Ok, so clearly I have been neglecting this poor blog, and that needs to stop.

Here’s the thing: My plan was for Ladysound to be mostly posts about awesome bands with women in them, written by people who love those bands*, with the occasional bit of analysis on women in music and such thrown in. But then, I thought it would be bad if the posts were too infrequent, so I started trying to keep up with bands that I don’t so much love as like a lot, so that I’d have more stuff to tell you all. Which was hard, because keeping track of bands is a lot of work if you don’t love them, and so then I got burnt out and the posts got really, seriously infrequent.

So! From this point forwards, I’m going to focus mainly on awesome bands that I am a huge fan of, which is what I should have been focusing on all along**. If I neglect some band that deserves more attention on here, then email me and offer to write about them for Ladysound, and I will almost certainly be overjoyed to add you to our contributors list.

In the more immediate future, look for a post this weekend about The Runaways [link has sound], which I saw yesterday and which has stuck in my head.

In the present/immediate past, I do not think I can recommend Ladypalooza over at Tiger Beatdown highly enough. It’s a series of posts on women and music by smart, funny, feminist bloggers, curated by Sady Doyle (the proprietress of Tiger Beatdown). It’s awesome. Seriously. Go read it.

*Or are in them, but if you’re in an awesome band than I’m hoping you love it, so this still covers you.
**There was a post on NxEW a while ago that helped make this clear to me, and I would totally link it, but I can’t find it now. Sorry.

Recently, I interviewed the fantabulous Ruth Minnikin via email. (You can listen to her while you read this through her CBC Radio 3 artist page).
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I can never resist a good “best of” list, and culture blog Flavorwire has come up with the 50 essential women-in-music albums, giving a short blurb for each album. It’s a pretty wide-ranging list, spanning a variety of styles and 50 years of music: from  Ella Fitzgerald’s first songbook album back in 1956 through to M.I.A.’s 2007 album Kala.  

I’m pleased to see a few of my personal favourites in there, including albums from Sarah McLachlan, Tori Amos and PJ Harvey.  There are a few others that didn’t make the cut that I’ve had on high rotation over the years, and are definitely on my essential list:

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Grant Lawrence interviewed Julie Fader on CBC Radio 3 yesterday.  If you want to know why she’s the “Polaris secret weapon,” you need to listen to this.

The wonderfully talented singer/songwriter/guitarist Aimee Mann will be touring Vancouver and the west coast of the US in early October (she’ll be playing the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver on October 8).  Mann’s been on the music scene for many years, and received wide mainstream acclaim with the release of the offbeat movie Magnolia back in 1999, the soundtrack to which she contributed 8 songs, including the gorgeously desperate “Save Me”.  Her songs have a lot of emotional depth with meaningful lyrics, haunting vocals and strong melodies.

Mann gets bonus points for her appearance on an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - she and her band played at The Bronze, and rocked Spike’s socks off with their performance of Pavlov’s Bell. 

If you’re on the west coast, don’t miss out on seeing her live.

Elle magazine has compiled a list of twelve of the greatest female electric guitarists ever.

It’s a pretty awesome list, but it doesn’t have any audio, so I’ve rounded up some sites with audio or video from all twelve (links after the jump).

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Check out the secret song char2d2 posted on her myspace page yesterday.  It’s only going to be there for another day, so don’t wait!

There’s a neat article on Broadsheet about some of the problems with how women musicians are often discussed.

It’s much better than that sentence made it sound.  Go read it.

The Refrain Side Project has covers/reimaginings of songs from new indie film Refrain by independent artists.  A lot of the artists who’ve participated so far are women who you might want to check out.  Also, they’re still looking for contributors.

CBC Radio 3 has put up an entire Special Edition Podcast on Women in Indie Music, hosted by Lisa Christiansen.  It includes tons of awesome music, a reprise of Amanda Ash’s interview-filled short documentary from earlier this summer, and interviews with Amanda Ash, Eli Leary (talking about Rock Girl Camp Vancouver), and me (talking about Ladysound).  I think it’s pretty awesome.  I even like the parts with other people, so it can’t be only because I like to hear myself talk.