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Spotlight

Terrific Twitter Trio of the Week

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Lots of musicians tweet — but all that Twitters is not gold.

That’s why you’ll want to check out SPIN.com every Friday to see whose tweets we’re reading this week — then update your TweetDeck! (Obligatory Self-Promotion: …while you’re at it, be sure to follow @SPINmagazine!)

This week’s winners:

  • Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
    @EdwardSharpe

    Why You Should Follow: This energetic, 10-member collective has big plans for 2011. In March, lead singer Alex Ebert is releasing a solo album, Alexander, and embarking on a short U.S. tour (making a pit stop at SXSW along the way). After that, he’ll rejoin the band to finish recording their second album, which they plan to release sometime later this year. Whew! They’ll be tweeting through it all, using the @EdwardSharpe handle as a means of spreading news about both albums, as well as any other projects they decide to undertake. Look out for photos and videos of their concerts, words of wisdom (“Love yourself and Yourself will love”), and tweets so poetic they could be song lyrics (“Fresh springs a’swimmin an free music playin an my bicycle wheels spinnin in Austin my love”) — or excerpts from a really fascinating memoir (“Bonnaroo burnt thru and thru in hot-wet-air… expanding beyond our membranes, dripping apart with tense jaw and loose neck, smiling thru it”).

    Best Tweet of the Week: “A smile ear to ear carrying us from this year to next year.”

  • Peter Bjorn and John
    @peterbjornjohn

    Why You Should Follow: We’ve been longtime fans of this Swedish indie rock trio’s tweets, but we’ve been following them even more closely lately as they get ready to release a new album, Gimme Some, at the end of March. This album, they told us, will be a return to basics — and it looks like they’re taking that declaration pretty seriously. They’ve been carrying their gig equipment in plastic bags (or “gigbags,” as they call them) and hallucinating classic rock ‘n’ roll icons everywhere they look (“jesus! Think it was keith richards in the subway in stockholm just now!”). The journey to record Gimme Some was a long one, documented entirely on Twitter, where they asked fans for input on everything from track names (“ok, another song title problem. ‘breaker breaker’ or ‘dan backman sucks’?”) to ideas for the album cover, which apparently got everyone thinking dirty (“thanks for the tips folks! 3 cocks might be too hardcore for us&a and the vatican state though. But a pb&j sandwich is a great idea”). Expect more opportunities for collaboration — along with lots of funny anecdotes and Twitpics — as they begin touring North America and Europe in support of the album.

    Best Tweet of the Week: “We have made rock videos! It’s like short films but instead of actors or dinosaurs there’s a band playing music in it! Fresh!”

  • Discographies
    @Discographies

    Why You Should Follow: This anonymous tweeter has a knack for coming up with the perfect 140-character summary for every artist’s body of work, from Kanye West (“Kanye West: 1-3 ‘I was a good student.’ 4 ‘But after graduation, I got depressed.’ 5 ‘All I did was surf the web and listen to Meat Loaf'”) to Green Day (“Green Day: 1-2 ‘Retro-punk 4ever, dude! We’ll never sell out or slow down or write rock operas!’ 3 Sell out. 4-6 Slow down. 7-8 Rock operas”) to Josh Groban (“Josh Groban: 1-5 The magical pony yodelled ‘Bellissimo!’ as he flew the princess to a far-off land of completely unthreatening asexuality”). These summaries are so dead-on and hilarious that The Village Voice actually named Discographies as the most influential music critic of 2010 — and it seems like he or she has no intentions of slowing down in 2011. You can expect a new discography every couple of days or so — and yes, it’s okay to re-tweet them all.

    Best Tweet of the Week: It’s a tie between “Santana: san-?ta-n? v. (Archaic.) 1-17 to bloviate aimlessly while abusing a cowbell; 18-21 to mask inadequacy with mediocre guest stars” and “XTC 1-12, Guided By Voices 1-15, Teenage Fanclub 1-9: ‘You don’t need to reinvent the wheel in order to make a really nice set of tires.'”