Over at the official HBO site for The Wire they’re running a feature about the music that has a fairly substantial interview with me, and a cool playlist I put together called “The B-Side of Baltimore”, showcasing eleven tracks that never made it into the show. There’s also some back-story to several tracks that were used over the last few seasons. The whole feature turned out pretty nicely, as far as these things go. One limitation was that I could only use tracks that they could link to in the iTunes store, but that didn’t cramp my style too much.

You can check it out here.

This just arrived in my inbox this morning, so I thought I’d share. I’m thinking that the tsunami of hope is not quite high enough yet that we will be hearing an official presidential campaign song from a Bmore rapper. But how about using it in some targeted ads? Just the fact that you might stop and consider the idea says something about the current climate, doncha think?

When Barack Obama is president, all radio stations, even NPR, will be required to play a certain minimum number of hours per week of hip-hop.

Mullyman has a Myspace here. Mully’s song The Life, The Hood, The Streetz is on both versions of The Wire soundtrack, which you can find here and here. The image of Barack Obama above comes from a limited edition print by Shepard Fairey, which is here. Barack Obama himself is here.

I’m Blake Leyh and I endorse Barack Obama for president.

Today, Wednesday January 30th, I will be a guest on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC in New York, along with Clarke Peters (Freamon), Jamie Hector (Marlo), and Gbenga Akinnagbe (Chris). I’m guessing it will be a pretty lively discussion, and we will also play some music from the recently released soundtrack CDs. It’s live radio (we’ll try the hell not to curse), and the kick-off is at noon. If you can’t listen live, the show will be archived here.

In other radio news, I taped a nice spot for NPR’s World Cafe show last week in Philly, along with Darkroom Productions’ Juan Donovan. That one will air on Thursday, February 7th. In New York you can hear it on WFUV 90.7 at 10pm. In Baltimore, it’s on WTMD 89.7 at 2pm. World Cafe is syndicated on 200 NPR affiliates, and their shows are archived here.

I hope you can listen in.

**UPDATE** I guess the World Cafe spot has been re-scheduled, as there seemed to be a pledge drive happening on the XPN live feed when this was supposed to air. I’ll post here when I get the re-scheduled air date.

**UPDATE 2** Apparently it is airing today on the regular scheduled World Cafe broadcast on NPR affiliates, just not on XPN where I was listening.  Did anyone manage to catch this??

For the last five years, people have been asking me for a copy of The Fall, the piece which I wrote for the end-credits of The Wire. I’ve kept that track out of circulation so that it could be part of a Wire soundtrack record, and that is finally happening on January 8th.

The other thing people want is a longer version of The Fall, but that is not going to happen. Can’t do it. I tried, and it just doesn’t make sense. It’s the nature of the track for it to be under two minutes, and very specific, and to just be the thing that we have come to indelibly know as the music that plays at the end of The Wire. When I tried to make a longer version, somehow it just felt trite, like a sellout. Repeating the same material seemed monotonous, and adding new ideas seemed beside the point. So The Fall will stay the way it is.

But here’s a track from the forthcoming record that has the same band as The Fall, similar instrumentation, relevant mood, but is longer and pretty much a fully developed piece of music. I’m playing bass and electric piano, and my collaborator Andre Burke is playing violin, like on The Fall. Over the years, fans of The Fall have also asked for other tracks that were similar, but other than this, there aren’t really any to speak of. The music I do covers a very wide range, and just because you like The Fall, doesn’t necessarily mean you will like anything else of mine (much as I might wish otherwise!).

So here it is, 151 Canal, from my forthcoming “Ambient Electro-Tango Funk Dub” record, X-Ray Yankee Zulu Tango, which will be arriving in January along with everything else. I’m having a “soft release” on December 23rd, which would have been Andre’s 48th birthday, and the official street date is January 15th. Anyone who needs an advance copy of the CD for a review, blog post, podcast, or whatever, drop me an email…

X-Ray Yankee Zulu Tango has its own (currently minimal, soon to expand) site here, and there was an earlier track from the record posted here. My previous record with Andre, Shadow Economy, is available from Amazon, CD Baby, and the iTunes Music Store.

After years of anticipation, The Wire Soundtrack will finally be released on January 8th, 2008, on Nonesuch Records. We are currently in the very final stages of production of the record, and I can say without reservation that the project is everything I always hoped it would be. It turns out David Bither and Bob Hurwitz at Nonesuch are huge Wire fans, and they have given us incredible support and creative freedom to do the record the right way. It includes many of the show’s most important musical signatures, including several versions of Way Down In The Hole, all of the season-end montage songs, a great selection of Baltimore club and hip-hop, The Pogues, Stelios Kazantzidis, a selection of dialog scenes from the show, and the theme music “The Fall” which I composed and so many have asked for over the years. It also includes a gigantic deluxe booklet stuffed with photographs, and liner notes by David Simon, George Pelecanos and Jeff Chang.

I will post more details and a full track list in the near future right here. Until then there’s a bit more info at the Nonesuch blog here:

And in case you were wondering, Season 5 is finished and continues the tradition we have all come to expect from The Wire; the season premiere will be Sunday January 6th.

Here’s looking forward to January!

If you’re not a hip-hop fan from Baltimore, you may not know this track. But in Baltimore, The Hamsterdam Mixtape which this comes from was one of the biggest hits of 2005 and is still going strong. It’s sold well over 30,000 copies last time I checked, and that’s without any official label release. The Hamsterdam Mixtape is named after the al-fresco legalized drug market from Season 3 of The Wire, and features a huge lineup of Baltimore MCs: Diablo, Mullyman, Tyree Colion, Shellbe Raw, Bossman, and more.

Juan Donovan and Jamal Roberts, the two producers who comprise Darkroom Productions, are the minds behind The Hamsterdam Mixtape, and they are at this moment hard at work on Hamsterdam 2: The Re-up, which should be hitting the street at the end of November. Darkroom contributed several tracks to Season 4 of The Wire, and you can hear this track in the episode which airs tonight, October 29th.

There’s a great City Paper article about Darkroom Productions here, and you can find their official site here. Essential reading for Baltimore Hip-Hop coverage is the blog Government Names, which is here. There was a New York Times article recently about Baltimore Hip-Hop and The Wire, which you can read here.

Season Four of The Wire is in full swing, and we’ve been sleeping on it here at Ten Thousand Things. To get back into the fray, here’s a roundup of previous Wire-related posts, all with temporarily re-activated music links:

Stelios Kazantzidis: Efuge Efuge

Positive Black Soul: Respect the Nubians

Lorem Ipsum: Wax Music Box

Michael Franti: Rock The Nation

The J.B.’s: Paradise

I am the music supervisor for The Wire, and I also wrote the theme music that plays over the end credits, a piece titled “The Fall”. I’ve been receiving dozens of emails from people asking where they can get a copy of The Fall, and I have to reiterate here: that track is not available anywhere, and it has never been released. We are saving it for The Wire soundtrack, which we hope will be released next year along with the recently announced Season Five. In response to the deluge of requests, I have made a page explaining the situation here.

Check back in the coming days for more posts about The Wire. The official site for the show is here. The Wikipedia page for the show is stuffed with fascinating minutiae and can be found here. There’s a very readable new unnoficial blog about the show called Heaven and Here. There was an article about my work on the show in the Baltimore City Paper recently, which you can find here.

A big welcome to those of you landing here for the first time from Soul Sides. This one’s for you.

It’s a somewhat obscure track from The J.B’s, a shifting cast of characters who have all played in James Brown’s band in various forms. This track, written by drummer Clyde Stubblefield, comes from their 2002 throwback album Bring The Funk On Down. The full title is There’s a Price to Pay to Live in Paradise, and it’s one of my favorite J.B.’s tracks. It was actually momentarily in the running to be the title track of The Wire, but we ended up using it as a throwaway in the back of Stringer’s print shop.

You can find Bring The Funk On Down here.

While Franti may sometimes stray into holier-than-thou territory, God bless him for keeping it real, and let’s just remember that someone has to be out there barefoot with a guitar lecturing us about right and wrong. At his most successful, Franti merges a deeply felt political consciousness with great musical poignancy, or, as in this case, great shake-your-booty grooves.

This is from Franti’s 2001 release Stay Human, which also includes the terrific track Oh My God, among others. We used both songs in Season 1 of HBO’s The Wire; I imagined that Avon Barksdale had a copy of Stay Human floating around in his SUV. After having used Oh My God in an early episode, a discussion of political content in songs emerged on one of the HBO bulletin boards in which someone said “yeah, but HBO would never DARE use Rock The Nation in a show,” apparently feeling that the lyrics were just too politically scathing.

Bomb Bomb
Rock the Nation
Take over television and radio station
Bomb Bomb
The truth shall come
Give the corporation some complication

Fuck the Constitution
Are we part of the solution or part of the polution?

Well, we had already used that song and those lyrics in an episode which was completed but hadn’t aired yet. Turns out you CAN say shit like that on TV, and no-one cares. And, of course, absolutely nothing changes as a result.

Anyway, you can find Stay Human here. Michael Franti has a web site here.

The Wire, Season 1, Episode 6. Avon Barksdale visits The Pit. For 30 seconds the show breaks its own rules and dissolves into slow motion. For one of the only moments in all 40 hours of The Wire, musical score is used. It’s a catchy electronic thing, very obscure, and people have regularly asked me about it over the last few years. Well, here it is.

The Cytoplastik collective is a group of artists formed in Columbia, Maryland in 1997, who have been oozing their music, visual art, philosophy, and improbable hairstyles into the Baltimore area for the last several years. Somehow a demo of one of their offshoot projects made it into our hands and ears, and their tune Wax Music Box ended up being used on The Wire. Cytoplastik’s ideas are so deep, their mission so obscure, their Web site so labyrinthal, and their server so slow, that I can’t quite figure out if they are unrecognized geniuses, the ultimate technodorks, or both, but either way this track is great and they have a lot more good music available in various forms.

The Cytoplastik collective has its home here. There are more Lorem Ipsum mp3s here. Lorem Ipsum has since morphed into a project called Zeug, which can be found here.