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Maxwell - "Pretty Wings"

I can't wait to hear the album.

For dinner

Who needs cookbooks, when you've got food blogs? For a delicious dinner, tonight:

• Flat iron steak and arugula salad with blue cheese and Catalina dressing (I altered the original a bit, since I prefer flat iron to skirt steak)
• Zucchini carpaccio
• Watermelon agua fresca
• Apple pie, with vanilla ice cream (I used a combination of Elise's recipe and Ruhlman's crust for his rhubarb pie)

On doing what you're good at

A great quote from Kim Gordon about the "Radiohead model" of selling records (via Idolator, who has more to say about it):

"I don't really think they did it by themselves," Gordon counters. "They did a marketing ploy by themselves and then got someone else to put it out. It seemed really community-oriented, but it wasn't catered towards their musician brothers and sisters, who don't sell as many records as them. It makes everyone else look bad for not offering their music for whatever. It was a good marketing ploy and I wish I'd thought of it! But we're not in that position either. We might not have been able to put out a record for another couple of years if we'd done it ourselves: it's a lot of work. And it takes away from the actual making music."

Butter 4.0

Sasha Frere-Jones writes about "Butter 4.0", a mixtape of nineties hip-hop by the Australian DJ Broke. I've been listening to this exclusively for the last couple of days. It's brilliant.

Some m.c.s were simply goofballs, a category that's almost defunct. DJ Broke drops in "Studda Step," a brief nineties comeback by eighties comic hero Biz Markie, who handed the crown to Ol' Dirty Bastard in the nineties. (The late ODB appears here with a personal favorite, "Hip-Hop Drunkies," an homage to drunkenness Ol' Dirty recorded with Tha Alkaholiks.) And "Butter 4.0" features Redman, who might be the poster boy for nineties rap. Redman was a skilled punch-line rapper, a type entirely absent from the 2009 charts, unless you count Eminem, who has turned into the Dane Cook of punchline rappers, delivering the goods about four per cent of the time.

Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

The album I'm most excited about this year, and the band I'm most excited to see live, streaming on NPR.

And, it's out for real next week; I can't wait.