Here’s the final Unwrapped session from the unseen archives. Matt & Brad Schultz along with Lincoln Parrish of Cage The Elephant stopped by our studio to play two songs from the debut album and a track that is still unreleased. The Bowling Green, KY based band who all went to the same high school together, were in New York City to play shows at The Bowery Ballroom and Music Hall Of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. It’s quite a great thing to see how far these guys have come since releasing their first single in March of 2008. Live, these guys pretty much have the energy level at a height few these days have been able to reach. Click-thru and watch this intense acoustic session.Click And Open The Cage Session

Another dip back into the unseen vaults of sessions that were never seen until now. For this session, we ventured out of our studio and headed about thirty blocks south in New York City to Atomic Heart Studio. This is the place where Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray of Ash make all the musical magic happen. At the time of this session, the guys were in the midst of recording and releases their latest project, The A-Z series. Between the dates of October 12, 2009 and September 27, 2010, they would release a total of 26 new songs every two weeks as downloads. (They would also be released on 7″ singles and CD as well).The Ash Session

Almost two years ago, guitarist/singer/songwriter Matthew Caws and drummer Ira Elliot of Nada Surf stopped by our studio to bring us up to date on their forthcoming album at the time, If I Had A Hi-Fi. The album, which featured all covers, would not be out for another 5 months. They stopped by the studio twice, once to play live and once to chat with me about this project. Click thru for the interview, followed by the performance, which featured two songs from the forthcoming album and three Nada Surf tunes.The Matthew & Ira Show

The multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter Brendan Benson in 2009 got to go back to what he started out as, a solo artist. Solo artist was a weird thing to call him considering he wasn’t in a band until after his first album. But even that band, The Mood Elevators, was just an alter-ego project. The Raconteurs, that of course is a different story. About an year and a half after the release of the second Raconteurs album, Brendan hit us with My Old, Familiar Friend. The album was recorded in 2007, in-between the two Raconteurs full-lengths. In the past Brendan did all the production work himself, but brought in Gil Norton and Dave Sardy to help with the album’s recording task. Currently, Brendan is putting finishing touches on his new album in Nashville, TN. He is gunning to have out next year.Your Old, Familiar Friend

Puddle Of Mudd were just under a week away from releasing their new album at the time Volume 4: Songs In The Key Of Love & Hate. Lead singer Wes Scantlin and “then” guitarist Paul Phillips. (As of November 13th, Paul Phillips will not be touring with the band). Acoustically, they did two songs from the forthcoming album and gave us two of their biggest hits of the past.  You may not notice it, but Wes was nursing a messed up ankle/foot. He and Paul were doing a syndicated radio show and Wes was sitting on his foot in a chair and it fell alseep. When he got up he lost his balance and came down hard on it. Click-thru for all the fun.Session Of Songs & Talk

I always look forward to interviews and sessions with Ian McCulloch. He’s always going to give a cool acoustic performance. With his interviews, sure you may not know what to expect from him, but what you do get is certainly insightful. Ian is joined by Pete Byrne in this classic session, featuring three songs from the Echo & The Bunnymen album The Fountain and an absolute classic!Think You Need It Too

Saosin released their album In Search Of Solid Ground two months prior to the visit to our studio. Since that visit, many changes took place in the Saosin camp. In the next year they parted ways with Virgin Records, their lead singer of five years (seen here) Cove Reber was out. Their website hasn’t been updated in quite some time, and they are still looking for a lead singer. There were rumors thrown about (although never confirmed by the band) that Tilian Pearson from Tides Of Man would be replacing Cove. Although some demos have surfaced and some talk of doing an album has been mentioned, nothing official has been stated. Watch that acoustic session now.Things Did Keep Changing

Our Unwrapped series continues as we bring you sessions that have never been seen before, done at our studios in New York City. Today click-thru and enjoy Langhorne Slim. Langhorne stopped by with his band while on tour to promote the then current album Be Set Free.More Unwrapped Music

Last year in December we introduced the Unwrapped series. Unwrapped features sessions that never saw the light of day on this site. You see, we started doing performances and interviews in our studio in September of 2009. It wasn’t until the spring of 2010 that we unveiled what you are looking at now. Previously, the audio of the interviews and song performances were only available on the Last.fm Discover radio station. Last year 26 sessions were “unwrapped” and this year the final 9 will be shown for the first time.Let’s Start To Unwrap

Today we finish up our month-long “unwrapped” series, where we brought you Last.fm Discover sessions that were never presented here on the site. We’ve got a few more that we will pop-up here in the near future.

Today’s session is from the band who put out my favorite album in 2005. The debut from Editors The Back Room, was killer from beginning to end. I’ve pretty much make it a point to see them everytime they hit NYC. Obviously, it was treat to have them come to our studio to do a special acoustic session. On this tour for the album In This Light And On This Evening, the band played Terminal 5 in NYC, along with another Last.fm Discover artist The Dig. For our session, which was recorded on February 22, 2010, Tom and Chris gave us a stunning acoustic set and were then joined by Russell and Ed for the interview. Editors were co-Artist Of The Week on May 31st.

Editors In Our Studio On This Day

Last.fm Discover got it ears on the forthcoming debut album from Neon Trees near the tail-end of 2009 and immediately fell in love with it! We quickly started working on getting the band in for a session. Although they played at The Mercury Lounge in NYC on January 14th of 2010, it wasn’t until they returned on February 11th, that we got them to our studio. Their debut album Habits, released on my birthday (a nice gift) is my sixth favorite album of the year. Check out one of the band’s first acoustic sessions and my chat with them as well. This session has never been unveiled in it’s entirety, until now. We tabbed them co-Artist Of The Week on May 10th of this year.

The Gnarly Session

The first time I heard “Animal” it was an immediate hit in my world. Like I do every so often say to a band if I truly believe a song can be big for them, I’ll say “in a right world, “this song” can be a hit!” Well, that doesn’t happen all that often, but for “Animal” it did. Watch the rest of the session with Neon Trees now.It’s Still Gnarly

Snow was falling in NYC as we anxiously awaited who from We Were Promised Jetpacks would make it to our studio on February 10th of this year. The debut album, These Four Walls was a runaway as my favorite album of 2009. I had seen them live once prior to this session (The Bowery Ballroom), and didn’t know too much about the boys from Edinburgh, Scotland. Arriving for the session we got lead singer and guitarist Adam Thompson. He came “unarmed” so he borrowed an autographed acoustic guitar that was hanging around the back of the studio. (I think the sessions from around this time, were the last with JUST an iPhone camera. We had no video taken for this, The Soft Pack or Neon Trees sessions. And our equipment was in the midst of being torn apart and being put back together!  But we pulled them off.). So check out all 3 parts of this session, listen to the performance and interview.

Adam From We Were Promised Jetpacks