Tonight's guests are Sonia Nazario on The Daily Show and Beck on The Colbert Report.
Sonia Nazario is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist focusing on social issues and author of national best-selling book Enrique's Journey. Enrique's Journey is very relevant to current events here in the US since it is about immigration.
Enrique’s Journey recounts the unforgettable quest of a Honduran boy looking for his mother, eleven years after she is forced to leave her starving family to find work in the United States. Braving unimaginable peril, often clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains, Enrique travels through hostile worlds full of thugs, bandits, and corrupt cops. But he pushes forward, relying on his wit, courage, hope, and the kindness of strangers. As Isabel Allende writes: “This is a twenty-first-century Odyssey. If you are going to read only one nonfiction book this year, it has to be this one.”
It was originally released in 2007 but has been re-released with a new Epilogue and Afterword, photos of Enrique and his family, an author interview, and more. We will definitely be talking about immigration tonight.
Beck is a musician, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. I was in high school when Loser came out (21 years ago, where the hell did the time go?).
Critics, feeling it the essential follow-up to Radiohead's "Creep", found vacantness in the lyrics of "Loser" strongly associated with Generation X, although Beck himself strongly contested his position as the face of the "slacker" generation: "Slacker my ass. I mean, I never had any slack. I was working a $4-an-hour job trying to stay alive. That slacker stuff is for people who have the time to be depressed about everything."
His sound has always been his sound and he is not really tied down to a genre. He released a new album
Morning Phase back in February of this year and he will be releasing another new album tomorrow.
Beck Hansen was hardly idle during the six-year lapse between 2008’s Modern Guilt and the recent, excellent Morning Phase, using some of that time away from the studio to concentrate on finishing a longtime labour of love: a sheet-music “album” entitled Song Reader.
From the moment Song Reader was first published in December 2012, Beck has insisted he had no real interest in recording the 20 songs gathered therein himself but in hearing what other musicians — both professional and amateur — would do with them. And while he’s caved to playing a few of those tunes with the help of guest artists in dedicated performances here and there, he remains very much a spectator on the new Song Reader compilation, sitting back as co-producer while everyone from Jack White and Jack Black to jazz guitarist Marc Ribot and electro-pop iconoclasts Sparks has a go at the material.
Beck tackles just a single track on the Song Reader album, the sumptuously psychedelic and somewhat Beatlesque “Heaven’s Ladder.” It’s a bit of a tease since, predictably, it’s the best of the 20 wildly eclectic cuts here, proving that nobody really knows how to sell a Beck song better than Beck. But that’s not the point of this exercise, is it? Beck wrote these songs to be interpreted by others and, as he put it in 2012 to McSweeny’s: “There are no rules in interpretation.”
Beck’s Song Reader album: CD review
Last night, during his concert at the Providence Performing Arts Center, Beck was joined by a very special guest: Jack White. The two performed "Loser", "Pay No Mind", and finished with "Where It's At". For that last track, the two men were also accompanied by Sean Lennon on tambourine. Jack White Joins Beck for "Loser", "Where It's At", "Pay No Mind"
This Weeks's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Tu 7/29: Sara Firth
We 7/30: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Th 7/31: Aubrey Plaza
THE COLBERT REPORT
Tu 7/29: Jon Batiste & Stay Human
We 7/30: James Franco
Th 7/31: Campbell Brown