Suffering from Olympic withdrawal? Counting the minutes till the Democratic convention kick off? Just plain sick of the broken-record rotation of CNN Headline News? Whoever said that news reporting would one day be distilled down to a Twitter message needs to make a lunch date with composer/performer Michael Hearst. He’ll raise you one and sing it back to you. His intentionally redundant “Songs for Newsworthy News” project offers subscribers sonically encapsulated reports on items of public interest–generally delivered in 30 seconds or less.
If Hearst’s name is news to your ears, you may want to dig around in his archives a bit. He first grabbed my attention when his band, OneRingZero, embraced their lyric-writing handicap and conned a bunch of famous-authors-you-might-recognize-from-B&N-bookshelves into contributing words to the ORZ music catalog. Any fears that he was a one-trick pony were laid to rest with the release of his more-than-just-quirky Songs for Ice Cream Trucks. Clearly, Hearst is a composer with a knack for spotting obscure instances of public need. If only the D.O.T. was this efficient at filling them in.