New music feature: Phoenix

Phoenix story for Billboard (slightly edited/cut-down version by way of Reuters … full version in the May 9 issue of Billboard)

*Update: The full version of the story is now online here!*

I’m sort of embarrassed to say I had never heard of Phoenix before I was assigned this story, but now I think they are awesome and their amazing upcoming album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (out May 26 on Glassnote), will be in heavy rotation this summer. This is my first lead music-section story in the magazine, so I would be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of geeking out about it.

Frontman Thomas Mars on the album title:

“It’s almost like unleashing a kid in a museum, or drawing a mustache on Mona Lisa. It’s something very childish. It’s messing up with something very iconic and I think maybe the fact that we grew up in Versailles, which is a very historical place … and the classical, all those names are very big weights and you can’t really have a future because you’re overwhelmed constantly by what happened before and what was greater before. I think it’s just something in that idea that you try to make something overwhelming, you try to make it your own and just mess up with it and have a chance to create something out of it.”

Video for Phoenix’s “Lisztomania”:

Phoenix’s MySpace