I’ve been wondering what to do with my cat’s ashes. Now I know, I’ll just cut her with some blow and do a few lines. [from AP]

Keith Richards has acknowledged consuming a raft of illegal substances in his time, but this may top them all. In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father’s ashes mixed with cocaine.
“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father,” Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.
“He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared,” he said. “… It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”
Richards’ father, Bert, died in 2002, at 84.
Richards, one of rock’s legendary wild men, told the magazine that his survival was the result of luck, and advised young musicians against trying to emulate him.
“I did it because that was the way I did it. Now people think it’s a way of life,” he was quoted as saying.
“I’ve no pretensions about immortality,” he added. “I’m the same as everyone … just kind of lucky.
“I was No. 1 on the ‘who’s likely to die’ list for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list,” Richards said.

Bright Eyes’ new record, Cassadaga, is out next week and we love what we’ve heard thus far, even if the cover concept sounds a bit cheesy. From Music Slut:

As one rep at his label, Saddle Creek explains: “The original concept as Conor Oberst and I discused it was to use a 3D stereogram, a ‘magic eye’ illusion, for the artwork, so if you stared at it the right way, images of pyramids would appear in 3D. The problem with this was that, especially with CD packaging, the stereogram would have to be very small. Also, there are some people who are not able to view magic eye images – myself included – and they would be losing out.”
“I did some hunting around for other options and found a company based in London who offer a patented process they developed called Focal Decoder that we ended up using. What we liked about this option was that it was very difficult to see anything of the hidden images without the decoder, it allowed a high level of detail in the hidden images and text, and it was a technique that we hadn’t seen anywhere before.”
“The hidden text was mostly written by Conor and translated into other languages by friends. The rest of the hidden text is magical in nature and from historical sources. I liked Conor’s idea of using different languages, so even after you use the decoder to view the text, you still have one more level before you can decipher the message. The ‘deluxe’ version of the CD and the vinyl LP have the most encoded images. The LP decoder is a larger size to accommodate the larger encoded panels. The design of the decoder was based on Conor’s idea of having it look like an antique scientific instrument.”

Here’s the cover and you can download some tracks here.

Afghan Whigs, ‚”Conjure Me”
Their retrospective is out next month. If there is a God, there will be a reunion tour.
-Cortney Harding

Their new record, Night of the Furies isn’t out until April 10th, but we’ve been enjoying The Rosebuds’ first single “Get Up, Get Out.” A bit reminiscent of Stars, it’s the perfect 80′s-inspired pop song for a dreary Monday morning. Aquarium Drunkard has the mp3 here.