Having allowed fans to decide how much its latest album is worth, Radiohead is now allowing them to shape how its new single, “Nude,” will sound. The British band, which let fans name their own price for downloading “In Rainbows” last fall, is posting five component tracks, or “stems,” from the single for purchase on iTunes. That will let them remix the stems to their own liking, or add beats, instruments or audio effects of their choosing.

The band wants fans then to upload finished remixes to www.radioheadremix.com, where other Radiohead fans can listen and then vote for a favorite. Voting runs through May 1. Remixers can also enable voting from their own websites, MySpace or Facebook pages that will count toward their vote total at Radiohead’s remix site. A spokeswoman for the band said it’s not meant to be a competition, and at least as of now, there’s no prize for the winner.

A statement issued Tuesday by the band said the stems for the song’s vocal, guitar, bass, drum and strings/effects tracks are compatible with a variety of music mixing software programs. People who buy all five stems during the first week they’re available will get an access code to a file that can be opened with certain software applications.

– Randy Lewis

Photo of Thom Yorke by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs… It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they’d heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

“It is Maxim’s editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers.”

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Yes, Rihanna’s enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of “Umbrella” on last night’s Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons’ biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna’s been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There’s a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn’t the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
–August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches’ “Who’s Got the Crack” (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band’s Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the “Juno” soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film’s title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork’s inexplicable adoration of “Person Pitch,” seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

– August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]