Purloined from The NY Times
Jesca Hoop is a striking, dark-haired 29-year-old from Northern California who writes and sings twisty, sprawling, lyrically abstract songs, featuring strange sonorities and offbeat rhythms. Her music sounds as if it comes from an imaginary country, and she sings in the accented English of someone from that country. In the fall of 2003, Hoop was living in a van in Sonoma County, 35 miles north of San Francisco, when late one morning she was awakened by a call on her cellphone. The voice on the other end belonged to Nic Harcourt, a disc jockey and host of a weekday music program, ”Morning Becomes Eclectic,” on the Los Angeles public-radio station KCRW. Harcourt had received a copy of some unreleased self-produced ”demo” recordings of Hoop’s and had begun playing them on the air. Her song ”Seed of Wonder” was especially popular: when it spun, the studio’s phones lighted up and listeners in their cars pulled over to the side of the road, waiting for Harcourt to announce what it was. It would go on to become one of KCRW’s top five requests for eight weeks running, a station record.
Hoop had no idea who Nic Harcourt was, what his radio show was like or even that he was in possession of a copy of her CD, but she could hardly have received a better break. ”Morning Becomes Eclectic,” and KCRW as a whole, are renowned for purveying the contemporary music equivalent of art-house films or literary fiction, a genre the rock critic Robert Christgau calls ”semipopular” music, marked less by style than by a certain base-line intelligence and tastefulness. (As the station’s music director, Harcourt also oversees the rest of its music programming.) Harcourt, whose show is broadcast daily from 9 a.m. to noon, has a knack for finding interesting new music ahead of everyone else: he was the first in America to play Norah Jones and Coldplay on the radio; like Jesca Hoop, the platinum-sellers Dido and David Gray were unsigned artists whose demos Harcourt originally spotlighted on his show; and more idiosyncratic unsigned acts like Damien Rice, Sigur Ros and Jem have all also become the object of record-company bidding wars as a result of Harcourt’s championing.
Programmers for larger commercial stations across the country now keep a close eye on what Harcourt plays. In Los Angeles, ”Morning Becomes Eclectic” is ”appointment radio” for film and television producers and the music supervisors responsible for finding hip songs for TV commercials, and it’s no longer uncommon for quirky, under-the-radar artists favored by Harcourt to be catapulted into mass popularity as a result of their furnishing the key musical-emotional moment in shows like ”The O.C.” and movies like ”Garden State.” Some producers have even begun to hire Harcourt himself to select songs for their soundtracks.
Los Angeles boasts a great lineage of charismatic, near-mythical disc jockeys, including B. Mitchell Reed, whose intimate late-night FM stylings inspired Joni Mitchell to write ”You Turn Me On (I’m a Radio),” and Rodney Bingenheimer, whose long-running show on KROQ served as the launching pad for Blondie, X, Hole and numerous iconic bands of the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s. Harcourt, who just celebrated his seventh anniversary on ”Morning Becomes Eclectic,” is more than just the latest incarnation of this figure. At a time in radio when D.J.’s generally possess little personality and no responsibility for choosing the music they play, he has emerged as the country’s most important disc jockey and a genuine bellwether.
”He has impeccable taste,” Chris Martin, Coldplay’s lead singer and songwriter, says. ”Every time I talk to someone in L.A., whether they’re a 16-year-old or a 40-year-old, if they’re talking about some random band or the new Doves record, when I ask how they know about it, it’s always KCRW.” When Sasquatch Books, the publishers of the Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl’s best-selling ”Book Lust,” sought someone as passionate and knowledgeable about records to write ”Music Lust,” Harcourt was the obvious choice.
Hoop had no idea who Nic Harcourt was, what his radio show was like or even that he was in possession of a copy of her CD, but she could hardly have received a better break. ”Morning Becomes Eclectic,” and KCRW as a whole, are renowned for purveying the contemporary music equivalent of art-house films or literary fiction, a genre the rock critic Robert Christgau calls ”semipopular” music, marked less by style than by a certain base-line intelligence and tastefulness. (As the station’s music director, Harcourt also oversees the rest of its music programming.) Harcourt, whose show is broadcast daily from 9 a.m. to noon, has a knack for finding interesting new music ahead of everyone else: he was the first in America to play Norah Jones and Coldplay on the radio; like Jesca Hoop, the platinum-sellers Dido and David Gray were unsigned artists whose demos Harcourt originally spotlighted on his show; and more idiosyncratic unsigned acts like Damien Rice, Sigur Ros and Jem have all also become the object of record-company bidding wars as a result of Harcourt’s championing.
Programmers for larger commercial stations across the country now keep a close eye on what Harcourt plays. In Los Angeles, ”Morning Becomes Eclectic” is ”appointment radio” for film and television producers and the music supervisors responsible for finding hip songs for TV commercials, and it’s no longer uncommon for quirky, under-the-radar artists favored by Harcourt to be catapulted into mass popularity as a result of their furnishing the key musical-emotional moment in shows like ”The O.C.” and movies like ”Garden State.” Some producers have even begun to hire Harcourt himself to select songs for their soundtracks.
Los Angeles boasts a great lineage of charismatic, near-mythical disc jockeys, including B. Mitchell Reed, whose intimate late-night FM stylings inspired Joni Mitchell to write ”You Turn Me On (I’m a Radio),” and Rodney Bingenheimer, whose long-running show on KROQ served as the launching pad for Blondie, X, Hole and numerous iconic bands of the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s. Harcourt, who just celebrated his seventh anniversary on ”Morning Becomes Eclectic,” is more than just the latest incarnation of this figure. At a time in radio when D.J.’s generally possess little personality and no responsibility for choosing the music they play, he has emerged as the country’s most important disc jockey and a genuine bellwether.
”He has impeccable taste,” Chris Martin, Coldplay’s lead singer and songwriter, says. ”Every time I talk to someone in L.A., whether they’re a 16-year-old or a 40-year-old, if they’re talking about some random band or the new Doves record, when I ask how they know about it, it’s always KCRW.” When Sasquatch Books, the publishers of the Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl’s best-selling ”Book Lust,” sought someone as passionate and knowledgeable about records to write ”Music Lust,” Harcourt was the obvious choice.
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