Letters to the Editor
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One band - two entries? That's just wrong...
Guys,
Um, I don't want to be a jerk, but how can Hallelujah the Hills have a song in the final ten, if they also entered under the name The Stairs?
Does this mean my single entry could have been multiplied if I "disbanded" and reentered another song under a different band name?
It's definitely a good song, so no disrespect to Hallelujah the Hills/The Stairs, but Salon, exactly what is up?
Obviously I'm pubishing anonymously here since I've also entered the contest. Of course, I'd have been happy to enter ten songs, but didn't know I had that opportunity. (Grrrrr....)
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What he said.
Yeah, I thought the rules said one entry per person. Not one per musical entity. I would have done the same with my solo and band music. What gives?
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How does this not violate the contest rules?
As stated above, nice tune, so nothing against H the H, but I just went back and looked at the official contest rules that we had to agree to. You can find them at:
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2006/09/25/songsearch_terms/index.html
It's a little fuzzy, but if you go all the way to the bottom of the page there is a FAQ section that specifically says something about the possibility of entering more than one song if, say, you were a singer-songwriter and also in a band. The answer says "One song per person, please."
I guess you could say that it doesn't explicitly cover the H the H (The Stairs) situation, but, man, it really doesn't seem like it's in the spirit of the rules at the very least.
If I'm in a band and I write a song, and my band-mate submits another song, well, I guess you would have to say this is ok if you absolutely knew that my band-mate didn't have anything to do with writing the band's song. Given that Salon knows enough about H the H to say that they came from the ashes of The Stairs, maybe they know more about the song writing than the rest of us, but still...
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On today's Hallelujah the Hills entry
We looked into this during the entry period. As we understand it, the Stairs entry we received was sent in by a former Stairs member who is not in Hallelujah the Hills, so there would be no reason for us to reject the Hallelujah the Hills' entry on that basis. We did, however, rule out the Stairs entry, but spotlighted it a few weeks back because we thought it was worth a listen. We apologize for the confusion.
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Diebold?
I wish I could vote, but on my mac, in both Firefox and Safari, your voting doesn't seem to work. For what it's worth, I think HTHs kick ass, and voter disenfranchisement doesn't.
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HTH
Hallelujah the Hills, definitely. I've seen them both live (I'm a Bostonian), and while Eli certainly puts on a mean show he's sort of a one-trick pony. A genre artist. HtH is brilliant in all directions-- and only getting better.
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The Stairs have been defunct for over a year
The Stairs no longer exist. The phrasing in the Audiofile post is unclear-- I think it must mean that the Stairs entered in a previous contest. The HTH song didn't exist in the Stairs's repertoire. It's the eponymous song of HTH!
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straight up ripoff of There Goes My Baby
Is this contest some kind of East Coast circle-jerk?
I'll roll with you sounds like a art-school Blues Brothers reworking of the There Goes My Baby, minus a chorus.
And that other one? I've heard it before. Different band, different song name ... it's on the tip of my tongue.
Celebrity "pop music" bloggers?
Blog is the new wimp.
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Hi, maybe I can be of some assistance
An anonymous fellow wrote, "Does this mean my single entry could have been multiplied if I "disbanded" and reentered another song under a different band name?"
I think it's ridiculous to insinuate that the Stairs broke up so that they could enter two songs in this contest. That's absurd. The reason The Stairs broke up was only slightly more valid: half of the band was suddenly accepted to out-of-state graduate schools. Two of the members of that band went on to form Hallelujah The Hills. Evan Sicuranza, the author of The Stairs' "Welcome To Confusion", is NOT in Hallelujah The Hills.
I know this because I wrote the song "Hallelujah The Hills" and was instructed to do so while I was tied to a tree in the middle of a Massachusetts forest one night following a particularly exhilirating band practice.
I clued Evan into the existence of this contest but we entered our own songs seperately. Ironically, I also told Eli Reed, our competition this week, about this contest and he may very well end up beating us. So you can't blame me for spreading the word about this contest because I told friend and possible-competition-alike.
While Evan and I have been accused of sharing the same brain for years now, I am here to tell you that we are indeed both seperate, sentient beings with different goals, hopes, and dreams. Insinuating otherwise is not only ill advised...it's downright un-American.
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Eli Reed and the True Loves
Eli Reed blows the other band out of the water.
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Hallelujah The Hills
HTH's sound is new and clever, not some tired rehashed music that time moved beyond.
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Where is the angst?
Good God...this contest goes to show you how uninformed these judges are...so far it has gone from wimpy to wimpier...I submitted a song and so far I have heard nothing that is close to rockin' I would concede if there was something that had some ooommph...
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voting thingy is busted
It currently isn't working but my comment is that you should only allow one vote per computer or something. The first week was clearly rigged.
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need a new judas
This Hallelujah song sounds like Dylan goes electric crossed with some kind of junky marching band with the dood from Guided by voices on the mic. Awesome. Gonna play it on my radio show later today.
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Dear HTH Guy - Don't blame us for our confusion...
What at first appeared to be a little hinky, has now been made clear by Scott - sorta.
What Scott neglected to say is that the song highlighted a couple of weeks back by the Stairs did not indicate that it had been eliminated from eligibility (as they did for one of the other quality highlighted songs). I believe the line was more like, "Check out one of the cool entries while you are waiting for the contest to begin."
Your fellow contestants had no way of knowing that the Stairs song had been eliminated (unless there was something written in the comments - which I admittedly didn't read) and thus we were alarmed by today's announcement about HTH originating from the Stairs and somehow not falling afoul of the contest rules.
Regardless, a couple of good songs just make the world a little better no matter how you slice it. And the fact that the same group of artists can have both a highlighted song and a song in the final ten (out of almost 500 entries) is pretty amazing!