piano-playing beauty was remaking herself in the image of a midcareer Tom Waits. The decision to shelve the album must have seemed obvious. Yet, it looks like the scrappy Free Fiona campaign and the skewed coverage of the leak may be swaying minds at Epic. The label's most recent statement, issued earlier this month, read: "Epic is continuing to work with Fiona's management toward the release of this project." This could be a costly mistake: Based on the evidence, there's no reason the label should second-guess itself.



Pitchfork's review of The White Stripes' BLUE ORCHID:

You probably remember from Pitchfork's insouciant Top 100 Singles of the Decade's First Half that we decoded the DaVinci out of "Seven Nation Army"'s elder protocols. A magical culture-curtain pulled back and awakened you to how that 2003 song was an allegorical blueprint for the political highlights of 2004. Here are the future-clues about the new and shocking White Stripes single that we've been able to Google so far:

"Blue Orchid" was the name of the Russian porn ring that was busted in 2001, the year of Bush's ascension and the year that the Stripes broke. Jack also sings with a Prince-in-heat wheeze. Perhaps a harbinger of a Putin scandal?

"Blue Orchid" is also the name of a racehorse in Singapore, which could be a reference to the band's gender inequity. Meg is given even simpler beat-keeping duties than we are used to hearing. Perhaps an omen of patriarchal machinations to restrain Hillary Clinton in upcoming "races"?

The "get behind me" line invokes what Jesus Christ says to both Satan and his disciple Peter when they try to tempt him out of sacrificing himself to fulfill his divine mission. Perhaps our faith-centered President will personally lead troops into battle with Osama's legions?

The scraped, crunchy, and overdriven but sleek riffage calls to mind past glories of bands from the Stripes' home turf, and vanquishes memories of that "bluegrass tribute" Pickin' On The White Stripes and the Joss Stone thing. Perhaps a panic in Detroit is looming?

The intimate-yet-momentous garage-itorium vibe (imagine a vengeful kid brother of Lenny Kravitz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" or whatever the Kills were supposed to get around to sounding like) would play perfectly over the title sequence of a prime-time fuel-worship show from the eighties such as Street Hawk, the one about the motorcycle with guns. Perhaps the Nielsens and Emmys will be conquered by Jack White piloting a nuclear Segway, or spreading rock gospel in a street-scientist-pimped Prius?

Pitchfork on what The Broken Social Scene may, or may not, do next:

Yesterday morning, like a tide of panic and dismemberment, reports came flooding into the Pitchfork inbox that tireless Toronto collective Broken Social Scene had plans to release not one, not two, but three new albums by this time next year. The source of the infoleak, Canadian news site Chartattack, had gotten the crazy idea from peripheral BSS figure Jason Collett, who told them, "We're putting out three records at staggered times. So we're starting in the fall and there will be one in the new year and then there will be one within that same year as well."

The ambitious 2005-06 agenda that Collett-- a longtime friend of the band's, and now an official group member-- had laid out for Broken Social Scene came as something of a surprise to BSS co-founder Kevin Drew and the Arts & Crafts label. All that's known at this early juncture, they say, is that there's one album in the works, tentatively slated for a fall release, and a whole lot of other stuff that remains up in the air: "We accumulated over 200 minutes of music," Drew told Pitchfork yesterday, "and we're trying to figure out what to do with it all."

"They recorded a lot of songs they've been playing live for the last two years, and at the same time they went in and wrote a ton of new stuff," says Arts & Crafts co-owner Jeffrey Remedios during a phone conversation last night. "The idea now is to bring it out in a way that suits the music. [There are] probably around 25 or 30 songs that could technically be three albums' worth of material, but there are no plans to put out three records. It might be a double album, maybe. It might be two albums slightly spaced apart, but the band is still a long way off from deciding anything."

At present, it's been more than three years since Broken Social Scene issued You Forgot It in People, the fall 2002 triumph that won them a Juno Award in their homeland for "Alternative Album of the Year" and made them one of the underground's most beloved bands virtually overnight. It will be very close to four years between records by the time this release hits stores. What's the hold-up?

"We got lost," Drew explains. "We kept writing the whole time. [You Forgot It in People producer] Dave Newfeld has been working for three years straight now. All he does is work. He got addicted to the idea of trying to top YFIP. His massage therapist says he might die in 10 years unless he changes his lifestyle. We don't have much time. Can't imagine making records without Newf. [We] owe him more than most could know."

We're not why massage therapists are in any position to make these kinds of diagnoses, but sources close to the band have compared Newfeld's work ethic and perfectionist streak to those of shut-ins Kevin Shields and Brian Wilson, who, at their creative peaks, were notoriously incapable of accepting a track or album as being finished. Remedios puts it gentler: "He's a wonderful genius, and with that it gets really beautifully intense and insane. He gets things really far, and then he pulls them right away, and then he goes back again, and somewhere in there comes out this beautiful approach to a record."

Either way, Broken Social Scene haven't been recording exclusively with Newfeld. "We actually had two studios running at the same time," Collett revealed to Chartattack. "Charlie [Spearin, guitar/trumpet for BSS] and Ohad [Benchetrit, of Do Make Say Think] have been working out of Ohad's place. And then Dave Newfeld's been mixing and having people record."

Says Drew, "Charlie Spearin and Ohad saved us with their little baby girls and mother-in-law cooking. [We] started to come up with more songs." Remedios chalked the decision up to a matter of simple convenience: "They were working at Newfeld's, but as people were going in and out, Brendan [Canning, BSS co-founder] and Kevin started going over to Ohad's studio. It was a creative choice-- they were working at Newfeld's as fast as they could, and felt like there was more that could be done at the same time, so they opened up a whole new outlet."

Meanwhile, as several contributors to You Forgot It in People struggled to focus on their own projects-- which include (but are certainly not limited to) Stars, Metric, Feist, and Apostle of Hustle-- Broken Social's scene expanded, with Benchetrit, Collett, and Stars' Amy Milan taking more prominent roles within the group, and rapper K-Os even stopping by to guest on a track (the fate of which, naturally, is yet to be determined).

Still, as much as these added contributions have aided production of the new material, it's remained difficult for the splintered collective to make any definitive decisions without all members present. "We've never been home long enough until now to make it take shape in order to finish it," says Collett. "It's still bizarrely democratic." So where does that leave us? Drew insists the as-yet-untitled album is "almost done," and that, barring any major catastrophes, it will be out in autumn, at which point the group will launch a worldwide tour. "All we've done is captured a time in our lives," he says. "Raw fucking puke and love. At the end of the day it's just music made by people who don't own a filtering system."



CANNES

Canada's premier film directors, Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, will be going head to head for the top prize, the Golden Palm, at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival next month. Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies, said to be his most commercially accessible film to date, will compete for the top honour with David Cronenberg's A History of Violence at the 12-day festival which opens May 11. The two Canadian titles will be among 20 from 13 countries in competition at the 58th festival, organizers announced Tuesday. The Golden Palm winner will be announced May 21.
The festival opens with one of three French films, Dominik Moll's Lemming. Other selections include Last Days by American director Gus Van Sant, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada by actor Tommy-Lee Jones, Don't Come Knockin' by Germany's Wim Wenders, Manderlay by Denmark's Lars Von Trier, and L'enfant by Belgium's Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. Movies by two legendary American directors beloved to the French will be among those presented out of competition: Woody Allen's Match Point and George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith.

A British movie, Chromophobia by director Martha Fiennes, will close the night of honours on May 21, although a rerun of the winning movie be shown on the final day, May 22. A History of Violence stars Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello and William Hurt and is based on the graphic book by John Wagner. It is the story of a quiet small-town man whose act of heroism plunges him into the media spotlight and the kind of exposure he doesn't want. Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies stars Colin Firth, Kevin Bacon, Alison Lohman and Maury Chaykin in a noirish story set in the 1950s about the decadent side of fame and fortune and how two decades later a writer decides to unearth a buried scandal. Egoyan was reported to be rushing to have the film completed in time for its Cannes screening.

The Best of Youth.

BENEDICT

Apparently the new Pope (Benedict XVI) has been elected. It's John Ratzenberger.