LimeWire Music Blog

While former print media empires crumble and burn around us, props to Pitchfork for keeping us abreast of the perhaps soon-to-be-anachronistic world of material information, or as we used to call them when I was a wee pup: books. The nice folks over at Yeti have brought us a beautiful little 156-page tome dedicated to another potentially lost art: touring. Accurately titled The Art of Touring, the book is mostly put together by artists who have dabbled in said medium. It  boasts artwork produced by Devendra Banhart and Tony Lazzarra (Atombombpocketknife), photography by Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Thurston Moore, Buck 65, and Alissa Anderson (of our beloved Vetiver); and writing by Johanna Fateman (Le Tigre) and Brian Case (The Ponys). And if that’s not enough for you, it comes packaged with a thematically linked DVD, offering a plethora of fun multimedia whose highlight, no doubt, is a Jem Cohen produced doc of The Ex on tour. And all for a humble $19.95, postage paid. Let’s hope The Art of Touring is a quiet and unpretentious lesson to those treading water in print: those long hours crammed in vans and disquieting situations across the county were in service to a seemingly unattainable goal, an arduous uphill battle. And that’s how most of the best art gets made.