With all things familiar several hundred miles south, it was hard to ignore the absence of a go-to friend, someone to talk to about nothing and everything. Attempting to look on the bright side, I set a few goals for the months ahead. In order of importance: be more open-minded, do not hesitate if something intrigues me, and get more sleep.

In a matter of days, I arrived to class well-rested with an open mind, and voila, something intrigued me. Now for the detailed and non-sugar-coated version, I was actually lingering in the hallway outside of my first graduate-level business class. Well beyond five minutes late, I stood in the doorway, peering into a room full of men who were wearing suits and unamused expressions. Just before I took my seat, out of the corner of my eye, I was sure I had spotted a smile on the face of a stranger who was a dead-ringer for James Marsden. In a matter of seconds I politely acknowledged the return of my sixteen year-old self and waved goodbye to the shred of focus I hoped I could muster up for the remainder of this three-hour business class.

Not surprisingly, I have absolutely no idea what was covered in class that night, since I instead occupied my time conjuring up a socially acceptable opening line, given the fact that I had absolutely nothing to ask or tell. Inquiring about class was out, primarily because it is so uninteresting that I myself would stay clear of anyone who did. Besides, I was not paying attention. The three seconds of eye contact were not a justifiable basis either, since a late arrival to this class is analogous to a bomb detonating in any other place. Lastly, asking anything remotely personal would deem me a desperate stalker.

I had read “The Secret” on a flight to Colorado, momentarily enchanted at the ability to will things into your life through thought. About 20 pages in, I tucked that book into the seat-back pocket in front of me, for good. I was uninterested and harshly critical of anyone who fell for it, but I must admit that I did secretly and strongly hope that I would be assigned to the same semester project group as this person. Based on my amusing-to-others but horrible luck with scratch-off lottery tickets and fortune cookies, this was probably unlikely. So, either I have a new-found supernatural ability, or fate knew that I could have really used a friend. Our names were called and with a few minutes left in class, we were instructed to cover introductions and a very brief brainstorming session.

I do not remember the exact words we exchanged that night, but I know his were sharp and captivating. I also know that I probably overlooked some clever pun or enlightened retort, but I would soon hear my fair share. Over the next couple of weeks, I began to look forward to our conversations, entertained and at ease regardless of length or topic. Rather than your usual inattentive “checking in” repartee, we dove into sincere and purposeful thoughts, genuinely interested in what the other was saying, and able to pick up where we had left off.

Still, there was no rush to divulge every detail just yet, but rather we were revealing and discovering the little things at a slow, refreshing pace. Yes, I am still talking about a friendship, and one in which I was learning a lot about myself.

For example, I had made a comment about a friend in my past—quite cavalier in her regard for me—who had recently resurfaced and attempted to fortify the remains of our friendship.

My new friend urged me to tread carefully around anyone who questioned my passions or my choices. He said there was nothing wrong with cutting my losses. I hadn’t quite realized how great of an impact my new friend had made in such a short amount of time. That is likely because most of our conversations take place over drinks, each time at yet another bar he recommended, citing each as ‘perfect’. It turns out, he has a knack for discovering places that are everything you want and nothing you don’t, as far as bars go. Lively crowds, but pleasantly absent of annoyingly loud, over-dressed girls. Great music—as in a song you love, followed by a song you forgot you loved, without a hint of Britney Spears or Kanye West. In these places, it never takes more than a minute or two to get a drink, poured by a bartender in a wish-I-saw-it-first t-shirt. Just as promised: perfection.

I also treasure the always adventurous commute to our post-class drinks, which have become an excellent pre-established Thursday night tradition and the highlight of my week. As a side note, I am thoroughly impressed by my friend’s ability to dispense such thoughtful advice while holding on for dear life, contemplating whether to speak up to a female New Jersey driver who blatantly lies about having a good sense of direction.

Grateful for the rather frightening realization that I needed to make friends quickly in my new life, I took a chance, let my guard down, and discovered that it is possible to find a genuine friendship at this stage in life. What’s more, the rules of being friends with the opposite sex have, as far as I’m concerned, gone out the window.

Certainly I thought it naive to be unable to find fault in someone, but I knew this was nothing like the fast friendships I had made in the past. Those were usually with girls, and were based on some trivial set of values, masquerading as common interests. It was nothing like a high school boyfriend where passing notes and going to the movies on Fridays constituted a relationship. Instead of bonding over some shared activity, we became friends with each other because of who we are.

I have no problem admitting that I have outgrown many friendships from my past, but only recently did it occur to me that most of those friends were girls. At the risk of oversimplifying my logic, it is nothing more than the fact that guys do not “do” drama, are straightforward when I ask for advice, and they can “cut to the chase” so to speak. rather than exhausting the details of every single minute of the day. Also, a love of whiskey probably factors in here.

For now, at a time when life is and should be somewhat ‘up in the air’ I find no comfort in the adage that things will get better with time. Rather, life throws you into times when each day is just as harrowing as the one before it, and you have to actively pursue people and passions that make the day worthwhile. What works for me is the reminder that after a long week of work, where papers replace parties and reading replaces sleeping; something as routine as a Thursday night business class is actually all I really need. The truth is, regardless of what is splashed across yet another PowerPoint presentation, I get to see my new friend and for a couple of hours, everything else sort of fades.

Black Ink (Beacon Hill: 101 Charles St. and Harvard Square: 5 Brattle St, Cambridge)

If you’re looking for something truly unique for that impossible-to-buy-for person, Black Ink should be your first stop. Hawking everything from a koi chopstick rest set to a space-agey magazine rack to a charcoal essence infused body towel, you can pick up cool kitchen utensils and old-school toys in the same fun to wander through store.

J. Press (Harvard Square: 82 Mt. Auburn St, Cambridge)

For the boyfriend, brother or even dad who is always dressed to the nines, J. Press in Harvard Square will outfit him perfectly (and, P.S., we’re jealous). They carry a wide range of ties for under $60, as well as classy cufflinks, sweaters, belts and other accessories. Consider it the new J. Crew for guys only.

Looney Tunes Records (1106 Boylston St.)

Those uber-hip Berklee kids duck into Looney Tunes for old LPs and every CD you could wish for. A little bit chaotic, but a music junkie’s dream, Looney Tunes is perfect for that friend who never takes off his headphones. Bonus: a lot of cheap finds are to be had.

Poor Little Rich Girl (Davis Square: 255 Elm St, Somerville and 166 Newbury St.)

This vintage and consignment store is where to go for your best girl friend, your girlfriend, or your eternally cool grandmother. Stocking designer dresses, vintage clothes and accessories from the 1940s-80s, classic apartment furnishings, contemporary stores’ clothing and more, there is no girl who won’t find a treasure here.

Oak (245 Newbury St.)

Consider this your one-stop shop for pretty much everyone on your list. Oak is an eclectic store with goods ranging from classy to crazy. We love the sterling silver scrabble letter necklace and the gin and tonic soap as well as the mix tape pillow and the Apple command key ring. Shop here for your techie boyfriend, glamorous girlfriend, parents, siblings, you name it. You can also find one-of-a-kind gifts for the kiddos in your life, like crocheted hand puppets and make-your-own plush monster kits. Plus, if you somehow don’t find what you need at Oak, you’ve still got the rest of Newbury at your disposal.

Formaggio Kitchen (244 Huron Ave, Cambridge)

If you haven’t been to Formaggio Kitchen yet, you’re so not our friend. Nationally known as a distinctive and delicious gourmet cheese shop, Formaggio is the perfect place to spend afternoon hours or to pick up the perfect gift for your favorite foodie or holiday party hostess. Here you’ll find hundreds of imported cheeses from around the world, as well as local favorites. They sell freshly made (and astoundingly delicious) baked goods as well as crackers, wine, jams, chocolate, produce and more. The shop is small, so try to duck in on a weekday afternoon to avoid the shoulder to shoulder crowds.

Blue Cloud Gallery (Ball Square: 713 Broadway, Somerville)

Looking for something artsy and unique? Blue Cloud has it. Carrying works by over 90 artisans, many local, this shop is perfect for someone like mom, who really deserves something special (especially if you still do your laundry at home). They stock beautiful pieces of pottery and glass blown decorations. Pick up some stunning photo tiles to give as coasters or a piece of handmade jewelry. Either way, pick something up here.

Know of any other great places to find holiday gifts? Comment below with your favorites and help other Blasties navigate the holiday minefield!

Eaton has found an artist’s office job — a management position that calls for raw creativity and that satisfies both her idealism and her longing for community. She is Project Manager of Outside the Lines, an art-based day program for adults with developmental disabilities run out of a giant warehouse on the Tufts University campus. The people served by O.T.L. are not simply given art projects to do, they are managed as artists — it is both a workshop and a gallery space in which participants’ artwork graces the walls and gets sold at shows.

“We’re different from other programs,” Eaton explains, “because a lot of them are work-related programs where people mostly just do piece work.”

O.T.L. is an experimental offshoot of the nonprofit organization, Resources for Human Development (R.H.D.). “We call ourselves an ‘alternative day program.’ We give them work that’s more meaningful, I would say.”

Eaton and the staff she oversees are different from most social workers. They are themselves, artists, and they know how to treat their clients as such. Everyone in the building shares the same talents and obsessions, and they enjoy learning from one another.

“Hiring artists works, because we’re all sensitive, we’re intuitive. We’re free with them, and we can treat them like human beings, rather than, like, ‘You’re a patient and we’re going to analyze you,’ we can just be like ‘We are who we are and you are who you are,’ and we appreciate them for that.”

Eaton is 30 years old. She is tall, and although she is soft-spoken, her stature and her constant state of calm make her a convincing figure of authority. She could not, however, be easily mistaken for corporate. While her office is the only closed room with a desk in the scattered warehouse, her speech and dress are informal. Today, she wears a short skirt over a pair of jeans, a dark blouse and a colorful silk scarf.

Eaton was not always specifically drawn to working with the disabled. She has, however, always been an artist. Before O.T.L., she struggled to find an artistic community that felt like home. At Mount Holyoke College, she majored in art and anthropology, and while these disciplines excited her, the “art crowd” she discovered, did not.

A painting by Jose DeJesus, who was awarded “Best in Show” in a recent statewide exhibition at the capitol building for his piece Man from Burma

“I actually got really fed up with the whole ‘Art World.’ It can be really inclusive, if you’re in it. People are making pieces that are speaking to other artists—meaning that those other artists have prior knowledge of art history, or contemporary artists — rather than having an original vision of how to express themselves, with the idea that they can reach people through what they’re creating.

“But art for me is really just doing a thing that I like. Something that I feel like I always have to do — is part of my life in some way. I have to manipulate materials and make pretty things — well not necessarily pretty, but visually interesting. When I was at school though, I got involved with that whole scene.”

Eaton spent her junior year studying photography in Florence, Italy. Her exploration of this new medium combined with her experience abroad and her studies in anthropology led to a new inspiration.

“I wanted to travel, I wanted to tell people about what’s going on in the world through art. I was idealistic, and I did do that for a while. I did travel the world and take pictures. I went to Southeast Asia. I went to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos. That was pretty awesome. It was really amazing.”

Before long, however, she ran into a barrier. Just as she hadn’t been able to connect with what she perceived as the art world, she came to feel that photojournalism prevented her from connecting with the people she found on her travels.

“I took pictures. I mean, I had my camera with me. I was a person with a camera. People would ask me for money for taking their pictures. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t what I really wanted to do.”

Back from the States and out of college, Eaton continued to pursue her skills where she could, but there was a lot missing. “I was working for a jewelry designer and working as a house painter,” she recalls with a laugh, “so the stuff I was doing was kind of isolating and I really felt like working on my own artwork was self-indulgent. I really wanted to be able to reach out to people and be creative.”

Eaton heard about O.T.L. from a friend who worked there before it had a management structure. She began on the floor, as a “Direct Support Professional,” and was prompted once R.H.D. decided a manager was necessary. Her first breakthrough with an artist did not come while working on an art project, but it did call for an important kind of creativity. She was working with a woman known for acting out.

“If she’s not getting what she wants she’ll do temper tantrum kinds of things like, screaming and whining. So she started to do that one day, and I started whining back, and I made it into like, oh, you sound like a seagull,’ Eaton remembers, laughing. “And it totally just threw her off. She thought it was hilarious. So she started doing it in a way where she was calling like a seagull, and then I was calling back like a seagull, and it was just really funny.”

Eaton calls this “redirecting,” and it is central to the work of O.T.L. where one of the defining practices in working with the developmentally disabled is never to punish, never to provide negative attention. As much as in designing art projects, this is where the creativity and sensitivity of the artist are called upon. It’s about finding ways to make abnormal behavior OK, to laugh together and direct focus back to the shared value of art-making. This seems to be exactly the atmosphere Eaton has been searching for, and she is not alone.

“There is a strong feeling of community here,” says Allison Stroh, an Art Therapist, recently hired for the ‘Direct Support’ role. “Everyone here feels part of it. When Else walks in, all of the artists smile. She has a million tricks up her sleeve to make them feel at ease. Meanwhile, she’s got me singing, dancing, working on giant monsters– stuff I never thought I’d get to do at work.”

“We really try to make it so that everyone here just feels comfortable being who they are. No matter who they are,” says Eaton. You know we’re all awkward and weird in some ways and we just let that be. Both the staff and the clients, their personalities really come out here.”

Outside of Eaton’s office, a heavyset man wearing an unattached pair of earphones is showing off his brand new cowboy boots — from L.L. Bean, he boasts — to a bespectacled twenty-something in skinny jeans. The subject exhausted, he shows off his latest glowing cityscape. The kid looks impressed. So does The Hulk.

We in Generation Y had it good. We saw the emergence of the sourest candies ever made, while the good old candies you could choke on were still there.

From our sugary amazingnesses to favorite fast food, here’s a list of 10 things that taste like our childhood.

1. Airheads

The originals are still available. (Media credit/Travis Hornung/Flickr)

After taffy, there were Airheads. These babies are flattened sugar with artificial flavoring. Mmmm.

Manufactured by Perfetti Van Melle of Erlanger, Kentucky for the past two decades, the mini ones are a tease, but the big, full size, foil-packaged Airheads really do bring back memories. You could get more than one for a dollar at the concession stand at the little league field. Watermelon is particularly good, but we also remember the sour varieties and the odd “white” Airhead.

Kids today know of Airheads because they’ve done a Spongebob variety and in 2007 and 2008, a new “BerryHot” flavor gets warm in your mouth, and “Chillin” flavors are supposed to have a “cold” feeling. They aren’t the same. The originals are still available, and that’s all that matters.

2. Play-Doh

You know you went for it at least once. (Media credit/WikiMedia)

You don’t have to admit that you might have nibbled on the product of your Fun Factory. It’s OK. You ate the Doh. We know it.

We didn’t have clay growing up. We had Play-Doh. Originally created in the 1940s as a wallpaper cleaner, the makers soon realized kids were playing with it. Play-Doh was born. The product may have had its golden age slightly before our generation, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single kid our age (and by kid, we mean mid 20s) that didn’t play with Play-Doh growing up.

And don’t worry; it’s non-toxic.

3. Atomic Fireballs

15 million Fireballs are consumed weekly (Media credit/pgh_shutter/Flickr)

Round, red, hot. Nello Ferrara’s 1954 contribution to the candy world was extremely popular in the 80s and 90s when we were sucking them down, and we might still be found trying to talk to our boss with an Atomic Fireball that leaves our mouth red.

The company claims that 15 million atomic fireballs are consumed by Americans every week.

This is one of those things that, when we’re 50, we can tell our kids that “back in our day, Atomic Fireballs were a nickel. A NICKEL!”

Atomic Fireballs are part of the Jawbreaker family. There are also four flavors of Atomic Sourball.

4. Plastic

Everything we touched was made of plastic. (Media credit/Kat Gloor/Flickr)

Sippy cups. Action figures. Furniture. Buttons. Pens. Soda bottles. Baby dolls.

Almost every freakin thing we touched — and subsequently put in our months — as kids was made of plastic.

We were born in the plastic revolution. Do you know what they used to use before plastic? GLASS!

We didn’t use glass. The only things made of glass back in our day were Gatorade bottles.

One Blast editor said she can’t smell plastic without thinking of her Glo Worm, which she’d always have in her mouth as a child.

Plastic has since been vilified. You don’t even see plastic bags at the supermarket anymore.

5. Fundip and Pixy Stix

Pure, tooth-rotting sugar (Media credit/WikiMedia)

This is candy. Pure, tooth-rotting sugar that will make you bounce off the walls 20 minutes before you pass out from the crash.

Fun Dip has been on the market since 1942, when it was called Lik-M-Aid. We remember the stick is called Lik-A-Stix. It was white and flavorless, and that’s how we liked it. Willy Wonka Candy Company ruined Fun Dip by making the stick flavored in the modern era.

Fun Dip is the same sugar as Pixy Stix. Three flavors come in a package, separated, of course. The stick becomes a yucky mess.

Good times.

6. Candy Cigarettes

I never got the urge to smoke. (Media credit/WikiMedia)

In 1991 the government tried to ban candy cigarettes.

They failed, but the fun chalky pretend cigarettes with a red tip are all but gone now. The bubblegum ones were not very good because the paper tasted, well, like paper. The chalky candy ones were fun to suck on and pretend we were having a good ol’ smoke.

I never had the urge to actually smoke because of candy cigarettes.

According to Wikipedia, candy cigarettes are banned Finland, Norway, Ireland, Turkey and Saudi Arabia .

Still, it was fun to buy a pack whenever the ice cream truck came up the hill when I was a kid.

7. McDonald’s French Fries

Hey Jimmy, what did you win in the Monopoly game? OBESITY! (Media credit/Scorpions and Centaurs/Flickr)

McDonald’s used to cook with trans fats. I think it even used animal fat before our time.

French fries are God-awful for you. Dietitians will tell you that they’re one of the worst things you could possibly consume.

Fuck that.

OK, so I have gone a whole year without eating a single French fry, but McDonald’s French fries are the best French fries in the world, perhaps second only to the Glenwood Drive-In in Hamden, Connecticut.

They’ve tasted the same since we were kids. They’re delicious, and we’re all fat today because of them.

But…memories…

8. Big League Chew

It comes in a pouch! Cool! You mean they make tobacco in a pouch too? Gross! (Media credit/thinkjose/Flickr)

Here’s another attempt by big tobacco to get kids hooked, right?

Horseshit.

The only bad thing about Big League Chew was that the taste didn’t last very long, and you always had to go “dipping” for more.

The original was good, but I always bit down on a big wad of watermelon when I was on the pitcher’s mound in my little league glory days. My teeth ache at the memory of chewing down on a golf ball-sized wad of gum.

9. Sunny Delight

I don’t know what’s in Sunny D. I don’t wanna know what’s in Sunny D. All I know is that it was better than soda, OJ and that purple stuff, and it’s got healthy junk in it.

10. Old-School Doritos

75 cents! Back in my day!

Jesus Christ, is it any wonder we’re all out of shape?

But do you remember old-school Doritos? Before “Nacho Cheesier” and “Collisions” came to be? Back when it was just a cheesy corn chip?

Really, all you needed were Doritos, Fritos, some pretzels and maybe some Smartfood Popcorn, and you’ve got yourself a party!

There were some failed experiments. Remember Doritos 3D?

Plus, Doritos always has great Superbowl commercials.

What did I miss? Share your favorite reminiscent tastes in the comments section!

Blast columnist Lindsay Milgroom and writers Sam Peters and Brooklynne Peters contributed to this report

Whatever the reasons, there are plenty of fine alternatives to the old brandy-in-egg-nog mixture that I can never seem to think about without throwing up a little in my mouth.

I found some cocktails that not only whet the whistle, but they just give you that warm, fuzzy, holiday feeling. You know, the kind that makes you forget you troubles like that speeding ticket from the Statey who didn’t want to hear your lame ass excuses on the Pike, or the hot blonde with the rack that never called you back last week, even though she seemed totally excited when you bought her a drink down at one of the Faneuil Hall bars and gave you her number before her giggling gaggle of girlfriends dragged her to the next bar.

Drink up, my friends.

If you happen to find yourself down in Dot, don’t miss the Ashmont Grill. Not only is the food great and the service fantastic, but the drinks shouldn’t be missed. The Berkshires Manhattan is a vanilla-infused bourbon mixed with apple cider reduction, Markers Mark, and orange bitters. This one is really different because is mixes the flavors and really hits the pallet. And one for you rummies: The Ashmont Apple Toddy is steamed apple cider, brown sugar, and Captain Morgan.

If you really want to try something wacky, and a little scary at first glance, UNI Sashimi Bar in The Eliot Hotel on Comm. Ave. has a $17 346 Below. Its Hammer & Sickle Vodka straight up with liquid nitrogen. By the way, if you drank liquid nitrogen straight, youd die, so dont try to copy this one at your next party.

For a hint of high class, UNI also has the Monarda: St. Remy Cognac, bergamot syrup, whiskey bitters and a splash of Louis Bouillot Cremant be Bourgogne (a pink sparkler).

If you’re a fan of pumpkin pies and all those great holiday desserts and need a cocktail to pair with them, head north to Za Za in Saugus. The Pumpkin Patch Martini combines vanilla vodka, pumpkin spice liquor, cream de cacao, and pumpkin pie filling and finishes it with a dollop of whipped cream and a candy corn to create a great spiced after dinner drink that’s good with dessert. But lets be real, youre really going to Saugus to scoff down some Sonic burgers. If you class it up at Za Za afterward, we wont tell anyone.

Back on the subject of rum for a minute, I always lumped rum in with tequila as a summer booze. Its in those hilarious buckets of booze you can buy at the supermarket, and you put it in daiquiris. And I do enjoy the occasional Captain and Diet. But I never really thought of rum as something to reach for during the cold weather months. Burtons Grill in Fenway found a way to change my mind. The Burtons Hot Buttered Cider combines Captain Morgan, Stoli Gala Apple, Navan Cognac, apple cider, cinnamon, sugar, and butter and makes something that will warm your stomach. Its $9 and available through December 31. Heres how you can make it yourself:

For one drink, you need:

75 oz Captain Morgan
.25 oz Navan Cognac
.5 oz Stoli Gala Apple
1 oz Monin Cinnamon Simple Syrup
6 oz Hot Apple cider
1 100 scoop of whipped butter (yes, actual butter)
Cinnamon sugar rimmer

In an Irish coffee mug, rim with cinnamon sugar. Combine all ingredients except butter in mug. Stir to mix. Garnish with a scoop of butter.

John M. Guilfoil runs BlastMagazine.com and is a freelance news reporter in Boston. He can be reached at guilfoil.j@blastmagazine.com.

I only had a few short days in Liege, and my first day was set in the typical rainy Belgian weather, a cool reminder of the oncoming autumn season and which added an aura of mystique. Set in the valley of the River Meuse, and hemmed in by its foothills, the quaint narrow streets are filled with pubs and snack shops. Pommes frites — French fries — are a common craving amongst the citizens. Famous for its chocolates and beers, the Belgian Blue Beef and wines for even the pickiest connoisseur are not to be skipped. There are modern shopping markets, palaces and judicial buildings and outdoor amphitheaters.

I met some friends and colleagues who were also over for the Gare du Liege festivities, and our first night was spent enjoying the above mentioned delights at a Spanish-named, Italian restaurant named La Cantina. The food was rustic and flavorful, with fresh seafood and tender beef cuts. Outside in the courtyard a table of children colored, and upon exploring, boasted to me of their abilities to speak Japanese and English, as well as their native French and German. There are a number of restaurants that feature an inner, courtyard-style garden, and our second meal together brought us into the cozy but modern ambiance of Jardin des Begards. Again the service, and tasty treats were unforgettable, the lighting swirled in colors around you, nothing was quite the same any time you glanced up and our meal felt a bit like a grown-up version of the Mad Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland, complete with a lovely round-faced Cheshire Cat chattering in the garden for his deserved attention, and receiving well his worth.

With the weather clearing the rest of the trip into crisp sunny days, and the sun glistening off the Meuse, our group set out to explore the city and was drawn to some of the cathedrals. Religion has always maintained a high importance to the city; with the ruling party typically a Prince-Bishop, a great number of cathedrals have been constructed for over 1,000 years. As a result of the constant process of wars and rebuilding, the city has a highly developed Archeoforum, which is a result of nearly 100 years of archaeological excavation and contains remains dating as far back as the Paleolithic era. The charismatic Cathedral St Bartholomew which is the oldest dating back to 1015 boasts a festive red and white icing-like paint job and a variety of influences ranging from Romanesque to Neoclassical. The grand gothic-like St. Paul’s Cathedral dates from the same era, but with major renovations throughout time has taken on the character of the famed Parisian Cathedrals. Near the foot of St. Bartholomew is a climb of 400 steps along a stairway called “Montagne de Bueren,” leading from Hors-Château to the Citadel. Once atop the city, the view overlooking the valley showcases the river, and ranges from the Gare du Liege at the foot of the Cointe Hills to the city-centre. The Citadel is now home to a modern hospital complex, but the brick and mortar remains of its original duty still stand guard and offer a fascinating glimpse into Liege’s strategic quality recognized by her founders.

On the outskirts of the city in the Seraing district, known for its factories and steelwork, there is a lasting reminder of the religious age, allowing for the tradition of great handcrafted arts to survive, in what was once a great Cathedral and later convent. The Crystal factory of Val St. Lombard is nearly a lost art. Here, crystal glass is sculpted into delicacies for your home. Artists create their glassware or artworks from scratch, a hands-on process from the mixing of the powders to creating the molten crystal and finally spinning a vase from the kiln like a skillful Pied Piper. The steel industry made a lasting mark on the area, and there are still a handful of operating factories and signs of the industrial age, but the economy has shifted to studies of chemistry and biology with a large number of Liege’s residents being college students.

Liege has an obvious significant historical value, dating back to Charlemagne and the Middle Ages, when the city was home to his mother. A signifying reason was accessibility and topography along the invaluable River Meuse. The river is not only a trading route, but home to many nautical-know-hows in the colorful varieties of barge-meets-houseboat. The rolling, tree-lined river valley showcasing the charming, eclectic mix of architecture and creates a gingerbread landscape, nestling the city inside hills and popularizing the city as an effective defense against enemy forces during the wars. The Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest skirmish American forces saw in WWII was fought near the city, and around the city there are a multiple of monuments to those who lost lives in all battles.

The new Calatrava-forged Gare du Liege was constructed over an arduous 12 years, built over the existing, continuously-operating, original train station. The project cost 245 million Euros to upgrade the track system, allowing for high speed train accessibility. The result re-centers Liege as a key transportation hub which in turn revitalizes the city. The final result was a sculptural masterpiece of steel and concrete, softly mimicking the undulating hills and taking on almost as if by osmosis the magical charm of its new home. Coinciding with the beginning of the Festival of Wallonia in the district of Liege, the inauguration boasted a never before seen performance by Frank Dragone and performers of Cirque du Soleil fame, employing many local dancers and talents, and reminiscent of the Olympics opening ceremonies acts. There was a reception in which many local dignitaries and government officials attended, and the performance, set on the train track platforms, and included trapeze artists, ballet, opera, fireworks, and a handful of trick-pony horsemen. There were large, projected images of video footage showing the construction of the station, highlighting the proud citizens bringing the arcs to life. There was sincerity, and a celebration. As with any Cirque du Soleil performance, but especially here, in Liege, at a train station, the music, lighting and performances were exhilarating and sealed Liege as one of my fondest memories.

Blast caught up with the young starlet to hear about her upcoming debut album and her lead role in the Broadway production of “Dreamgirls,” which premieres on November 22 at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and will continue on a 14-city tour throughout the country.

BLAST: What was it like to achieve the sudden success brought on by “American Idol?”

SYESHA MERCADO: It was crazy! It was such a journey and a roller coaster ride. I learned a lot about myself and about what I want my image to be. I met so many amazing people and made a lot of great friends. It was an amazing experience all around, and I am very grateful for it.

BLAST: Tell us about your upcoming album. What was the inspiration for it? What can fans expect to hear? When will it be coming out?

SM: I’ve been writing since elementary school; I’ve kept journals. All of my experiences in life have been incorporated into my music. It’s high energy, pop crossover. It tells the story of my life. It’ll be released sometime after the Broadway tour is over. I’ve been so grateful to be able to work with producers like Chris Rojas, Scott Cutler, REO (who produced Beyonce’s “Hello”), Andrew Dixon, and Evan Bogart. Soon I’ll be working with Eric Hudson and Toby Gad, and I’m really looking forward to it.

BLAST: You are quoted as saying, �As an artist, I believe experiences provide musicians with the inspiration for their music.� Could you tell us about an experience that has inspired your music?

SM: I’m inspired by love, relationships, the people around me, my family. I’m away from my family a lot, so I like to think about the good things and the good times. Being on the road inspires me, nature inspires me. My freshman year of high school, my house caught on fire. It really brought up lots of emotions and made me appreciate the small things.

BLAST: Tell us about your upcoming role in the stage production of “Dreamgirls.” Does the role of Deena Jones hold any significance to you? What is the most exciting part of being in a Broadway show for you?

SM: I can relate with every character, I think. People have many sides. Throughout the play, my character finds herself, and I can relate to that. I have lived that aspect of having a dream and working hard to achieve it. My character has a special place in my heart.

Being in the moment on stage is exciting to me. I’m inspired by the actors I work with, and by my the audience. That’s the beauty and the magic of theater: the show is different every time, it evolves. I’m moved and inspired by the audience. It’s amazing that the show is opening up at the Apollo. I am so excited to be performing there. I can feel the energy and the presence of the people who have performed there before, like Ella Fitzgerald and Michael Jackson. It’s an honor and a privilege. I’m so excited!

BLAST: What is a typical day like for you now?

SM: It’s different every day. Today I found out I have a revised schedule. We’re doing a costume parade, and I’ve never done one before. We wear our costumes and have our hair and makeup done — I wear 17 wigs! We parade across the stage and the director, stage manager and costume designer make sure everything looks right. There’s lots of standing and walking around. But there’s an amazing energy. I love being around all the other actors who love performing, too. I love it, I love the energy. And everyone’s so nice!

BLAST: What would you say to someone who has dreams of becoming a professional actor or singer?

SM: I’ve learned that you have to go after what you want, no matter what. Something’s gonna happen, there are going to be obstacles, but that’s life. You’ve got to keep going. No one is going to work harder for you than you. Be positive and it’ll happen. Oh, and practice! Practice is important.

BLAST: What do you think of the fact that Paula Abdul isn’t coming back to “American Idol?”

SM: I think it’s sad; I really love her. She was the motherly one, she really cared about us, and she was very sincere. She’d give us gifts and pep talks. Ellen (DeGeneres) is cool, too, though. She’ll be a good voice for the public, for people who watch the show but who aren’t singers. She’ll do well,� she’s so funny.

Want more of Syesha? Follow her on Twitter, @syesha, and become friends with her on MySpace.

Happy freaking Halloween. Now listen to three of our hungover editors talk about what’s in Blast this month.

�This isn�t a one trick pony,� Adler said about the new album on Shwayze�s website and Blast agrees. �Let It Beat� compiles Shwayze�s ability to blend hip hop verses over a multitude of instruments you never expected. �Heart and Soul�, the CD�s slowed down jam about life in the Hollywood fast-lane, sports a piano driven melody that has the notion of Phil Collins (which isn�t a bad thing). �Down at the Motel� introduces itself with an organ solo before breaking into epic hip-swinging party anthem status. Insane guitar solos and full band set-ups decorate the entire album. Smith�s, who goes by Shwayze by day, rhymes flow sweetly between Adler�s crooned sing-a-long choruses.

�We set out to do better than we did last time. We just wanted to expand on that. It’s really beefed up on the production side. We started to construct really good songs on this record,� said Shwayze to Blast from his hometown of Malibu, California, �We just really tried to expand our horizons on this one.�

While you can definitely see rocking out to �Let it Beat� on a drive to the beach, Shwayze proves he can shake up the club as well. The album�s first single, �Get U Home�, is driven by an electro-popcentric beat.

�Dirty Little Girl� featuring The Knux follows in the same vein. �Wait All Night� featuring Tabi Bonney slows it down over a dulled drum loop, but the �I don�t want to wait all night/I don�t want to wait all night. I don�t want to wait all night just to watch you leave� hook is designed specifically to get stuck in your head. It�d be interesting to see what the remixes would sound like considering �Let it Beat� songs are already so layered up.

Guest appearances are not scarce on �Let it Beat�. The record leads off with �Livin� It Up� featuring Snoop Dogg. The song exemplifies a theme that seems to pervade throughout the Shwayze camp � doing the best with what you�ve got and just keep growing.

�I want to capture all genres of music. I want to rap on the Shwayze project, I want to work with a lot of different artists which we were able to do a little bit more on this record. I just want to try everything I can with music and just expand,� said Shwayze.

The Shwayze boys will be hitting the road this week on the Party Rock Tour with LMFAO. They are bringing out a full band and Shwayze guarantees that the shows will be insane, and for all ages. With �Let It Beat� as the driving force, it�s sure to be a damn good dance party.

�Let It Beat� hits music retailers today, don�t forget to get your copy and start getting down because Shwayze assures Blast they don�t plan on going anywhere anytime soon.

�We’re just here for the long haul here, that’s what I want people to know.�

There are many great tapas restaurants in Boston that I’ve been frequenting for years including Tasca, a Brighton gem, and popular hot spot Tapeo on Newbury Street. But as I learned quickly, nothing compares to the incredibly fresh, diverse and innovative tapas of Spain.

Well known for being adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea, the fish is fresh, delicate and bountiful in Barcelona. Walking through the Mercat Boqueria, one of the most famous marketplaces in the world, it’s easy to see why seafood is such a huge contributor to the culture. The market is open air but enclosed in a building sans walls, brimming with small counter top-only cafes, bossy produce sellers that exclaim “No toca!” (”Don’t touch!”) when a tourist attempts to touch the fruit and mountains of mouth-watering meats such as jamon serrano. The place is sensory overload, filled with brightly colored candies and marzipan, and massive fruits and vegetables including colossal watermelons and zucchini. The place was worth seeing for sure, despite the dense crowds and fruit rind strewn floor wet with water and who knows what else.

On the first night, we sauntered up and down Las Ramblas, the famous avenue filled with street performers, human statues and all varieties of shopping from cheap souvenirs to expensive leather wear. We stumbled upon a seemingly typical restaurant. Its second floor overlooks the Mercat Boqueria but its entrance is right on Las Ramblas. Euskal Sukaldaria. I don’t even really know if this is the restaurant’s official name, but it was emblazoned on the windows. This place had the best patatas bravas I’d ever had, in my life, in any city. The sauce on them was garlicky, tangy, and just slightly spicy with a heat that’s only pleasurable, without an ounce of pain. I was in heaven. I had one plate to myself, and it was hardly enough.

I also ordered one of the tapas samplers that contained a variety of things including some cheeses, smoked chorizo on thickly cut baguette bread and some type of meat salad (maybe chicken, maybe ham who really knows). I also had a “small” plate of traditional seafood paella filled with razor clams, small mussels, shrimp and some squid (more than ample offerings for three people). I finally realized how Europeans stay so thin; they walk everywhere, all the time, and eat small portions, a little sampling of everything. Also, eating slowly and in a relaxed casual setting actually curbs overeating since it takes the body about 22 minutes to realize satiety.

Every meal should be served with a San Miguel beer, ridiculously inexpensive and amazingly delicious. Move aside Bud Light, you don’t know the first thing about drinkability. San Miguel invented drinkability.

I digress.

Moving on to breakfast. It was an experience that can only be summed up as simply decadent. The trademark Spain breakfast of churros con chocolate is essentially a very basic thing – fried dough served with hot chocolate. But this is not your Dunkin Donuts’ hot chocolate, my friends. The chocolate served in a mug in Barcelona is rich, thick and not overly sweet. It’s a darker chocolate than standard milk chocolate and does not include any added sugar, making it very easy to devour. Dipping the lightly fried, chewy, warm churros into this divine drink is nothing short of heaven, foodie heaven.

My traveling companions preferred a lighter breakfast of American-style coffee (they didn’t embrace the tiny cup of espresso-like coffee they were served when they simply asked for coffee) and fresh fruit. Amble into any grocery store off the main roads or a sidewalk produce vendor and you can get a week’s worth of fresh basics for about 5 Euros. They noshed on apples and bananas and a wonderful dried fig concoction dotted with almonds that was slightly sweet and high in protein. These folks are health-nuts and this light breakfast was the perfect way to start any day filled with sightseeing and ridiculously long and tiring walks.

Since I do frequent tapas restaurants here in the states, I already have a strong dossier of dishes I enjoy. I love tortilla espanola, recognized as a potato and egg omelet – light and fluffy and delicious. During one dinner I had a trio of tortillas, one cheesy and tangy, another made with spinach, and another with tomato and peppers that was amazing. I also indulged in melon con jamon, the perfect summer dish of cantaloupe or honey dew served with a heaping side of salty jamon iberico or jamon serrano. The marriage of sweet and salty is a great way to start any meal.

And while I was enjoying mid-morning and mid-afternoon sidewalk breaks to sip a San Miguel and feast on a light sandwich of jamon serrano and tomate or some perfect machego cheese, I could never really keep my mind off patatas bravas. I was a woman obsessed. I ate patatas bravas at least once each day I was in Barcelona, and I still couldn’t get enough. I was searching for the one, and while all the variations were amazing and had different intricacies and takes on the dish, I knew which prevailed.

Some restaurants served the potatoes more than lightly fried, but cooked darker brown similar to our hash brown. Others would serve it with a deep red sauce that was very spicy, or very heavy with tomato flavors. A beach-side restaurant in the beautiful southern coast town of Sitges served patatas bravas lined with a red sauce just slightly darker and more complex than ketchup, and another swirling circle of what I have to believe was plain mayonnaise. Please do not misunderstand me, they were all delicious, a great way to serve everyone’s favorite starch. But something about that first dish of patatas bravas lingered with me.

Maybe it was because they were the perfect size, approximately 1 x 2 inches making one piece a hearty forkful. Or maybe it was the way it was sort of fried-baked, with a crispy exterior that was barely golden brown and pillowy soft texture on the inside. Or maybe it was that sauce. That ridiculously mouth-watering, succulent sauce that I still can’t stop wishing I knew how to make. All I know, is that the combination of all of these elements melded together to make one of the best simple foods I’ve ever had in my life.

If you’re not a huge beer drinker, another great pairing with patatas bravas is sangria. I can’t talk about Spain, especially Barcelona, without mentioning sangria. Sangria is a wine punch, typically made with a fruity red wine such as a Spanish Rioja, mixed with sliced fruits including anything from apples to oranges to mangoes, and splashed with any number of other fruit liquors from apricot brandy to peach schnapps. The result is always delicious, and always refreshing.

A trip to Barcelona is the perfect antidote to a seemingly nonstop lifestyle of burgers and fries here in the United States. The critical foodie that lives inside me, bubbling on the surface daily to critique, analyze and search out the best in food was ecstatic at the sheer number of tapas varieties and restaurant locations. Ole!

Sadly, Orianthi’s time with Jackson was cut short after his tragic death, but she always sticks to her mantra: Don’t let negativity hold you down.

She reflects on the three months she spent with Jackson positively, albeit a little wistfully. “He was encouraging and wanted all of us to do our best, project our energy and just put on an amazing show,” she says. Jackson helped build her confidence, and made her believe in herself. “It was an amazing and really, really surreal experience.”

Despite the cancelled Jackson tour, Orianthi is keeping busy. Her debut album, “Believe,” hit shelves October 27, just one day before “This Is It,” the Jackson documentary opened in theaters. Orianthi is featured extensively throughout the film.

“Believe” is an energetic, invigorating mix of pop and rock that could easily fit between Kelly Clarkson and Ashlee Simpson-Wentz on Top 40 radio, or after The Donnas on a rock station. There’s also a heavy 80s influence, and of course, a shrieking and wailing guitar solo in every song. But unlike some of her contemporary female singer-songwriters who only throw on a guitar to strum a few chords for a music video, Orianthi really knows how to rock. Avril Lavigne only wishes she could make an album like this.

Growing up in Adelaide, Australia, Orianthi was surrounded by music from a very young age. At age 6, she picked up one of her dad’s guitars and hasn’t put it down since. She recalls sitting for hours, just playing song after song on her acoustic guitar.

“I think in life, you should go with what you get and what you’re passionate for,” she says. “I didn’t really get math, and I didn’t really get science or anything in school but I felt music was my calling.”

It was Carlos Santana’s soulful live performance that really inspired her at age 11. “After watching him perform, I didn’t want to play classical anymore because it was kind-of boring,” she says with a small laugh. She quickly switched to electric guitar.

Three years ago, Orianthi was offered a record deal by Geffen and moved to L.A. to write and record. “Believe”has been a long time in the making, but her hard work really shines through in the finished project.

When she first got a Myspace message from Jackson’s music director inviting her to audition for the band, she didn’t think it was real. But soon enough, she was playing in front of Jackson himself. She had never been so nervous in her entire life.

After Jackson hired her, Orianthi worked hard to learn all the songs and make sure all the music sounded just right. “Every time he’d come in the room, I’d get nervous because I wanted to make him happy,” she says.

His death hit everyone in the band hard. Seeing “This Is It”once it was released to the public was tough but as usual, Orianthi tries to stay upbeat. “It was very emotional but fun looking back on some amazing memories working with the ultimate entertainer,” she says.

Just like Jackson, Vai, and Santana influenced Orianthi, she hopes to be an inspiration to kids around the world. “I really hope to inspire more young girls to pick up the guitar and keep at it,” she says.”It wasn’t easy being a female guitar player growing up and lining up at the auditions with the guys at school. It was pretty difficult but if I can inspire more females to get started, that would be amazing.”

Next up for Orianthi: a tour. She’s excited to go out on the road and start playing some of her new songs. No matter what happens, she knows everything will work out. “If I can play guitar every day, I’ll be happy,” she says.

Orianthi’s “Believe” is available in major music retailers everywhere, including iTunes and Amazon.

Lights dropped her newest full length CD “The Listening” in early October and chatted to Blast from her hometown of Toronto shortly after the release to tell us how the CD came about, how she became her own super hero and why it’s cool to be a sci-fi geek.

“A couple days before the record came out in the states we hit the road to tour on the record so its been going, going, going, but it’s awesome. For the first time I get to tour on my own record. People are coming to the shows and singing along,”said Lights about life since “The Listening” came out.

The title of the album came from Lights’s own self-reflection when writing the songs and learning a lot about herself.

“The title generated from track four called “The Listening” but it went a little deeper than that. The whole record spawned from me kind of having to analyze emotional situations where I was just feeling really low and had to pull myself out with music,” said Lights. “Through that process I learned a lot about myself. All these songs, through all this music, I’ve learned so much more about myself. I thought this is a direct result of that, listening to music. That’s why I took the mouth off of me on the album cover, to help drive that home. It feels appropriate.”

Lights will spend most of the rest of the year on the road promoting the album like musicians do, but she’s also got a little something special up her sleeve. A long time fan of fantasy and comic books Lights teamed up with Marvel writer Tim Coker to create The Captain Lights Adventure.

“The Captain Lights Adventure which [is like] a glorified comic book with my music in the background. It’s going to be playing on MTV in the morning in America and you can see it on the website as well,” explained Lights.

Comics aren’t the only way Lights lets her inner-nerd out. She’s also a WoW (World of Warcraft) veteran. She says no matter how busy she is, she always makes time for WoW the fantasy role-playing video game that has become an ever growing cult sensation among computer gamers – even Brand New’s Jesse Lacey has admitted to being a fan. Lights said she too is a huge fan of the game.

“It was totally something I just wanted to get into. And actually when I started playing, one or two years ago, I didn’t know anyone that played and I was such a lover of fantasy stuff, comic books and all of that I thought I’d have a good time with it and I love it. Every day I always make a little time for it.” Lights said.

Fantasy has always appealed to Lights, simply for what it represents to her. It’s a place to escape, which she explains on in her bio became essential to her during her childhood when her family was constantly moving around. Now fantasy worlds and comic book agendas help Lights channel her out of this world energy.

“Music for starters is something I totally love, it’s my passion, but the same with sci-fi and comics. These are all things that I love so why not implement all these things into it? It’s an absolute reflection of my personality and what I’m into. Its the idea that the reason I love fantasy and all that stuff is the notion of unlimited creativity and aliens and far off worlds and crazy powers and make it all real. It’s all stuff you can invent and the same goes for my music. If I hear a sound in my head then I’ll find a way to make it into the recording. There’s no limits or bounds for what I want. In that sense it all goes together,” explained Lights.

Lights, who changed her legal name to Lights from Valerie Poxleitner, uses her intergalactic notions to help her reach the artistic goal she set for herself when she started playing music, and holding on to that has kept her steady in an industry that’s isn’t known for playing nice.

“People will try to get to you and they are going to hate. In order to keep track of who I really am I set this one goal to always hold on to and that’s to reach as many people as I can in a positive way,” said Lights. “So anything that I do to make you happy or entertain you for a few minutes or just make you think about things – just something positive, that’s my goal.”

“The Listening” is available in all major music retailers now.

Rosenbaum’s winning stout is being brewed by The Boston Beer Company and served at Gillette Stadium for Patriots season this year. The next contest is going on now, and the deadline is December 18. The winner also gets a little chunk of change: $2,000.

“The first two pre-season games were hot summer nights, and they sold out the first night. And the first home game, which was also a warm day, it sold out as well. So that’s very gratifying,” said Rosenbaum, who holds Patriots season tickets. His stout is lighter than other stouts, but still holds all the depth of flavor that’s looked for. Sometimes when you drink a a beer, you’re tasting it for the next hour or so. Not the case with Rosenbaum’s, which adds to its popularity at the stadium.

Rosenbaum first became interested not so much in brewing, but in beers, when he studied in the UK during his time in college. He found he liked beers quite unlike the ones he could find in the United States, which were usually light and thin. He enjoyed a beer with a lot of flavor — multiple components coming together to form a more harmonious brew. “This was some time ago, but when I came back to the States, there weren’t a lot of imports so I just drank what I could find and was always looking for other interesting beers,” he said.

A few years ago Rosenbaum received a homebrewing kit as a gift, and brewed his first batch. “My first batch wasn’t horrible,” he says, “but it certainly wasn’t great either.”

Looking for guidance, he joined Brew Free or Die, New Hampshire’s oldest homebrew club, and slowly learned what he had been doing wrong with his first attempts at brewing. A few parts of the process had been left out in the brewing kit directions he’d received. There’s a whole list of things of what to do, or not do, so that off-flavors aren’t introduced to a batch of beer. “For example, you have to boil a batch and then cool it. And if you stir your beer really vigorously to cool it down and break the surface tension then you introduce cardboard flavors into your beer,” Rosenbaum explained. There are many rules like this in homebrewing, and each recipe has its own quirks.

It took him a few years of practice and four tries to get the batch right. Rosenbaum entered the third batch of his Oatmeal Stout into last year’s Patriot Homebrew Contest (which didn’t place), though he knew going into it that it wasn’t the beer he wanted it to be. “It tasted good but it was a little thin in the mouth,” he said. “I had decided to add a kind of bourbon flavor to it by adding whiskey that had been soaked in oak chips. So the flavor was good but it was a little… ” he makes a hand gesture to show ‘lacking,’ his palms turned upward to the ceiling.

It was his fourth batch that won. Rosenbaum’s winning brew is full-flavored and full-bodied. It’s rich without being indulgent, flavorful without being bitter. It’s malty and sugary at the same time, the deep black color of the brew paired nicely with a creamy head.

Currently, Rosenbaum is back in his kitchen, settling back into his brewing. His kitchen is more of a mad scientist’s laboratory. Cabinets open to expose large metal bins with grates in the bottom for percolation. Tubes are hooked up to faucets to let fermented brews flow out. He has two refrigerators, one for food, and one that holds three kegs of whatever brew he’s working on at the current moment. To challenge himself, he’s taking award-winning recipes as a base and tweaking them a bit here and there to create something totally new. “Even the smallest change can make quite a bit of difference,” he says.

A few weeks ago, Rosenbaum had an English Best Bitter in a plastic bin cooling on his front steps, the keg sitting in a vat of ice water. Since it’s still the fall season and temperatures still vary daily, a mechanized thermometer maintains the temperature by activating a fan if the vat gets too warm. The Bitter is intended to be a beer to drink several glasses of over the course of an evening, while not having to worry about getting drunk.

Winning the Patriot Homebrew Contest added quite a lot of excitement to his life, but Rosenbaum’s ready to try out new recipes. “I think it’s a great thing (Samuel Adams) does for others. They show a lot of support for the homebrewing community,” he said. “Their president, Jim Koch, started off as a homebrewer and created a whole company out of it. I don’t think he’s forgotten his roots, and it’s a great thing to see.”

Michael Shanks is an actor, and while it’s easy to get lost in the character he has played on, off and on again for a dozen years, there’s a lot under the surface.

Born in Vancouver and raised in small town British Columbia, Shanks began his acting career playing Charlie Brown in the fourth grade play. He witnessed his first television production in college while taking a beach break from trying out for a play. Ironically, it was “MacGyver” that shanks saw being filmed, not knowing of course that he would one day star beside Richard Dean Anderson in “SG-1.”

He made his television debut in a 1993 episode of “The Commish,” a popular ABC crime drama. He landed a lot of minor roles before getting his big break on “Stargate SG-1″ in 1997, staring in 196 episodes in the series as an adventurous archeologist named Dr. Daniel Jackson. Since the end of “Stargate SG-1″ in 2007, Shanks, 38, has been trying to remake himself as an actor

“Well its a double-edged sword, I will say this,” Shanks said in his interview with Blast. “The things that come down the pipe, career-wise, that are offers to pay the bills are sort of sci-fi related projects.”

But, humbly, Shanks admits that all he can do is keep trying to land roles — hopefully roles that aren’t nerdy archeologists. “You just have to get back in a line as if you’re starting all over again,” he said.

We saw some of this. Shanks left “SG-1″ after season 5 and landed a few small roles, including two episodes of “Andromeda,” where he met his wife. It’s possible we may never have seen Daniel Jackson again if Shanks was offered another starring role (pure speculation). But Daniel’s was a popular role, and Shanks returned to “Stargate,” first as a guest, and then in his everyday role.

After “Stargate,” Shanks got to show some range by playing a pseudo-villain in the popular USA series “Burn Notice.” He played Victor, a rogue secret agent taking revenge on the shadowy intelligence agency that killed his family. He also recently landed a role that could bring him more into the mainstream by appearing in The CW’s “Smallville,” as comic book hero Hawkman. It’s still in the realm of sci-fi/fantasy, but the show has a wider following.

Still though, we can’t forget what Shanks and the “SG-1″ crew did in making the Sci-Fi/SyFy channel what it is today. A new Stargate show, “Stargate Universe” began this year, even as a rumoed “SG-1″ straight-to-DVD movie is on the shelf.

“Stargate Universe” is a much younger, more melodramatic, almost juvenile take on the franchise, and fans are conflicted. Shanks is too, even though he’s slated to appear in at least four episodes this season.

“It is really slick and pretty,” Shanks said. “[But] from what I’ve seen I’m not on board. … I’m not hooked in.”

Shanks said the drama and conflict seems forced. “They’re creating tension, pathos and angst,” he said. “The conflict with the characters seems a bit forced.”

One thing I did not dig deeply into was Shanks’ relationship with Christopher Judge. At the San Diego Comic-Con International in 2008, Judge boasted that he and Shanks started their own production company. We later heard about a production about the archangel Michael. But Shanks said the production company was off. He didn’t discuss his relationship with Judge, and I didn’t press him any further on the matter.

BLAST: So you and Christopher Judge are best buds. You have a production company you’re putting together? What’s happening with you guys?

MICHAEL SHANKS: Yeah. Let’s just say the production company’s not happening anymore, and I’d rather not go down that road and talk about Christopher Judge at this particular junction.

Shanks lives in Vancouver with his wife, the beautiful British-Filipina-Canadian actress Lexa Doig (Jason X), whom he got to work with when she played a doctor in 11 episodes at the end of “SG-1’s” running. She is also known for her sci-fi/fantasy work. The couple has two children, and Shanks has an 11-year-old Daughter, Tatiana, born in 1998 to then girlfriend Vaitiare Bandera, who played Daniel Jackson’s wife, Sha’re on “SG-1.” Shanks also said he’s been known to enjoy a good game of Hockey — like any true Canadian.

Editor’s note: After readers called out Blast — and called us liars — for not including the audio of the Christopher Judge portion of the Michael Shanks interview, we are posting it in the interest in full disclosure. We wouldn’t lie about or improperly quote an actor who agreed to give an interview to Blast.

There will be some spoilers in the podcast. Click at your own risk.

Now that the movie has been shown to fans, we can finally sit down and talk about it.

I saw “Boondock Saints II” last week. I liked it.

I didn’t like it in the way that I’m a news editor and occasional film critic. I didn’t love it in the way that I’m an artist and I can appreciate a classic piece of film.

Let’s face it, there’s two kinds of people in the world: The ones that love “The Boondock Saints” and the ones who hate “The Boondock Saints.”

And I love “The Boondock Saints.”

Shit, I put it on the cover. But I’m not a damn fanboy. I’m not a fanboy about anything. In fact, the more I like something, the harder I tend to be on the people in charge. You can ask the people at Sony when PlayStation 3 first came out, and you can ask Boondock writer/director Troy Duffy, because I changed the pace on Monday and asked him some pointed questions.

What you’re going to hear in the podcast on the top of this article is my session on one of a series of roundtable interviews that Duffy and actors Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, and Billy Connolly put on at The Black Rose bar in downtown Boston. We had a good time and we laughed throughout most of the 20-minute session, but I was on a mission to bring home some data for this piece of our month-long coverage on the sequel, “All Saints Day.” But, besides that, the podcast is mostly hilariousness and gay jokes.

“It was just like riding a bicycle,” Duffy said about his return to directing.

“He sucked equally on this one as he did in the first one,” Flanery added after a pause, laughing.

But return it is. Duffy made Boondock in 1999 and hasn’t made a film since. He was a young director coming out to Hollywood, and he made some mistakes — and I’m probably being nice here. But he still managed to make a good movie amidst it all.

“They talk about Troy as a new director, but from day one it looks as if he was doing it his whole life,” Connolly said.

Just as people either love or hate Boondock, they either love or hate Duffy. (The Documentary “Overnight” really hurt him too)

The people in the original movie seem to be loyalists. Nearly everybody — including someone you don’t expect (it’s in the podcast) — is back for the sequel.

“Everything just happened,” Connolly said. “Everybody seemed to be there for the love of the piece, not just to be in a movie or earn some money.”

It showed. When you listen to the podcast and check out our other interviews, you’ll hear how good of a time they all had making both movies.

Boondock is an organic cult success, and the cast and crew know it.

“Half of Boondock was one guy sitting another guy down going ‘you’re watching this movie,’” Duffy said.

Will there be a third movie?

“Lets just ride this one into the shore and see what happens,” Duffy said. “I got some ideas.”

It’s also up to the studio and the fans. If the sequel makes money in theaters, I say bet on a trilogy.

At the end, I asked Duffy what we could expect from him going forward.

“During that 10-year period, I have written a bunch of scripts,” he said, “and I intend to knock them down like dominoes one by one. They’re in ascending budgets, all different stories. One is a period piece, a buddy comedy, a black comedy, one is about serial killers, one is called “The Peregrines” which would take me an hour to describe what the’s about, one is about a historical figure, which will take a lot of money to do that last one.”

The four guys also toured Boston College and Emerson College before premiering the movie for fans on Monday night. Here’s a vid from their day:

“Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” is in theaters October 30.

Without giving away too much, we can say that good ole George gets the crap embarrassed out of him by the brothers in the flick.

We saw the movie, but it doesn’t officially realize until October 30, so take some time to get to know Rubin.

BLAST: So Bob, tell us a little about yourself. I see a mix of film, tv, writing and comedy in your background.

BOB RUBIN: Everyone knows that as a baby, I was abandoned in the woods and raised at the end of a stick by a pack of wild corndogs. After years of
battling condiment addiction, I pulled myself together, started stand up and in only 26 years I made it to an obscure, cult hit status.

That’s 26 years of maximun R&B (rambles and babbles). The rest of the story is at Rubetime.com.

BLAST: What is your role in “Boondock Saints II?”

BR: I play Gorgeous George, a pivitol character in the storyline of “BDSll,” and another awsomely memorable character created by Troy Duffy.

BLAST: Tell us about “Gorgeous George” — what went into that character?

BR: To prepare for the role, I spent a week watching “The Sound of Music” over and over. When that didn’t work, I conjured up the spirit of Otto Preminger who told me to fatten up on Chubby Chug Bacon Beer.

BLAST: How did you get involved in Boondock Saints II?

BR: I was walking down the midway at a carnival when Troy hit me in the head with a sledge hammer on his backswing during a try at the
strength skill game, ring the bell. I was in a coma for a week. When I came to I was okay, except I lost all my 4’s, which screwed up a lot of my phone numbers and some uncashed checks I had. Anyhow, Troy felt so bad he put me in his movie.

BLAST: Any plans to come to Boston?

BR: Oh hell yes. I love Boston. Great town and it’s been way too long since I’ve been there. Don’t know when, but I’ll see ya there soon.

Enjoy the movie, it kicks ass.

Catch Bob Rubin in “The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” in theaters October 30.

On their Beginnings

Mikel Jollett formed Airborne in 2006. Spurred by personal catastrophic events in his life Jollet turned from writing about music and started to make his own.

“I realized I was composing an album instead of a novel,” he told the Los Angeles Times in August of 2007.

He recruited some of his friends: Steven Chen on guitar, Noah Harmon on bass, Daren Taylor on drums, and Anna Bulbrook on viola keyboards and tambourine.

Less than a month later the band played its first show in Echo Park. Jollett had been keeping busy contacting bloggers and getting word out their about the band and their first concert. Jollett sent MP3s to blogs, and the bloggers started writing. “When it came to that first show, they were all there,” Chen said. Jollett remembers about 200 showing up, which is impressive for a first show.

October 5 is the anniversary of their first show Chen remembers, “and we completely forgot about it this year,” he said. Before that first show Chen had only met Harmon one or two times. “He was still on the fence (about joining the band) at that point,” Chen said.

“I’m still on the fence now three years later,” Harmon interrupted laughing.

On the Band

“We all bring something different, something new to the mix,” Chen said. Before turning to writing Jollett was a freelancer for National Public Radio and the Los Angeles Times and worked on a few novels. Bulbrook is a classically trained violinist and upon joining the band taught herself to play the viola and the keyboard. Harmon holds a jazz degree in upright bass and worked as a music teacher in LA for a few years. Chen was asked to join as a keyboardist, but petitioned to be lead guitarist.

“Anna and her viola bring something different,” Harmon agreed. String instruments are rare and few between in rock bands, and when they do appear it’s nine times out of ten a violin.

“It’s a rock and roll viola,” Harmon said, “The poor thing never knew what it was getting into.”

“Our goal, whether it be a slower song like ‘Midnight’ or a more upbeat song like ‘Gasoline’ is to write a good song and strike some chord,” Chen said. “That was the whole idea for the album.”

As for the name, it was all Jollett’s idea. Taken from Don DeLillo’s novel ‘White Noise,’ an airborne toxic event was a term coined by the military to reference a poisonous cloud emitted from a chemical spill.

“I had read the book for three classes and wrote two essays on it,” Chen said, “as the title it makes a lot of sense.”

“It doesn’t matter at all what you call yourself,” Chen said. “It’s what you do with it.”

On the Tour

“We’re just a new band,” Jollett said to the audience, “the world’s coming by us at 100 miles a minute and I don’t think any of us can make heads or tails of it.”

Airborne has played more than 250 shows this year, and the year is far from over. The band members cannot remember the last time they were home for more than a month.

“When I go home I don’t even bother putting things away,” Chen laughed. Instead he just lives easily out of a suitcase. Harmon sold his car when he realized it was doing little more than gathering dust.

“Your idea of home becomes a bit skewed,” Harmon added, “now home is a tour bus.”

Chen cannot even picture home anymore: “I can’t imagine not being in a new place every night.”

Airborne will take a nice long break around the holiday time and then jet off to the UK and beyond.

It will be their sixth time in UK this year.

“I’ve landed in London as many times as I’ve landed in Los Angeles,” Harmon laughed.

For Harmon, the UK is one of their favorite destinations, and they’ve been there six times this year. “But in the UK the fridges don’t work,” Chen butted in, “but it’s really ok because they know their fridges don’t work. They’re not trying to convince anyone that the refrigerator works.”

On “Sometime Around Midnight”

The viola starts and the crowd screams at its loudest. Everyone knows what songs coming before one bow stroke is over. It may only be 10:58 by my clock, but for Airborne Toxic Event it’s “Sometime Around Midnight.”

An acoustic version of the song was released as a free Starbucks song of the week, and from there it grew popularity on both iTunes and the music charts.

It’s not that big of a deal when your friends know who you are, when your friends-friends know who you are Chen said. “It’s when your parents friends start to notice, it’s like whoa.”

People relate to the emotions in it, Harmon comments. The record became an instant hit. Not only a top radio and music video track, iTunes also named it the “Number 1 Alternative Song of 2008.”

On Boston and the House of Blues

Now that the Red Sox season is officially over, the gem of Landsdowne has moved across the street to House of Blues. And here the players are musicians and they wear red basketball shorts and converse instead of cleats and baseball tights. “We just played the most intense game of basketball ever,” bassist Noah Harmon said, pulling his hair back. “I don’t remember the last time I was so winded.”

Two opening bands, and two hours into the night Airborne finally hits the stage. And they hit it running. For a impressive few minutes they all go a bit crazy and show off their raw talent. No vocals, no lights, just Airborne and their respective instruments. Before you know it the first song has started, and you are transfixed in a daze.

On stage they show undeniable togetherness and energy, even as the set pushes upon two hours. They bounce off each other’s backs, Bulbrook wields her viola, Harmon sporadically strokes a bow on his bass strings, Taylor hacks away with his drum sticks, Jollett spasms, and Chen stands tall and unmoving. But somehow it all works.

One of the most impressive parts of the set was an acoustic set. Jollett sat down on the stage and sang to the audience more personally, Chen went to an upright piano, and Harmon picked up a jazz bass. “I feel like we’re getting to know you now,” Jollett told the crowd.

“You were the audience, Boston, and we were the band,” Jollett ended after a four song encore. “One day, when your dead you’re one wish is gonna be for this hour and a half back, but thank you for it.”

But Jollett’s words were wrong, as the crowd’s one wish was that the night never ended.

Mahoney was Detective Duffy in “The Boondock Saints,” playing one of a trio of bumbling Boston police officers.

Mahoney admits he started out late in the game, but he’s catching up. He told us that he’s appearing in a scene with Matt Damon in “The Adjustment Bureau,” which is filming right now.

Mahoney sat down with Blast recently to talk about the career and his role in the sequel, “The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day.”

BLAST: What can we expect from Detective Duffy this time around?

BRIAN MAHONEY: I get to move around a lot more this time around. There’s more action with me involved.

BLAST: What’s it like re-uniting with the cast 10 years later?

BM: It was great. Sean (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Norm (Norman Reedus) are the coolest guys. It was especially special getting back with Bob Marley, and I think that translates onscreen.

Cliff Collins, who is an Oscar winner, is so good! I was so excited to work with him. I even prepared by taking some Irish dancing lessons for a scene to prepare. I never needed to actually dance, but I was ready!

BLAST: Coming from a military background to a film career is an interesting career change. You are going tell us about the transition in the book that you’re writing, “A Cobra Pilot in Hollywood.” What can you tell us here?

BM: Well, in the army it’s a whole “think, don’t feel” concept, and this was embedded in me for ten whole years. So when I made that transition into acting, it was instantly “feel, don’t think.” It was “you need to FEEL this scene.” This was so new to me, and a total challenge. So I’ll be touching on that a lot.

BLAST: You’re from Framingham originally — do you come back often?

BM: Oh yes, we do quite a bit. My wife is also from Gardner so we enjoy coming back to Massachusetts.

BLAST: For the October 30 release, what would you like to tell fans?

BM: Thank you. Thank you for all the replies all over the world we’ve received. So much has happened and we need to set some things straight, so I’m looking forward to that. Troy deserves this he really does. There was a documentary called “Overnight” that really hit Troy hard. It was hurtful, and stabbed him in the back. He deserves this comeback.

1. (Don’t) Dress up for your Flight: Ok so you’re going on vacation, and it’s been who-knows-how-long since you’ve had one. I understand that this is a special occasion, and often see those travelers who have “dressed-up” for the airport. It’s a bad idea and here’s why; firstly you’re showing every pick pocket and tourist scam-artist that you are a Tourist. That translates to pure gold for them, and you will easily become a target. Secondly, no matter how short the flight is, or how luxurious your on-board accommodations are, you will look like a sorority girl who never went to sleep after homecoming by the time you walk out of your destination airport. Best to keep things simple when flying. Be chic, but don’t be high-maintenance. For the ladies, don’t wear too much makeup or you’ll end up like Tammy Faye Baker on an evangelistic tour of the swamp. Guys, stay away from heavy colognes, and double up on the deodorant.

2. (Don’t) Fly Air France, Continental or US Airways: As a travel correspondent, and many days on the road as a model in my hey-day, I learned which airlines were the most convenient, customer-focused, and responsive to complaints or a lack of service. The three afore-mentioned do neither. Air France actually doesn’t have ANY way for a customer to call in and make complaints or suggestions. Continental has literally lied to me and hundreds of others to save themselves hotel fees, claiming weather as a factor in the delay of 6 flights. Most of the passengers missed the connecting flights, and in reality it was a downed control tower that caused the problem. US Airways has consistently the worst attitude amongst its attendants.

3. (Don’t) Drink Heavily the Night Before: Yes, this IS a hard rule to keep! Often there is the urge to begin the vacation the night before, but this will only leave you dehydrated and with a headache that the plane’s pressurized compartments will only exaggerate.

4. (Don’t) Eat Airplane Food: Ok, I admit it: Lufthansa food was amazing – but they’re the exception. This rule also is extremely dependent upon whether you fly economy or First Class, of course, but this is a fairly easy thing to avoid, or at least diminish greatly. The day of the flight, bring along a salad, raw veggies, a sandwich, etc. Just make sure there are no pure liquid contents, and buy a reusable 3 oz dispenser for things like dressing and condiments. Fresh fruit is a great way to maintain your hydration levels when flying. If you are flying to a foreign location, pack snacks that remind you of home. Sometimes foreign fare can be a bit tricky, but with a grab bag of cookies, crackers and pretzels, you’re sure to stay satisfied.

5. (Don’t) Arrive to the Airport Late: It’s a terrible idea! Pack the night before. You never know the state of pandemonium at the airport. The earlier you show up for those morning flights, and for the mid to late afternoon internationals, the shorter the security lines. Sure, sitting at the gate for 2 hours is rough, but you brought snacks, right!? This is when to have a glass of wine, check those last minute emails and relax.

6. (Don’t) Be afraid to ask questions: Know your rights. Each and every airport has a list of various passenger rights, and you should do your homework. As mentioned above in Item two, airlines will do anything they can think of to save money and put themselves first. Don’t assume that they are looking out for you. Ask questions, lots of them if necessary, about what the delay is, or what they’re going to do in the event of an unforeseen complication. Airlines are the first major corporations to assume responsibility for their rights as a company, and they have the right to make the rules up as they go along. Be informed, be assertive and don’t let them bully you!

7. (Don’t) Board the plane empty handed: Take whatever you need to stay occupied and satisfied. It’s no secret that I travel with my teddy bear. Sure I get funny looks at my age whipping out an old ratty teddy bear, but so what! When you are away from home a lot, it’s nice to have a piece of it with you. If you’re going on an extended vacation, take photographs, pillows – anything that will make you feel at home and at peace. Take a few magazines, a book to read, crossword puzzles, emails, etc to keep you occupied on the plane and make the whole ordeal go by a bit quicker. If you’re distracted, you won’t be inclined to worry about the physics of thrusting a mega-ton piece of metal in the air.

8. (Don’t) Forget to pack any necessities in your carry on: Hopefully, your luggage will get off the plane when you do, but there is the chance that it won’t. If there are any medications you need, take them on the plane with you. The same goes for a toothbrush, deodorant and anything you think you may need should you be without your luggage for a day or two (sexy heels perhaps?).

9. (Don’t) Get in the way: This goes for other passengers, attendants and security officials. If you are on a moving walkway, please stand right and walk left. Often, moving walkways are used when the distance between gates is farther than usual and those of us with layovers do not want to run you over trying to make a mile in six minutes. Be aware of other people’s personal space, and avoid using the chair in front of you to catapult yourself out of your seat. Whiplash is bad. Don’t be fearful of using your fair share of space, but don’t be a space-hog. If you need to check your phone or grab your boarding pass, stand to the side.

10. (Don’t) Be a Negative Nelly: Everyone is annoyed by the airlines, the security lines, the bad food, the recycled air. There is no need to take that out on your fellow passengers or the flight attendants. I don’t know how many times I’ve had some random guy scream at me to move up in the line a whole four feet, when there was still 20 people in front of us to screen…DON’T be that guy. And if you hear a hearty laugh across an airport terminal one day, it is probably me, laughing at “That Guy.”

In October, Blast started podcasting.

We’re even on iTunes.

In this podcast, Blast editors John Guilfoil, Brooklynne Peters and Erica Marcus talk about what’s happening in October and what you can expect going forward!

It’s the stuff of a movie itself — our hero is in a nasty car crash, laid up in a hospital bed for weeks, and he needs an interpreter to tell him what the doctors are saying. He’s black-and-blue, his face is badly swollen, and he wears an eye patch to cover the scars from the surgery to implant an artificial eye socket.

But his devotion to his art is true. He devises and storyboards a movie from that hospital bed and sneaks out late at night. He flies to Los Angeles with the eye patch still attached to his face and directs the movie he envisioned.

Fiction this is not.

It’s part of how Norman Reedus spent the ten years between “Boondock Saints” installments. Reedus, who plays Murphy McManus in the upcoming sequel, “Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day,” said he “dropped off the face of the earth for a while” following a serious accident several years ago.

“It was pretty dramatic, I didn’t think I’d be an actor again,” Reedus said. But even if he had been unable to act, he planned on staying in movies. And his short film “I Thought of You” is proof-positive of that fact. Reedus escaped briefly from a hospital in Germany to shoot the movie, which he wrote and assembled from his hospital bed.

And though Reedus said he was worried he didn’t look the same after the accident, Boondock fans still approach him daily, recognizing him on the street.

“I’m impressed every day. Sometimes people come up and they have my face tattooed on them,” he said. “I say, ‘I hope you were drunk when you got that.’ Almost 90 percent of the time they say, ‘yes I was.’”

Reedus said that in the ten years since the original movie, there were several false starts at getting “Boondock Saints II” up and moving.

“It came and it went so many times in the last ten years,” he said. “You get excited and you start to work with your schedule.”

But when the project was finally green-lit, Reedus said it was easy to drop back into Murphy McManus mode.

“I started working with a trainer right away, with a dialect coach right away. Then it was just ‘Boondock Saints’ camp,” he said. And gathering everybody together again helped, too. “It was a déjà vu once we got on the set and in the peacoats, once we got the guns and started reciting the prayers and stuff.”

And that thick Irish accent that Murphy has? It’s not natural.

“It’s not super hard once you get going with it. Everybody on the set’s speaking like that all day long,” he said.

Reedus’ impression of his character is one of respect and awe.

“They sort of have this calling from a higher power to take out the bad guys that have slipped through society and are getting away with it,” he siad. “I don’t think they’re bad killers or nasty people, they’re just stepping up to the plate.” The public really connected with the Saints in the first movie, and the controversy of are-they-good-or-are-they-bad helps them relate, he said.

The new “Boondock Saints” movie isn’t the only chance the public will have to connect with Reedus this fall — he’s also got a new movie, “Pandorum,” which recently hit theaters. Reedus described the film as a sci-fi thriller set in an abandoned spaceship.

Reedus also addressed amost important question: Will there be a Boondock Saints III?

“I hope so — I could do a bunch of these,” he said. But he added he hoped it wouldn’t be ten years down the road, imagining “Sean and I walking with walkers, trying to lift our guns and we can’t get them up. Hiding out in an old-folks home in Miami.”

"Motherhood" starring Uma Thurman

It’s just one day in the life of Eliza Welch — a mother of two, former writer and chronic blogger.

It seems simple enough on the surface. Today, she needs to get her daughter to school, take care of her toddler son, blog and prepare for her daughter’s sixth birthday party, along with a list of other errands. Then, she decides to enter a contest for a parenting magazine: 500 words on what motherhood means to her.

Now it’s not so simple. Adding to the chaos is the fact that she lives in a tenement walk-up in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Not only is there an endless line of physical obstacles, like a towed car, there is an endless sea of people ready and willing to criticize her.

It all culminates in a breakdown. The once promising, creative and inspired writer fears she’s lost herself in motherhood.

“Motherhood is a thing that can be terribly under-appreciated,” said Uma Thurman, who plays Eliza, in a recent interview with Blast. Even mothers themselves deride their own job, she said.

And that’s just why director and writer Katherine Dieckmann wrote “Motherhood.” The experience doesn’t parallel any of the usual extremes. It’s not “Leave it to Beaver,” nor is it “Mommie Dearest.” It’s a continuous barrage of larger problems, mindless minutia and judgmental by-standers; all of which can quickly make an intelligent, creative woman question herself.

“I wrote it because I was very frustrated with the absence of movies about mothers,” said Dieckmann. “What is motherhood really like? What happens to a woman’s psyche and sense of self?”

For Thurman, also a New Yorker and mother of two in a creative industry, Eliza’s story is familiar.

“I felt very moved and much related to Katherine’s writing,” she said. “I relate to (Eliza) as a character in many ways. I’ve had that day, in my own way.”

And almost as important as Eliza are the people that surround her. Avery, her husband played by Anthony Edwards, quietly endures an unfulfilling job to bring in money. Sheila, her best friend played by Minnie Driver, is the single, sex deprived mom who becomes the unwilling subject of a blog entry. Then there are the other mothers – the wealthy snob mom, the over attentive mom, the slightly crazy new-age mom and more – all ready to offer their opinions and judgments without being asked.

“People like to lecture mothers,” Dieckmann said. “And it’s just like, fuck you.”

Even the 20-something guy in the party store and some old ladies on the street had rude lectures to dole out.

“It’s amazing how liberal people are in criticizing mothers,” Thurman said.

New York itself becomes a problematic character too. Streets crowded with tourists, a film crew, heavy traffic and tenement living all make Eliza’s day even harder. That’s why, Dieckmann said, she chose the city as her setting. Suburbia just doesn’t present as many challenges. Your life is planned differently and ordinary tasks become more difficult.

“There’s something about the peculiarity of life in New York,” she said.

“Motherhood” doesn’t glorify its heroine, though. Eliza isn’t always right. As Thurman put it, “She’s trapped in her bubble.”

Eliza begins to face doubts about her parenting skills, her marriage and her creative self as she tries to answer the question, “What does motherhood mean to you?”

“She sort of agrees with the deriding of her own job,” Thurman said, thinking about a particular scene. “Is it important? Do I have anything to say? Am I just another mother in this park?”

And that’s the central theme of “Motherhood.” How does a mother successfully raise children while maintaining a sense of self? What happens to passion and creativity when all she can focus on are physical daily tasks? It’s a delicate, difficult balance.

So what does motherhood mean to Thurman?

“Growing up.”

“Motherhood” opens in theaters October 23.

And he doesn’t mean knocking down a mafioso or some badass Russian crime boss.

Ten years ago, David Della Rocco played a character named after him, but the character is not him. Rocco, a college-educated, classical actor, couldn’t be farther removed from the dumbass street thug he plays in the “Boondock Saints” movies. He had to knock himself down a little bit to his character’s level.

He did like the freedom in the dialog and the way he was able to put some of himself into the character, but David is not Rocco.

“I had a lot of freedom,” he said, “in the way, you look at the script and — Troy directs what he wants for an emotion — and basically I could use so much of myself, which is really nice when you’re an actor.”

This student of the stage still doesn’t have many Hollywood films to his name, and that’s become hard to believe because he’s recognized everywhere for his role in “Boondock Saints,” which is extremely popular in Boston and a cult classic everywhere else.

In fact, the only other film to his name is 2008’s “Jake’s Corner,” about an ex-football star who has a family tragedy. He plays a minor character named “Wheels.” He said he’d love to get more roles, but acknowledged how hard it is to make a living as an actor.

He told Blast that he reprises his role in “All Saints Day” in a dream sequence in three different spots, filmed in three locations, where he interacts with the two brothers.

Rocco lives in Hollywood and has a girlfriend named Debra Donovan.

As for his favorite Rocco line in the two films, he threw a nod to the often vulgar writing in the flicks:

“Shut your fat ass, Rayvie! I can’t go and buy a pack of smokes without running into nine guys you’ve fucked!”

Bob Marley’s not a reggae star. He’s a local boy, from New England. He’s the comedian who gained some measure of fame for his role as the bumbling Detective Greenly in “The Boondock Saints.”

His most famous line — “Where you goin? NO WHERE” — can still be heard 10 years later at bars across Boston.

We tapped the phones in the Blast newsroom to Podcast our 20-minute interview with Marley, where we talked about terrorism, comedy and most of all the hotly anticipated sequel to the 1999 cult classic (if all of Boston is considered one big cult) “Boondock Saints.” Marley reprises his role in “Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day,” which is due out October 30, despite the utter lack of publicity surrounding the flick so far.

Contrary to some published reports, Marley hadn’t known “Saints” director Troy Duffy since childhood. They met about 12 years ago.

“A buddy of mine introduced me to Troy and then they came to see me at The Laugh Factory (in Los Angeles) and he said ‘come audition,’” Marley said. “When that movie came out it was like nothing happened, and we were like ‘oh I guess nothing’s going to happen.’”

But something did happen. Suddenly, larger crowds were coming out to his shows, and they started firing lines from the movie up on stage.

“Then I realized it was taking off,” he said.

The original film helped lift the careers of the actors and comedians like Marley and guys like Brian Mahoney, and David Ferry. Marley said it was vital to bring this trio of cops back — as well as so many other actors, right down to the more obscure Tom Barnett, who plays the Irish gun dealer in both films.

So why did it take 10 years to make another “Boondock Saints?” In that case, the published reports are true. Duffy had problems with Franchise Films — and there was money involved. It was one big mess.

We do know that Marley’s character, the Boston Police Detective, will have a larger role in the sequel. He even tries to get with the gorgeous FBI Agent Eunice Bloom (Julie Benz).

Over the past decade, rumors flew around about a sequel, including one that would be set in New York. Marley was glad, however, that the film came home.

“I’m glad its in Boston and I’m glad it takes place in New England,” he said.

Although, despite the tax credits and “Hollywood East” mantra, the film was shot in Canada.

Marley said it was also fun to have a bunch of jackasses like comedians on set.

“Everybody on the film’s got a great sense fo humor, so it’s hard not to just sit there and laugh,” he said. “Judd Nelson is in this movie, and his part is menacing and yet hilarious at the same time. He’s really, really funny in the movie. There’s a bunch of clowns.”

Marley’s official website

Carlile, 28, exploded with “The Story,” her 2007 T. Bone Burnett-produced sophomore album whose title track became the basis for a “Grey’s Anatomy” music video. (Several other songs were featured on the show itself.) “Grey’s”-friendly folk songs continue to dominate on “Give Up the Ghost,” particularly the ukulele-infused “Oh Dear” and wistful “That Year.”

Also prevalent on “Ghost” are Carlile’s country influences, namely on the honky-tonk “Caroline,” to which Elton John lends a restrained collaboration. The idea of small town escapism also plays an important role, particularly on the outcast anthem “Looking Out,” on which Carlile muses, “I went out lookin’ for the answers … Some people get religion, some people get the truth.”

While none of the songs showcase the raw vocal chops that Carlile displayed on “The Story” (“Pride and Joy” comes close, as Carlile wonders, “Do I make you proud? Do you get me now?”), her distinctive voice quivers with emotion, fluctuating pitch like a slide guitar as she sings about love, heartache and self-discovery.

Brandi Carlile is in Boston tonight at House of Blues.

Pogo.com wasn’t always known for its casual offerings—before it was even Pogo, it was Total Entertainment Network (TEN), and that outlet focused more on the hardcore in this pre-online console world. “The site focused on connecting hardcore gamers to each other online. We had games like Quake and Command & Conquer. Then companies started to include online functionality in their games and we were in a situation where we knew we’d be obsolete eventually” says Mike Riccio, the current VP and chief technology officer of Pogo.com. Riccio has been there since the beginning, so he’s seen all of the changes and why they were necessary.

Pogo's homepage has come a long way in 10 years

Before they were knocked out of the picture by the online improvements to home consoles, Riccio and co. switched TEN to Pogo.com, and became an outlet for casual gaming. “Web portals were driving revenue through advertising, and online games were one way for them to engage consumers. We built a new team to develop casual online games, partnered with portals to provide them with gaming content, changed our name to Pogo.com, and launched our own destination site. ” There was no other site on the Internet that gave itself over completely to casual online gaming at this point, so Pogo was taking a chance with the switch, but as Riccio stated, it was a necessary one to ensure the company lived on as the rest of the gaming world improved.

As stated, the industry today is much different than it was 10 years ago. Whereas today you cannot avoid seeing the call to the casuals everywhere—from free-to-play games to other websites that have followed in Pogo’s footsteps to home consoles that have made both hardware and software killings this generation due to their ever-increasing casual user base—when Pogo began, they were filling a hole in the market. “Yahoo and MSN had some basic online games” says Riccio, but thanks to Pogo and its ilk “Today millions of people are playing games on sites that have hundreds of games that you can play online or download.” It’s gotten to the point where the terms “core” and “casual” are thrown around constantly by gamers and journalists alike, many times in a derogatory fashion. Regardless of the complaints, you have to admit that casual games have helped keep the industry afloat in the same way that established, “core” franchises have. Riccio tells us that “casual games are being taken seriously and are seen as a viable business.” While this has been true online for a bit, it’s a more recent development with the home console market; Nintendo’s “blue ocean” strategy fits in with Riccio’s point snugly.

It’s not just the games that have brought Pogo success, though titles like Poppit, Word Whomp (Riccio’s personal favorite) and First-Class Solitaire have been and remain some of the most popular online games around, helping keep Pogo.com in its place as the stickiest website around.  It’s the community aspect of Pogo that makes people come back to play again. Riccio says that Pogo has a saying, “People come for the games and stay for the community. We make games that can be fun in five minutes if you need a quick break or five hours if you’re meeting up with your friends to chat and play.” While the community is mainly a great way for friends to catch up, there have been other benefits found. For instance, there have been over 250 marriages that came about due to a couple meeting at Pogo.com. While maybe that’s not enough to start working it in to Pogo’s company slogan, it’s an indication of just how addicting some of these games can be, and how Pogo makes it easy for people to keep in touch and play together.

Pogo was purchased by EA back in 2001, and has since then filled much more than just an online niche. Besides being the stickiest destination on the web, Pogo has expanded into downloadable titles and the mobile sector. Pogo To Go allows users to play these previously online only titles offline, and the mobile versions of games are self-explanatory. The site continues to grow as well—whereas in 2001, at the time of the EA acquisition, Pogo had 17 millions different users, it now claims to have 15 million active users. There’s a big difference between total users and active ones, and 15 million active is a big deal, especially with all of the other choices that are available to the consumer today compared to 2001 or when the site launched.

Advertising still powers the Pogo.com machine, but like many other in the industry, micro transactions are the future. They have existed on Pogo since 2006, and as many free-to-play games across the industry have proven, they are a great way to pull in revenue and keep your most casual and more “core” casual gamer interested and coming back for more. EA has even utilized some of what has been learned through the casual space in their more hardcore offerings, with games like BattleForge moving to free-to-play but with downloadable, paid for in-game items.

Riccio and Pogo are still looking for new ways to bring gamers to the games, or, as Riccio puts it when asked about the future of Pogo, “the games will come to the players be it online, on their cell phone or any other way that hasn’t been discovered yet.” With 10 years behind them, based on how Pogo.com has adjusted to the market and continued to grow during that time, it should be no surprise that they are thinking about how to position themselves for success for the next 10 years.

I mean, it’s dank, old, a little sketchy, and has more cigarettes going at once than a high-stakes bingo parlor. But the railroad-themed casino features $5 table games, including craps. That’s good. The cowboy bar has good service — bartender Chris was very friendly. Oh, and you can tell people you stayed at the same casino that O.J. Simpson got arrested at for that sports memorabilia robbery. It also hosts fun UFC parties. Vegas has a distinct lack of sports bars.

One thing in particular really made the Palace Station worth the trip: The Bonkerz Comedy Club. That’s where I met comedian Chris Edgerly.

Edgerly headlined a show one night, doing a routine of impersonations and funny observational bits. While his name might not be familiar yet, his work probably is. He was Nick Diamond on “Celebrity Deathmatch,” and he has voiced an unbelievable amount of video games including Alpha Protocol, G.I. Joe, Godfather II, Ninja Blade, Lord of the Rings Conquest, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Kingdom Hearts II, Final Fantasy XII, SWAT 4, Yakuza (with Eliza Dushku) and several dozen more.

He currently provides the voice talent for Peter Potamus on the Adult Swim animated series “Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law.”

Here are some questions and answers with Edgerly:

BLAST: How did you get your start in comedy? Why comedy?

Chris Edgerly: I was in college, October of ‘90. A buddy told me about a group of comedians who did stand-up once a month at this local pizza place in the basement downstairs. I met with them that night, and the next night I was onstage in front of a packed house. It was exhilarating. I had been doing some acting as a drama minor at the university (UGA) but nothing could quite match the thrill of doing your own material in front of an audience.

BLAST: You’ve done a lot of voice acting — what do you like about that side of entertainment?

CE: Two things about voice acting rule: One, you don’t have to worry about how you look or how old you are. It is egalitarian — if you can do the job (and have a good agent that believes in you), you’ll get work. Two, it’s constantly changing, so you never get bored. I audition five days a week, and the scripts are incredibly varied, from video games with aliens and zombies, to commercials involving friendly announcer-type voices, to voice-matching a-list actors for movies to animation involving just about any kind of character you could imagine. This week I’m doing ADR (automated dialogue replacement) work to provide the English voice for a character in a Japanese anime series. It’s a constant challenge to my imagination to see what I can do with a script.

Blast: Comedy or acting, which would you rather be doing?

CE: Impossible to choose. On the one hand, it’s more fulfilling to perform in front of a live audience, especially when you write the material and have ultimate creative control over how it’s delivered. On the other hand, getting to read someone else’s words and interpret them can be a treat, not to mention some of the famous people I’ve gotten to work with over the past few years. And it pays a hell of a lot better, and I can sleep in my own bed and don’t have to be on the road half the year.

Blast: How often do you come out to Vegas to perform? Any plans for an East Coast (Boston?) jaunt?

CE: Haven’t done Vegas often. I don’t like to leave L.A. if i can help it since work never stops in the voice-over world. It would have to take a very special occasion to come to the East Coast, but if things click with the Men’s Club Comedy Tour (the current project I’ve been doing with my three buddies), anything could happen.

Blast: How would you classify your comedic style? I’m sorry to ask this cliche, but who are your influences?

CE: I don’t know how I would classify my style. Above all, I try to be entertaining without insulting the intelligence of the audience. I have a few voices, some wry observations, some longer, more monologist type bits sprinkled in there as well. I like to gently subvert the audience’s expectations of where a bit will go. Above all, it is about giving the audience a good time that stays with them afterward. I’ve been inspired by so many comedians in my life: Cosby and Pryor and Carlin and Rich Little as a kid, Jim Carrey (his physical comedy more than anything), Dennis Miller’s incredible way with words, Bill Maher’s ease with commentary, even Johnny Carson’s way with an audience — the way he could take them anywhere he wanted to go, even when a joke didn’t work. How he could take them by the hand and lead them back whenever he chose. Contemporary comics — Patton Oswalt (a great wordsmith and imagist), Dave Attell (gets you to love lechery), Todd Barry (nobody does wry like him) and Chris Rock (back in ‘96, his HBO special “Bring the Pain” was the best I’d ever seen from a stand-up and still is, in my opinion.)

Blast: What does a comedian do when he’s not on stage? Are you always “on” or do you have people/friends that you can just be off/yourself around?

CE: When I’m not onstage I get up at the crack of 10 a.m., go to my agency and record my auditions, come home and surf the web for fun and ideas, get lunch, exercise, work on the act or anything creative I have on the docket for a little while, etc., spend time with my girlfriend, catch my favorite shows on TV, you name it.

Unexciting and yet highly pleasurable, because my life is my own. My schedule my own. It took years to get to that point but I’m enjoying the hell out of it. That’s probably why you wouldn’t suspect I was a comic if you met me away from a club. I’m not “on” very often . When I’m around my actor and comedian friends, sure. We’re all “on” in one way or another because we understand how we all think and the jokes come fast and furious. But otherwise I’ve been described by my “civilian” friends as laid back, philosophical and — gasp — mature. The opposite of the insecure kid that started years ago, thinking he had to make everyone laugh to prove to himself that he could do it as a career. You know, pretty textbook stuff.

Finally, there is the issue of Tilly’s brother, Grady Funk, portrayed by David Koechner, who some fans may recognize from NBC’s “The Office” and most recently the film “Extract,”

As one of the final sets Blast visited in Burbank recently, we caught glimpses of a few scenes being shot before we sat down with Grammer, McGraw and Koechner to discuss the show.

The first question we had to ask the cast was: What brought them all together for this project?

“For the last year or so I was thinking about returning to television again, and trying another shot after ‘Back to You,’” said Grammer. “I looked at television and thought to myself, the only thing missing in television these days is the traditional family show that has everyone living together, mother, father, and the kids, you know? Then I met Tucker (Cawley) and he had this loosely phrased idea about a guy who had fallen down from a big perch and was moving down to Virginia.”

Blast was able to see the final pilot episode shortly before our meeting, and we wondered if the physical comedy aside from the witty dialogue would be part of its style.

“Melinda’s stuff is high farce. This week we shot some things in the woods,” Grammer laughed.

“I think a lot of the behavior just ends up physical,” McGraw added. “So, a lot of times if it’s not written in, if it becomes physical because of how we are covering for ourselves and each other. I think there’s a lot fun stuff, and there’s some things that are a little broad.”

We may just see a bit more into Tilly’s side of the family, whose southern roots brought them to Virginia in the first place.

“Well we get (Grady’s wife) and a couple of kids. I don’t know how many.” Grammer said. He also explained more about the relationship Hank has with his brother-in-law, Grady, a man who has no problem reminding Hank of the reasons he’s in Virigina.

“This relationship will be to always antagonize one another,” Grammer said. “And she secretly is a party to it all because he and she are brother and sister. But the key relationships are here (in the pilot).”

“So far we’re exploring the world of the family, the extended family,” said Koechner, “and then probably the town, and the state, and the nation.”

And what of the kids on the show? In the pilot, Maddie clearly has her issues with daddy, and a boyfriend of sorts. “Oh we’ll be dealing with the boyfriends, I mean she’s only 17,” said Grammer emphasizing the plural.

“What’s great is that it’s a modern father daughter relationship. It’s not one of the corny ones that doesn’t exist,” Koechner added, saying that, these days, teenagers go through things much faster than a decade ago.

“There are real moments, and hopefully in the end everyone is going to grow up a little,” said Grammer. “They’ve had one life they thought was pretty well set, and it changed. That throws everyone into a tailspin.”

“And it was a rare existence that you don’t really have,” McGraw chimed in, “and I do think an interesting dynamic in the triangle (between Hank, Grady, and Tilly) is that in-between them, I might come back to her old ways. Throw back a couple of beers with Grady. Or I’ll push against them. Hank has that American (perspective) of starting from nothing and making something new, kind of pulling up by your bootstraps. And the realities of how those ‘bootstraps’ are different than twenty years ago.”

We closed by asking the trio to tell viewers why they should watch “Hank” this fall.

“I think the show has an identifiable character that everyone can relate to, that’s just like so and so,” said Koechner. “And it’ll definitely get people to laugh. It comes from a place of honesty and truth. It’s not just manufactured. The writing is good, and makes me laugh out loud. And finally, well, I just love Kelsey Grammer!”

“Oh, I can’t fight with that!” Grammer replied.

“I think it’s a relief to watch a show where you see people going through such changes because it makes you feel like you’re not the only ones,” McGraw added.

“And this is a show, the whole family can watch it, and it’s not a kid’s kind of show.” said Koechner.

“For years, I’ve heard people tell me that Hollywood doesn’t make shows for (the family) anymore,” Grammer said, “and this year, Hollywood does.”

Catch Grammer, McGraw, Koechner and all of “Hank” every Wednesday at 8 p.m. on ABC.

They came up with “The Jaguar Club” after drummer Jeremiah Joyce came across the intricate logos of organizations of car devotees one day while doing a Google Image search.

“It’s never been a strong point,” according to Joyce. “We were terrible at coming up with band names.”

Blast chatted with The Jaguar Club at their record release party at Brooklyn’s Union Hall last month. Since forming in 2006, the band has released two EPs. Their first full-length album, “And We Wake Up Slowly,” was released September 1.

Joyce and bassist Yoichiro Fujita met while both were students at Vassar College and eventually moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn together.

“In the fall of 2005, we were really getting the itch to start a band,” Joyce said.

Meanwhile, singer Will Popadic, a former Emerson College student who had recently relocated to New York from Los Angeles, posted an ad on Craigslist saying he was looking to meet like-minded musicians.

“It was just so nice and warm and friendly,” Joyce recalled thinking upon coming across Popadic’s ad. “He was like, ‘I just moved to New York…‘”

And the rest, as they say, is history. The newly-formed group began writing songs in the spring of 2006, released an EP that fall, and toured extensively up and down the East Coast in 2007.

“Basically, we hit the ground running,” Joyce said.

“And We Wake Up Slowly” was recorded earlier this year in an 300-year-old barn in New Paltz, in upstate New York — a stark contrast to the Brooklyn basements in which most of the songs were written. The band members say the experience was a bit like camping, with musical instruments scattered around the converted studio, which had no running water.

“It definitely took us out of our element,” Popadic said. “A lot of the sound and texture is a product of being there.”

“You just feel so liberated from everything back in the city,” Joyce said. “It feels like home, for me.”

In fact, much of the record deals with typical quarter-life crisis themes, one of which is “being a country mouse in the city,” as Popadic puts it.

“I don‘t love cities, but I have to be in them to do this,” said Popadic, who is from rural Massachusetts.

The members cite Oasis, Band of Horses, The National, Idlewild, and Radiohead among their influences. Their sound, at times, resembles what The Smiths might have sounded like if they’d been an arena rock band. Popadic’s vocals bear more than a passing resemblance to David Byrne’s, with occasional theatrical warblings like those of Rush’s Geddy Lee.

Still, feeling that their sound was a bit lacking, the trio recently added a second guitarist for live shows, Gavin Dunaway, who had been living in D.C. and had seen the band perform several times.

“We were always looking for ways to make (our sound) bigger,” Joyce said. “He’s like a new pair of socks. They’re so instantly comfortable, and yet they’re new.”

Dunaway’s proposal for a new band name? “Gavin and the Jerks.”

But for now, perhaps out of necessity, it seems “The Jaguar Club” will stick.

“We had a small window of opportunity (to change the name),” Fujita said, as his bandmates considered their newly-minted LP. “And now it’s too late.”

It’s pretty much a given that the band will never live up to the high standard they set for themselves with their extraordinary first trio of albums in the early 1990s, but there are moments on “Backspacer,” their ninth studio album, on which they nearly do.

“Got Some,” for instance, which the band debuted on Conan O’Brien’s first show back in June, harkens back to the hard-hitting “Vs.” era, while first single “The Fixer” could blend seamlessly with the band’s 15-year-old album “Vitalogy.” Other tracks like “Supersonic” prove that guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard still have what it takes to make their instruments wail like no other.

It’s a rock cliché, but Pearl Jam sounds older and wiser on its latest effort, out Sept. 20. (They’re also apparently no longer concerned with avoiding the “sellout” tag, having partnered with Target as the only big-box retailer that will sell “Backspacer” in the U.S., where it is being released without the help of a record label.)

Nothing conveys bittersweet nostalgia better than singer Eddie Vedder’s immediately identifiable strained baritone. He pours the weight of the band’s nearly 20-year career into the contemplative album closer “The End,” incorporating strings for a heightened effect. And the gorgeous, goosebump-inducing acoustic ballad “Just Breathe” finds the 44-year-old re-treading the musical territory he covered on his solo soundtrack to “Into the Wild,” singing, “I’m a lucky man to count on both hands the ones I love / Some folks just have one, yeah, others they’ve got none.”

“Backspacer” is not without its weak spots. Leadoff track “Gonna See My Friend” reveals the band to be re-energized, but feels a bit lazy as it progresses, and “Amongst the Waves” causes the album to lag a bit in the middle. But overall, it’s the band’s strongest material of this decade. Credit for that might be due in part to one-time go-to producer Brendan O’Brien, who reunited with the band on “Backspacer” for the first time since 1998’s “Yield.”

On “The Fixer,” Vedder croons, “When something’s lost, I wanna fight to get back again.” He might be referring to Pearl Jam’s chutzpah — in which case, mission accomplished.

Now, Bornstein is back in Boston. He’s set up shop and working with the growing local film business.

Blast: So we see that since 2003, when you moved to LA, you’ve contributed to over 50 projects in the film and television industry. How did you get your foot in the door in this industry?

Ben Bornstein: I actually had gone to LA with two hundred dollars in my pocket and I didn’t really know anybody out there at that point … I had sent out 30 press kits to makeup fx studios. I got one call three months later. A lot of people didn’t want to hire new people because they’d have to train them. It was really hard to get a job. (Eventually) I got a job creating some fake money trees for a commercial on set at Universal Studios.

Blast: What was the most exciting project you’ve ever worked on?

BB: Tough question. To be on the makeup department for “The Fighter” was a huge difference for me. (There’s a) difference between being a shop technician and doing makeup on the set with the cast and crew. I’m most proud of doing in shop for 300.

Blast: What was your most stressful project?

BB: They usually all are. It’s a high stress business and the deadlines are seemingly impossible. But it was for a short film we shot at Paramount. 18 hour days, zero days off for six weeks straight. It was crazy!  A huge deadline. We had enough work for 15 crew members with only five of us.

Blast: And what is your current project?

BB: Just finished up with “The Fighter.”

Blast:  What advice do you have for people interested in getting into special FX or film in general?

BB: As far as makeup FX, get as many books and DVDs online and research it. I don’t personally think you need to go to school for it. If you want to take a course, get the Dick Smith Advanced Makeup Course. Study anatomy the best you can. It’s all about knowing the human form to the best of your abilities.

In film, start out as a PA. If you can get a PA job-especially in a union production you might have a good shot. … Have a great attitude, never show up late. Show up early.

Blast: And you founded Creative Initiative Make-Up & FX Studio-can you tell us a bit more about that?

BB: Basically I had done a couple of little jobs while in LA. I was there a little over five years and moved back to Massachusetts. It was basically that I felt that my skill level had gone up enough to handle the fx in film.

Blast: How do you feel about the future of the film industry in Boston with Plymouth Rock Studios being built and the whole Hollywood East movement?

BB: I have a really strong feeling about it. If I didn’t I wouldn’t have moved back to Boston. I have really high hopes for this city.

There were 13 features shot in Boston in 2008, and Plymouth Rock Studios is due to open in 2010 , with plans for another studio to also open in the South Shore within that time frame (http://www.mafilm.org).

Work had really slowed down in LA, because of the strikes. I got  a job a week after I decided to start packing (for Boston). I was lucky enough to get a job over there to work on tThe Surrogates…(but I was) working in LA when I wanted to go home, for a film that would be shot in Boston. I was there six weeks and the whole crew was great. I worked on The Final Destination and Shorts, and after that I had a couple of small jobs and then decided just to move. And I’m really glad that I did! Work has really picked up a lot here. It was difficult to be a nonunion fx guy, everything is union here. Since I moved home last August I had applied to be a union makeup artist. It took me between October and February to see if I was getting in. Once you get in the union it can really change your life. And when I was in LA, my last day there I got a phone call saying I’d gotten into the Union.

Blast: Anything else you’d like to add?

BB: I’d like to thank the local makeup artists in Boston who’ve given me a chance to prove myself and thank you and good luck!

I realized recently that I’ve probably spent more time listening to the voice of Paul McCartney than I’ve spent listening to any other person on the planet, save for immediate family members (who have the rather unfair advantage of knowing me personally). Friends come and go, but the music of the Beatles (in both their Beatle and post-Beatle guises) has been with me since infancy, and might very well play me off the stage when it’s all said and done.

For that reason, I’m torn between tailoring this review to two types of readers: those for whom the Beatles are just another band (I know you’re out there), and those for whom they’re something akin to a religion. Of course, you don’t need to know all the words to “Revolution 9” to find something to like in Beatles Rock Band, but your level of attachment to the band will largely determine whether you consider the game a worthwhile purchase.

You Say You Want a Revolution

Seth Schiesel of the New York Times recently suggested that Beatles Rock Band “may be the most important video game yet made.” While that lofty claim might have some validity in light of the game’s potential status as a “cultural watershed,” the title that started the franchise — the original Rock Band — was far more important from a gameplay perspective. Beatles Rock Band merely tweaks the established formula. You’ll still be strumming or pounding plastic instruments in time with “gems” scrolling down on-screen note charts, and while “Overdrive” has become “Beatlemania” and “Awesomes” have been replaced by “Fabs,” the core mechanics remain the same.

A three-second count-in before resuming play after exiting the pause screen and a more extensive drum trainer (“Beatle Beats” allows you to mimic 80 of Ringo’s signature strokes at reduced speed) are welcome additions, but Beatles Rock Band’s most notable innovation is its inclusion of three-part vocal harmonies. The Fabs were known for employing the sweetest harmonies this side of the Beach Boys or Zombies, and Beatles Rock Band capitalizes on the public’s familiarity with their songs to capture this essential element of their sound. Although the band bonuses conferred by activating “Beatlemania” encourage a degree of cooperation, the addition of vocal harmonies necessitates some planning and coordination, and goes a long way towards making each player feel like a part of a cohesive unit.

When harmonies are activated prior to starting any song that supports them, each player with a microphone can sing any of the vocal parts, with no penalties resulting from a failure to sing anything but the lead correctly. The vocal trainer in the practice mode allows you to isolate each vocal part and repeat each section of any song as many times as you like, and you might find yourself resorting to it when some of those peskier Double and Triple Fab scores prove elusive. As creative director Josh Randall noted, the Beatles rarely “shred,” but while Beatles Rock Band offers few instrumental challenges on par with those of the most difficult songs found in previous incarnations of the franchise, playing on expert while singing complex harmonies represents a feat that only the experienced can master. If you’re especially sadistic, you can activate “Super Speed” in the game’s settings, increasing the rate at which the note charts scroll, or enter “Performance Mode,” in which the notes themselves are hidden.

Is There Anybody Going to Listen to My Story?

In a nod to user-friendliness, Harmonix made 44 of the game’s 45 songs accessible from the start in quickplay mode (in previous iterations of Rock Band, one had to progress through a lengthy career mode to catch ‘em all). However, in order to unlock the final tune (it’s worth the effort), you will have to play through the story mode. Story mode divides the assembled fragments of the Beatles catalog into discrete historical periods, introducing each through an artful montage of animated archival material. Simply complete every song in a given period to progress to the next.

Once you complete each section, you’ll also have the opportunity to complete a “Chapter Challenge,” which tasks you with five-starring each of that section’s songs without interruption, but Beatles Rock Band’s story mode is far less involved than those in Rock Band and Rock Band 2. You won’t be forced to replay songs countless times in pursuit of riches, mostly because there simply wouldn’t be anything to spend them on.

You Can’t Do That

That brings me to one possible source of frustration for fans of the franchise: Beatles Rock Band features a notable lack of customization and interactivity in comparison to the previous Rock Band titles. In the interest of historical accuracy, you won’t be able to create your own character, design your own logo, play dress-up with the Beatles, or tinker with their instruments. You’ll also find that freestyle drum fills and crowd participation have disappeared, whammying sustained notes no longer produces an audible effect, and butchering a song results in a failure message, rather than an inglorious exit from the stage.

Notice that I didn’t say that Beatles Rock Band suffers from these changes. There might be a certain segment of the game-playing public that laments these omissions, but I found the commitment to historical accuracy and the core Beatles experience far more rewarding than the ability to scour the sunglasses rack in Rock Band 2. Fortunately, the Beatles’ array of iconic outfits keeps things from growing stale on stage, even without the player’s intervention.

Every Little Thing

Beatles Rock Band positively oozes with Beatles-specific audio, imagery, and extras. In days gone by, I yearned for downloadable Beatles tracks to appear in the Rock Band music store, but now that I’ve witnessed the power of this fully armed and operational Beatles-station, I’m glad that the folks at Harmonix resisted the urge to drop the Beatles bomb before they were prepared to deliver the maximum payload. The game’s breathtaking intro and outro videos, produced by Passion Pictures, convey some sense of the Beatles’ cultural impact while drawing upon elements of the band’s visual legacy, and shorter animations, prepared by graphic design studio MK12, accompany the introduction of each new venue. Selecting menu options even elicits a chord that sounds straight out of “Getting Better.” In-studio chatter from actual Beatles recording sessions, some of which had never been officially released prior to appearing in the game, both precedes and follows the playing of most tracks, and helps to foster an immersive experience.

If strumming along with some of the best songs ever written doesn’t sound like an ample reward for your $60 outlay, you’ll be happy to learn that Harmonix has included a selection of photographs and videos of the band which can be unlocked through the story mode. The photos and their accompanying captions were vetted by Macca himself, and the videos, consisting mainly of excerpts from preexisting Beatle documentaries, offer a glimpse of the game’s principal characters in action. There’s little here that hardcore Beatlemaniacs haven’t seen and heard elsewhere, and it’s hard not to wish that Harmonix had managed to cram more of this material onto the disk, but what there is does offer a powerful incentive for players to master all of the game’s tracks, and should provide a handy primer for those new to the band’s history. In addition, a long list of achievements provides a host of more specific challenges which can be undertaken for Beatle bragging righties.

All These Places Had Their Moments

Although the music is the headliner, the venues in which you’ll find yourself playing it certainly qualify as co-stars of this show. As you advance through the story mode, you’ll find yourself playing to screaming crowds in a number of immediately recognizable settings, including the Cavern Club, the set of the Ed Sullivan Show, Shea Stadium, the Nippon Budokan, and the rooftop of Apple Records. Each of these locales was meticulously researched and recreated, and only the somewhat generic appearances and recycled animations of the crowds subtract from their overall effectiveness.

If you turn on “Realistic Mode” in the game’s settings, your every action will be accompanied by the high-pitched hollering of an adoring crowd. It’s exhilarating initially, but after struggling to hear yourself sing for a few songs, you’ll understand why the band decided to call touring quits after playing Candlestick in August of 1966. Fortunately, rather than retiring, the band retreated to the studio, and that’s where you’ll head after completing the Budokan set in story mode. Beatles Rock Band’s selection of songs that the group never performed live is set in Studio Two at Abbey Road, where you’ll be treated to an intimate look at the Fab Four in some of their quieter moments. However, Studio Two merely serves as a launching pad for the centerpieces of Beatles Rock Band’s graphical gallantry: several song-specific “Dreamscapes,” psychedelic landscapes through which the virtual Beatles meander in mid-performance. The Dreamscapes draw upon the band’s artistic endeavors, the imagery inherent in their lyrics, and the creativity of Harmonix’s design team to conduct a visual symphony which non-playing observers might appreciate more fully than the frenetic fretters locked in concentration beside them. Only when the Dreamscapes dissolve at each song’s conclusion to reveal oddly motionless Beatles sitting in Studio Two does the spell dissipate.

Harmonix went to great lengths to perfect the looks and animations of John, Paul, George, and Ringo in a slightly cartoony form, and for the most part, they succeeded. Motion-captured movements and extensive research yielded in-game models through which the essence of the Fab Four shines. Catching a glimpse mid-play of a merrily bobbing McCartney or a collectedly crooning Lennon undoubtedly enhances the excitement to be had.

Money Don’t Get Everything, It’s True

The original Rock Band shipped with 58 tracks (albeit with only 45 that anyone had ever heard of) while Rock Band 2 raised the bar by hitting the shelves with 75. More importantly, an ever-expanding catalogue of downloadable tracks awaits anyone who procures either title. If you purchase Rock Band 2 today (for less than the price of a fresh copy of Beatles Rock Band), you’ll have (at last count) as many as 832 songs at your fingertips. In contrast, Beatles Rock Band offers you the prospect of only 45 (46 if you count “All You Need is Love,” available online on release day), with a relatively limited number of downloadable numbers in the pipeline. Of course, you could regard the package in another light: at an MSRP of $60, you’re paying only two thirds of the price of an imaginary 45-song Beatles downloadable track pack offered at the going rate of ~$2/song, and you’re receiving significantly more than the songs alone.

The Beatles weren’t given to writing songs of extraordinary length, so most of the 45 tracks supplied on the disc, which span the group’s career, will fly by. In essence, you can see all that Beatles Rock Band has to offer in a single evening (or, if you’re like me, you can see all that it has to offer three or four times, in three or four successive evenings). Harmonix is banking on the fact that you’ll want to revisit those offerings over and over again, just as any self-respecting Beatles fan regularly revisits the band’s oeuvre.

By the standards of previous band-specific offerings, Beatles Rock Band’s set list is an unqualified success. Guitar Hero Aerosmith and Guitar Hero Metallica padded their selections with tracks from related bands and included even fewer masters from the titular groups. However, Beatles Rock Band was not intended to be a greatest hits collection, and those expecting one might be slightly disappointed. Out of the box, the game features only 13 of the 27 mega-hits collected on the One compilation in 2000; instead of “Help!” “A Day in the Life,” “Hey Jude,” “Let it Be,” or “Strawberry Fields Forever,” you’ll find the likes of “Boys,” “Good Morning Good Morning,” and “Birthday.” The latter cuts add some musical variety and make up in playability what they might lack in renown, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that Harmonix decided to hold some of its most potent weapons in reserve to serve as the highlights of future downloadable offerings.

I Can’t Get Through, My Hands Are Tied

We took the Beatle-branded custom guitars for a test-drive at the Harmonix offices, but we haven’t yet gotten our mitts on the replica of Ringo’s Ludwig drum set, and we didn’t spend enough time with the replicas of Paul’s Höfner bass, John’s Rickenbacker 325, or George’s Gretsch Duo to produce authoritative judgments.The new instruments have been modeled to give fans a heightened visual and tactile sense of being Beatles, but they play very similarly to the older Rock Band models.

Fortunately, Beatles Rock Band is compatible with a wide array of preexisting fake instruments, so you really only need to pick up the Beatles-branded gear if you just don’t feel fab enough without them (I don’t). Because the game’s servers hadn’t yet gone live, we also weren’t able to sample its online offerings, but Rock Band 2’s online quickplay, Tug of War, and Score Duel modes have all returned for another showing.

Come and Get It

In the end, the love you’ll take is equal to your affection for the music you’ll fake, so you might be wise to steer clear of Beatles Rock Band if you’ve already proven resistant to the band’s charms. However, the multiple generations of would-be Apple scruffs who have come to cherish the music of those four lads from Liverpool should greet the game with nothing less than the love with which Harmonix clearly labored. Best played with a bandmate or five, Beatles Rock Band is perfect for parties, but it’s also an ideal solution when you’re craving a more interactive alternative to yet another listen. Now, just wake me when I can mangle the medley.

The End

Now that you’ve read Blast’s review, be sure to peruse our previous coverage of one of this year’s most engaging games:

• Oct. 30, 2008: Blast reports Beatles Rock Band under development
• March 5: Beatles Rock Band gets 9/9/09 release date
• June 3: Blast interviews Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos at E3
• June 10: Blast ranks Beatles Rock Band among the best games seen at E3 2009
• Aug. 18: Most of the track list is revealed
• Aug. 25: TV Spot
• Sept. Issue: Harmonix lead artist Dare Matheson interviewed
• Sept. Issue: Harmonix audio lead Eric Brosius interviewed
• Sept. Issue: Harmonix creative director Josh Randall interviewed

Present during the first exploratory meetings between Harmonix and the Apple Corps. shareholders, as well the game’s final days in production, Randall possesses a unique perspective on the monumental effort put forth by the 300+ employees at the music/gaming company to render the Beatles properly in the video game medium. We sat down with Josh to discuss the need for secrecy, meeting with Macca, and the end of the affair.

Josh Randall: I’ve been working on the game since we first started talking about the idea of doing Beatles Rock Band. I was on the front lines between Harmonix and Apple Corps and the shareholders — the shareholders are Paul and Ringo, and Yoko, and Olivia Harrison. So, we had most of the company working on it — we’re about 300 people now, so most of us were focused on that.

Blast editor John Guilfoil: What was the first game you worked on here?

JR: Frequency. Before Harmonix, I was with Looking Glass Studios. We did Thief and System Shock.

Blast’s Ben Lindbergh: Now that you’re so close to release, are you looking back and reflecting on all the things that had to come to come together for this to become a reality? Does it seem like something you couldn’t have imagined happening a few years ago, with all the people and companies involved?

JR: There’s definitely been some reflection. Yeah, it’s been amazing. I still kind of — I have to say, I’m still waiting to see it on the shelves before I can actually relax. Because it was so secret for a really long time, that it was really tricky to sort of, every day — like, every email that I sent, I’d have to recheck all the people that that I was sending to, just to make sure. You know, like, ‘Am I going to blow it today? Oh, I didn’t blow it today! All right, great, it’s good till tomorrow!’ But yeah, it’s been a pretty amazing journey for everyone involved.

BL: How receptive were the shareholders initially? I know it was an idea that came, at least in part, from George’s son. Was it something that they had to be convinced to do? Something that appealed to them immediately?

Beatles Rock Band has been Randall's biggest challenge in more than 10 years with Harmonix (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

JR: It’s funny, Alex, our CEO, I remember talking with him years ago, and he was like, ‘Yeah, someday we’re going to do a Beatles game!’ I was like, ‘Ha ha ha, that’s hilarious.’ And then, I guess Dhani (Harrison) had been a fan of our earlier games, and somehow met the head of MTV, Van Toffler. And Van was like, ‘Oh, well we just acquired Harmonix, you should talk to Harmonix.’ So Dhani met with Alex, and they sort of kicked around a Beatles Game.

My interaction with all the shareholders was amazing. It was like they understood, just looking at what we showed them — you know, our first meetings were just showing them Rock Band and talking about our experience with Rock Band, and how we find that it’s encouraging people to play music, or to have a deeper understanding of the music they already love.

So I think they got that, and then once we started talking about some of the creative things we could do, I think they started getting excited, when they realized, ‘Oh, this is going to be like a new edition to the Beatles catalog, this is the real deal.’ So, with that in mind, they all really pushed us to do new stuff.

BL: You put a demo together for them initially, right? Did they play it, or did they just watch it?

JR: They watched us play it. It was basically, I think it was a few (Beatles) songs that you could play in Rock Band, and then there was a video, where we had spent a few months basically sculpting all the heads of the Beatles in 3-D, and sort of stuck them into the game, but didn’t have them animating, they were all just sort of posed. But our game engine used camera cuts and stuff to make it look almost like the Budokan concert, and we showed them that. They could use their imaginations to figure out where that was going to go.

JG: Obviously this game was a challenge, and every project you take on was difficult, but what was it like having Paul McCartney kind of correct you, and say, ‘No, that is not how I stand, this is how I stand!’ Did that, overall, make it a lot more difficult for you? What was that like?

JR: I think the biggest challenge for us on this project was really just the fact that most video games don’t look good until, really, the last month of production. And so, we were in a situation where we really wanted to show progress, and show that, like, ‘You guys are going to look amazing in the game, and the whole game is going to be fantastic and look gorgeous.

But, it was more like, ‘Right now all we can show you is that we’ve got guys on stage, and they’re kind of goofy because we might not have perfected all the technology’ or whatever. And so what we wound up doing was basically having a lot of visual milestones, where we would have to, pretty early on in production, push to have a demo that would maybe show like 3 or 4 songs, but they would be sort of like proof of concepts. Like, ‘Here’s what the guys look like in these outfits, here’s what they look like when they move, here are some of the venues,’ and stuff like that.

And every time we would get to one of those milestones, me and some of the team would get on a plane over to Abbey Road, or go to New York, or wherever we had to go, to basically sit with the Apple Corps shareholders, get their feedback, and discuss it. And then we’d get their feedback and be like, ‘Okay, we’ll see you guys in a few weeks,’ and then we’d iterate it and come back. So, trying to sort of push the visual quality earlier in the pipeline is really tricky. Sometimes you just need that time to get all the little nuances right. So, we would have certain meetings where we’d go, ‘Hey, it’s Shea Stadium, and it’s huge, and it’s awesome, and there’s a crowd, and there’s all this stuff,’ and Apple’s like, ‘Yeah, but they’re not singing into their microphones.’ And we were like, ‘Oh, yeah yeah yeah. Next milestone, next milestone!’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, but—,’ and we’re like, ‘No, it’ll be good!’

Before Harmonix, Randall was with Looking Glass Studios working on Thief and System Shock. (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

And after a while, those guys started to trust us. When I said, ‘All right, trust me, next month you’ll see all this stuff,’ and then we would deliver, and then they’d be like, ‘Okay.’

JG: Was there a specific nuance that really stuck out that one of the shareholders made happen, and said, ‘No, this is how you’re going to do this, this is how this is going to look?’ Was there one particular thing that one of the shareholders kind of walked you through?

JR: No, I think it was more like helping us find our way through stuff. I think that just meeting with any of them, they could sort of help, like,’ Oh, actually, if you really want to capture the spirit of this particular Beatle, you should do this and this and this.’ Or sometimes they didn’t know the technical terms to be able to guide us to where we should go, but they would be able to say, ‘Oh, well…’ Like, our John model wasn’t that good for a while, because he was slightly stooped over a little bit, and talking like Yoko, she was like, ‘No, he was way more powerful-looking than that, he should look better than that.’ And we were like, ‘Okay, what is it, what does she mean by that?’ And we went back and looked at all the footage, and you watch John when he plays, and he’s just like (mimics John Lennon). Just totally owning 50,000 people. And it was like, ‘Oh, okay, I get it.’

So we basically just took his skeleton and bent him back, and made him always sort of look down his nose, and it was like, ‘Hey, it’s John.’ It was just stuff like that that they sort of pushed to capture that spirit. Paul sat with Chris Foster, and I think we had written a few things, and he was just like, ‘No, actually that’s not how it happened.’ I think Paul realized, ‘Oh, now I can finally clear the air on a lot of this stuff, or I can put down how I remember it.’

It’s weird, because that’s one guy out of four, and he remembers it that way. So we had to sort of talk to him, then basically I think what Chris did was have all of his facts straight from a bunch of different books, and when he walked in or when he talked with Paul, he could be like, ‘All right, well this guy reports that it was this way, and this guy reports that it was this way.’ And Paul would be like, ‘Oh, well maybe it was this way.’ It was a long time ago.

JG: You mentioned kind of being part of the Beatles catalog with this game. With all the previous music games, both of the major competitors, there are dozens of dozens of bands poured into the game, there are hundreds of songs now, and it’s a game. How do you feel about how now you have all the Beatles albums — and Beatles Rock Band? It’s got all the intimate details, and their outtakes and stuff. How do you feel about this game not being just a collection of songs, but actually part of Beatlemania?

JR: It’s amazing. For us to be a part of that is really like a dream come true. And I think that when we were showing it to the shareholders, they sort of realized, ‘Oh, this is the new Anthology.’ That’s what they were saying. And ‘This is the way that kids are going to be introduced to us now.’ And so, they were like, ‘Make sure this is right!’ And we were like, ‘Okay!’ So I think what we tried to do is really sort of make the game feel like it came through them. We wanted it to feel like the Beatles in-game. It hasn’t totally hit me yet, but I’m sure in a few years, I’ll look back at this time and think, ‘Whoa, that was really cool.’

JG: What do you think is the most epic part of the game? The one that’s really going to capture new fans, and make our moms scream and cry when they see it?

One of the challenges Harmonix faced was showing the Beatles shareholders their progress over months and months of building the game. They created milestones to show specific aspects of development.

JR: Oh, yeah. Well, I think there are a few dreamscapes in there that have really had an emotional impact on people. I think it depends on what your relationship is to the Beatles. For my mom, she was more into the early pop stuff, and so when she’s seen the stuff in the Sullivan show, she actually remembers watching that on TV, or seeing the Shea Stadium concert. She gets caught up in the sort of Beatlemania, fan aspect of it. But I’ve seen other people really respond to dreamscapes. ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ that one in particular is really moving. And I think that for me, the most moving one is either ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ which still makes me smile every time I play it — I’ll get like halfway through the song, and think ‘This is cool,’ and then something will happen on-screen, like the guys will look at me or the sun will come up or something, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is awesome.’ The one that’s probably most epic is ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ just because that was our biggest one. That one took a long time, and you’re sort of going from one place to another, and all this stuff. Another one that, for me, is pretty moving, is the ‘Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows,’ that’s another that’s really trippy and has some good shots of George looking at you, and the drums are really awesome.

BL: Does the fact that you’re dealing with such an iconic band, and the fact that most people will be coming into it knowing not only the music, but the visuals, the way these guys acted, and some of the history, did that make your job easier, knowing that there would be some currency among the players, or did it make it more difficult because you had to conform to those expectations?

JR: I think it was basically like, ‘Oh, great, everyone’s going to know these songs already. That’s awesome.’ And I think that happened with the whole vocal harmony feature, where it’s like, people already know how to sing the main part, so if they want to reach and try to sing the harmony parts, they at least have that foundation there. So, there was that. But more than that, it was the challenge of like, ‘Okay, we now have to make four of the most recognizable people in the world, and make their 3-D avatars look good.’ And that’s incredibly daunting. And then with the dreamscapes, that was another one where people have had this music in their heads for their whole lives, and every time they hear this music, they get a certain image in their head of what this song looks like. And so, we were pressed with coming up with these, basically interactive music videos, that somehow meet or exceed the visuals that they have in their heads. Which was like, ‘I hope we don’t screw this up,’ you know?

BL: Was there every any consideration of going with a hyper-realistic look, or was it always sort of a toned-down, Rock Band, cartoony version?

JR: I think that we very early on realized that the closer you get to hyper-real, the closer you get to the Uncanny Valley, where it’s like the closer it gets to human, but is not, your brain is like, ‘Hey, that’s not a human!’ and instantly picks it out. So, we were all really concerned about that. We didn’t want these guys to be creepy. We wanted them to be cute and lovable and have all the charisma that the real guys do. If you watch these guys play live, there’s just so much joy that pours out of these guys, and they’re so clever. They always seemed like they had some sort of inside joke while they were playing, little smirks and things like that. So we really tried to go in and identify that stuff, and sort of put that into our characters. But I think if we had gone for a more realistic thing, it just would’ve come off creepy. You just can’t do it yet. Maybe at some point your brain will not care, but right now, it’s like—especially if there are still movies that are kind of creepy in that way when they try to make 3-D humans, trying to do it on a game console is really hard.

BL: Was there any consideration ever given to trying to cram a second guitar note chart onto the screen, or did you always know that you were going to try to compress them into one?

JR: Yeah, I think that early on, we sort of realized that doing our standard Rock Band thing of taking all the guitars and putting it on one track was going to be more fun, because then you’d have, you know, when you design a Rock Band “level,” when you’re looking at a song, you want to make sure that each player has enough note content to last the entire song. So, if there are these big, long pauses while you’re waiting for someone else to play something, then it gets kind of boring. So I think if we had two guitar tracks, then that’s probably what would happen. Each person would have a track that was kind of spotty. So I think we all just kind of quickly were like, ‘Yeah, just put it all on one track to make it fun to play all the way through.’

BL: Did you ever worry that maybe the Beatles, despite their popularity, weren’t the band best-suited for a game like this, because of their experimentation, the unusual instruments, the fact that they don’t really fit into the “rock god” paradigm?

JR: Well, they don’t shred, right? That was one thing that was just like, ‘Oh, well, there aren’t a million insane guitar solos,’ so just from a difficulty standpoint, in the beginning I was like ‘Well, how is this going to work?’ And then once we added vocal harmonies and were basically having people play an instrument and sing in harmony like the Beatles did, it’s really challenging. So I think for people who want a challenge out of this game, it’s like, ‘Hey, the Beatles could do it — can you do it?’ That sort of thing.

JG: What’s your favorite song on the list so far?

JR: It kind of changes, you know? I think I’m still psyched about “Sgt. Pepper,” because that’s my favorite Beatles song, going back to when I was a kid, and favorite album. But it depends on my mood. We definitely play the game around here a lot. When we were making the game, we’d play the game just to sort of blow off steam, which was great. I’d sort of go between, if I needed to chill out, I’d play ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ if I needed to blow off steam, I’d play ‘Helter Skelter’ or some of the early tracks that are pretty fast and fun, and we’d sort of clear our minds to go back and finish working. But I think probably ‘Sgt. Pepper.’

JG: On the question of the two major music games out there: Guitar Hero was a phenomenon that Harmonix brought into the world, really introduced everyone to. And for the last couple of years, Guitar Hero has still been — when people think of music games, the first thing they think of is Guitar Hero. With Rock Band, you really turned a corner, and really got people thinking about the multiplayer aspect of this. Do you think Beatles Rock Band finally kind of comes full circle for Harmonix, that now you’ve kind of taken back the throne of the music gaming world?

JR: I don’t know. I guess for me, I’m still surprised that there are other people making music games besides us. When I started, there was Harmonix, and then these Japanese companies, whose games didn’t really come over to the States. So, now I think that it’s a really interesting time, that there are all these people making music games. And I think for people that love music, it’s a fantastic time. As far as the throne, or the king or whatever, I don’t really have a comment on that. I’m just really amazingly psyched that the Beatles chose to work with us, and I’m so proud of my team for what they were able to accomplish. And I really hope people will love it when it comes out. I think it’s an amazing game, and I think pairing the music and story of the Beatles with our gameplay is — well, it’s really fun.

BL: Could you see yourself doing another band-centric game in the future, or would it just be all downhill from here?

JR: Oh, it’s all downhill. (jokes) I don’t know. I’m taking a vacation. (laughs) It would be cool to work with other bands if they were cool and creative and wanted to engage with us on a creative level. I’m kind of up for anything.

JG: Is there a band that’s not been in a Rock Band game that you’d really like to work with?

JR: I don’t know. I’m actually a big techno guy, so there are a bunch of bands or types of music that I’d like to see in our games again, but I already got to make a bunch of those games ten years ago, so I’m not complaining.

BL: How much more effort goes into prepping one track for this game, as compared to one track for Rock Band, where you’re not necessarily having to tailor the video to a specific band, and maybe you’re not having to deal with audio that’s from 45-year-old two-track sources? How much more effort goes into a single track of this game than would go into downloadable content for Rock Band 2?

JR: Right. Well, Rock Band is made in a pretty modular way, that allows you to—talking about offering stuff. Our venues are set up in a way that basically for any song, it’ll sort of look good in any venue. For the Beatles Rock Band, since we have this concept of dreamscapes, we wound up making a bunch of graphical assets that are really specific to that one song, which is just a mammoth undertaking. Also, we had never done that stuff before. You know, we’d never had guys walking through a field or anything like that. So, from that standpoint, that’s a huge production difference, custom-crafting all the graphics for each individual song.

BL: Does that limit the scope of what you’re looking to do with the DLC at all?

JR: Actually, no. What we did, which was tricky, was we made, for songs that are going to wind up in dreamscapes in DLC, there’s actually stuff that’s on the disk that you haven’t seen yet. So when new DLC songs come out, that’ll help conserve new custom assets for that. And then some stuff is going to be, almost doing a mash-up of the stuff that you’ve seen before. So you might revisit certain dreamscapes that have been tweaked out or changed in different ways. We tried to come up with a modular system that would work for these dreamscape elements as well. If there were time, it would be cool to like, for every single song, go really deep and make it totally custom for every DLC song. But I think the level of customization that you’ll see is actually really good.

BL: Are you looking at making the whole catalogue available eventually, or is that a little ambitious?

JR: Yeah, it’s a little ambitious. I think right now we’ve got three albums that we’ve announced, plus the “All You Need is Love” single. It would be cool to keep going.

John M. Guilfoil and Marc Normandin of the Blast staff and Blast correspondents Steve Bagley and Darcy Hofmann contributed to this report.

“The tour is going great, everything is amazing,” said MacIntyre.

“The fans are the reason that it is. I couldn’t imagine this without them and their incredible support,” Sarver commented. Fans were already waiting outside of the Garden hours before the show in the sweltering heat hoping to get a glimpse of their favorite contestant. Sarver elaborated that meeting the fans is their favorite part of the day, but due to security restraints and the number of people outside they wouldn’t be able to do it at the Garden.

Fans of the show have already drastically changed the lives of the Idol contestants who now have to adjust to being recognized everywhere they go.

“[My] personal life down the drain. People know who I am now,” said Iraheta.

“There is not a single place that I can go where someone doesn’t recognize me, which is flattering,” Sarver said. “I’m not going to lie, I like to eat without being talked to, but outside of eating I don’t mind being disturbed. It’s very flattering and very touching for people to know who I am.”

The Boston date was just over the midway point for the tour, and the idols were lucky enough to enjoy a day off in Beantown before they performed at the Garden on August 18.

Sarver and a few of the other male finalists took a Duck tour and a trip to the Aquarium while MacIntyre went scouring the city for a grand piano.

“I found one at a hotel way far away from the hotel we are staying in now. I got to play one song before they kicked me out,” MacIntyre said, “(The piano) was in hearing distance of three or four rooms. I like to respect people’s sleep.”

The Boston day off was one of the few on the tour when Iraheta wasn’t shuttled off to recording her upcoming album.

“It’s pretty crazy, you know. (On) days off you record. They have been sending me songs, so just cutting them and getting them out there,” said Iraheta. She has been working with famed producer Kevin Rudolf who is an idol of hers.

“It’s definitely going to be the rock album I have always wanted to do,” explains Iraheta about the sound of the album when asked how much pop will have to be enthused with the album by record label request. While admitting that some compromise will have to be made, Iraheta is adamant about staying true to herself and her sound, “Hopefully it’ll be just a good rock album,” she said.

Iraheta, Adam Lambert and Kris Allen all signed contracts with 19 Recordings Entertainment – the label backing the American Idol competition. All contestants were under contract with 19 Recordings from the start of the show until August 20. If they did not sign with 19 Recordings then they had to wait until August 20 to make any official contractual agreements with any other label or entertainment company.

Due to the contract issue, none of the Idols were able to comment on any specific plans once they were free from 19 Recordings, but each said they were shifting through options.

“It is going to be country,” said Sarver of his plans for his full-length album. “I have simply stated that there is going to be an album because I’ve been working on one, but that doesn’t mean legally. I have several options but even if that doesn’t work out, I have built a recording studio in my house so I will release it whether someone picks it up or not – there will be a Michael Sarver album out there,” Sarver promises.

While also sorting through record deal offers, MacIntyre, who was born visually impaired has also been offered a book publishing deal to write an autobiography of his experiences so far.

“[It] is something I’ve been wanting to do for a really long time,” explains MacIntyre. “It is going to be about my life. I feel like I do have a lot to say still. I have received thousands of e-mails from around the world of the most touching stories. People have told me that even just the little bit of my life story that they have experienced through American Idol has meant so much to them,” MacIntyre said.

MacIntyre is also considering a career behind the scenes, writing songs for other artists he admires.

“I would love to write a song for Tim McGraw and for the Jonas Brothers,” admitted MacIntyre, “I write a lot of material in that power pop kind of punk genre.”

Though the Idols’ paths are diverging, they are united during the tour and by their experiences on the show.

“This is a chance for fans to see us for who we really are,” MacIntyre said, “not through the lens of Motown week or Michael Jackson week.”

Iraheta echoes the sentiment in her advice to anyone auditioning for the show, but it seems to work for life in general too.

“Stay true to yourself and just go for it,” she said.

BLAST: Tell us a bit about Dead Space: Extraction and how it fits into what we know about the ever-growing Dead Space universe.

SMP:  Extraction is the official prequel to Dead Space.  The game kicks off from the moment the Red Marker is extracted and follows a group of four people as they attempt to escape Aegis VII and see sanctuary on the USG Ishimura.

BLAST: Rather than port over the original Dead Space to the Wii, the focus for Visceral Studios was instead to create an original property that expanded on the Dead Space universe. What drove you in that direction, rather than the one that many Wii owners are accustomed to seeing?

SMP:  As gamers we wanted to create a unique Dead Space experience from the ground up for the Nintendo Wii.  The Wii is a very unique console with its innovate motion controls and we wanted to embrace the challenge of building a Wii game and that meant starting from the ground up.

BLAST: There are mature games on the Wii, but they have hit retail with varying levels of success. What, in your mind, separates Dead Space: Extraction from those mature Wii games already on the market, as well as those that are still on the way?

SMP:  With Extraction we are hoping to deliver a unique and new Dead Space experience for Wii gamers.  One of our main areas of focus with Extraction was nailing the atmosphere the first game had.  Compared to some of the other mature games on the Wii we feel our visuals and gameplay will really stand apart and hopefully interest a wide range of gamers.

BLAST: From what I have played, even in a room full of other people, this game has you jumping and feeling antsy just like the original did. Since the game is a guided experience though, was it challenging to recreate that creepy atmosphere in this format? How was it accomplished?

SMP:  Going with the Guided Experience approach has really opened a lot of doors for us as it relates to setting up tension and scares.  With this new perspective we have been able to approach the game in ways familiar to film makers.  Since the majority of the time we know where the camera will be looking we can leverage that knowledge and create some good set ups that we were not able to do on the original game.

BLAST: Part of the problem with the Wii is perception; many gamers that consider themselves “hardcore” have ignored the Wii in favor of its other console cousins. What do you think Dead Space: Extraction can do about changing the mindset of those gamers by convincing them that it’s okay to own and even like a Wii?

SMP:  Personally as a gamer I think it’s great to have options when it comes to the game systems I play on.  I enjoy playing games on all of the various console and handhelds.

I hope people enjoy Extraction and view it as one of the must have games on the Wii.  I think gamers are open minded and as long as a game is fun will give it a shot regardless of the platform it is on.  Hopefully they feel that way about Extraction.

BLAST: Tell us a little bit about Deep Silver.

Hannes Seifert: Deep Silver is the games brand of Koch Media group. We run Deep Silver Vienna, and our job is to create games that interest a broad, international audience.  Right now we’re working on expanding internationally and opening an American office and working on games that we hope interest an American audience, and one of the key parts of that is our role as producers in Vienna’s studio.

BLAST: Cursed Mountain takes a different environment for survival horror than we are used to seeing. How did the idea of the Himalayas as the background for a survival horror game come together?

HS: At Deep Silver Vienna we have a very specific approach to new IP and new games. It’s very setting-driven; we are looking for settings that feel fresh and haven’t been overused, and Cursed Mountain’s was one of those. The first idea was to use something well known, like Katmandu, which is the capital of Nepal. So what we were looking for is something that stands out and still provides an environment where you can play with imagination, hallucination, and horror that’s potentially based on real religious beliefs, which makes it very plausible. That came altogether then, and in the end became Cursed Mountain.

The decision for a platform was also, perhaps, an unusual one. When we were doing the research regarding Tibetan Buddhism and the story and everything, we discovered that a lot of the defeating and protecting against ghosts in real life was done through mantras, prayer gestures and chanting. The prayer gestures are the link back to the Wii. When we had been working on games before that, people would use the controller to protect their bodies from the screen, and what appealed to me when we were pitching the concept of how to fight was that you would need to open your body and perform these gestures. And that was back then only possible on the Wii, and that was how we made the decision for the platform.

BLAST: Cursed Mountain has a creepy aesthetic and there are a lot of supernatural elements, despite having an everyman lead character—he’s a famous mountain climber, but he’s still pretty much a regular guy. What were inspirations for both the supernatural elements as well as the main character, Eric Simmons?

HS: There’s a lot of inspiration coming from the famous mountaineers. They all had that near-death experience where they wrote about it or talked about it, and when you combine that with the hallucinations and the very hostile environment you’ve already provided that creepy background. And all of them seem to be guy, whether it’s Hillary or Bishop or whoever. The decision to make Eric a Scotsman, well, all of the famous mountaineers are either Swiss or Austrian or British, and you can’t have a Swiss or Austrian character in English because they instantly sound like the bad guy because of their accents, so we decided to go for a Scottish character which made him pretty appealing and stand out.

The inspiration for the enemies, the ghosts and the demons, that was very heavily influenced by Tibetan Buddhism. A big part of that is based on this Buddhist text called the Trip, which is not as peaceful as is normally conveyed in the west. Each religion has its peaceful and brutal aspects, and what we tried to do, we went through and researched—we spent 10 months on this in the pre-production phase—researched Trip and studying that. We didn’t copy one-to-one what we found, but we were heavily inspired by it so that we didn’t upset the believers but still use things that are powerful and as close to the truth and research as possible, and we think the combination worked out pretty nicely.

The main inspiration, the source as you could say, was the experience of climbers, especially in the 70s and 80s, before chopper rescues up high and GPS systems. The other thing was the Tibetan Buddhism, with the architecture connected to it, and the demons and the ghosts and the goddesses. It’s a very, very rich thing to be inspired by.

BLAST: You can see the entire game world from any level in Cursed Mountain. How did you approach accomplish this goal—it’s not the kind of thing we’re used to seeing in games.

HS: The basic thing we wanted to add as you climb the mountain is the summit ahead of you—it looks so unbelievably remote, but it’s always there. When you look back, you see where you came from, and this is something else we wanted to achieve. Of course there are parts of the game that are indoors that you won’t see, but in principal if you can see it in the game you can see it. We started out with a real mountain, because Chomolonzo in the game is a fictional mountain. We used Ama Dablam’s satellite data, and with that we created a valley that we modified for game purposes. Having this valley as a backdrop for geometry was a very good start because it’s a natural environment, and everything fits together when you work like that. Then we placed the city, and the villages, and all the experiences up to the summit. So the levels themselves are also based on that, and the backdrop is as well, so my favorite part of the game fits together with the backdrop, and this is why you can see everything from any position. We avoided things like fog, because we wanted to show this off in the game. We also made the landscapes pretty versatile, they go from cities to fields, it’s not all just mountains. We set out to set enough memory aside for a streaming engine that allows us to have the geometry we want in the game for the player to walk around but also lets you see the backdrop from everywhere.

BLAST: There were a lot of hands worldwide working on Cursed Mountain, as you had multiple development houses working on it. What was that like, working on this project in so many places at the same time?

HS: The short answer is “exhausting”, but we knew that and knew that it was going to be difficult.  We’ve worked like this in the past—we used to be with Rockstar Games, so we worked with other tech teams in San Diego and with Japanese partners and such, so we were used to remote producing. Having that many companies, doing this for the first time for us in that scope, it was quite an experience, and we of course made mistakes. One of the things that might be interesting is that we worked with a lot of different cultures with different expectations and different ways of communicating, which was one challenge. Another thing on the very good side is that it allowed us to take the people we wanted to have work on specific parts of the game. A very good example is the props for the game world and most of the characters. We deliberately were looking for an Asian company to do that, because of the style and having the feeling for the statues and the hundreds of props in the game. Since the game had a Tibetan topic, no Chinese supplier would even touch it or hear a pitch for it for political reasons, so we went with an Indian company, and I think in the end it came out pretty well. That’s one of the strengths of working like that.

Our producing team was on video conference, phone calls or answering e-mails almost 24/7 because, for instance, our motion capture was done in the states, and our offices are here so we worked with them remotely in time shifts starting in the afternoon and working until midnight. Working as a team when you live in different time zones is exhausting, but it’s also very interesting, and it allowed us to produce something in a pretty short amount of time that became a pretty big game.

Blast editor John Guilfoil: Well, we’ve talked to the audio guys already, and the project lead on the game. You had to kind of take the audio and the concept and all the orders from the shareholders and crew and make it look good. What was part of the challenge of doing that?

Dare Matheson: What wasn’t part of the challenge of doing that? Obviously, it’s like you’re taking some of the most iconic popular music, and everybody who likes the Beatles, and who’s listened to the Beatles, has their own sort of connection with it. People listen to the lyrics, and have their own interpretations and visualizations that go along with it.

It’s sort of like, with the historical venues, that’s sort of one thing, and that’s really tied up in our interpretation of the characters and the settings. Maybe I’ll just speak to that really quickly and then go to the dreamscapes, because I think that’s really where things get crazy, and that’s really where the biggest challenge for us in the game was. So, with the characters, we really wanted to get something that felt—you know, there’s a whole range of ways that the band has been depicted in terms of art. Everybody’s familiar with their likenesses and their personalities, and the emotions that they show on their face, so we really wanted to get the emotional side across. They’ve been depicted in, for example, the Yellow Submarine movie, which is a great reductive approach to them that could represent the furthest extreme of what we could’ve done. And we like that style, we like that look. But it felt like that would be too limited for the majority of the experience, for a total experience of the band in this medium. So we kind of looked at that possibility.

What we wanted to do was get something that immediately was familiar as the Beatles, had all of their unique identity and personality that could show through for the four guys, that people could pick up on and really connect with, and have it be a bit stylized. Because on the one extreme would be going too cartoony, and you wouldn’t get enough of the identity and richness of connection — you’ve seen photos and footage and all that, so it could be sort of like you go too far in that direction. The other danger would be to go sort of too realistic, and you know how it is in games where it’s like, you see something where somebody’s trying to make a real person, and it just looks creepy, and it just looks kind of scary and kind of gross, so we wanted to avoid that.

The dreamscapes Matheson helped create add to the Beatles experience in the game.

So that was the key, and that’s the thing that stands true whether you’re talking about the historical venues or the dreamscapes. With the historical venues, we really just looked at a lot of the archival footage, and we really tried to get a sense of the atmosphere, and that’s the thing that we went for, we went for the atmosphere and tried to find, for each one of the five historical venues, that each one of them had a distinctive atmosphere from each other, and it so happened that we did. In some cases, we exaggerated a little bit.

For example, Budokan was — you know, typically in these games we go from a smaller venue setting to a bigger one, showing a sort of career arc there. And in this case, Budokan was a smaller place than Shea Stadium, and Budokan happened afterwards. So in the case of Budokan, we didn’t want it to feel like a letdown, so we exaggerated the verticality of Budokan, and really had it feel like this sort of compressed version of a giant arena. And the stage in Budokan is — I think the real stage was something like 12 or 15 feet, really tall, just this giant blue plan box — so we even exaggerated that a little bit further, and just made everything feel like it was going ‘up.’

From the beginning, with the psychedelic dreamscapes, when we showed an early prototype of a dreamscape — it wasn’t even a prototype, it was just a storyboard, an animatic — to Giles Martin, it was this idea that the band would depart from Abbey Road, and they would change into more psychedelic outfits, and they’d be in a magical land. And Giles was like, ‘Okay, that’s cool. Looks good. I just want to make sure that you guys don’t hold back.’ And he’s like, ‘Make sure this is as psychedelic as you can make it.’ Because, going to a magical land — I think the land in our animatic looked a little bit like the Yellow Submarine movie, and he basically said, ‘Okay, that was psychedelic in the sixties, but what’s psychedelic now? You guys have to bridge the gap, because something that is truly psychedelic is something that is a new experience.’

You're taking some of the most iconic popular music, and everybody who likes the Beatles, and who’s listened to the Beatles, has their own sort of connection with it, Matheson said. (Darcy Hoffman for Blast)

So, that was our big call for ourselves, that in the dreamscapes, and in the style of the game generally, we wanted to find something that — you know, the Beatles’ music, the most amazing music, happened forty years ago. So, we’re trying to find something that will feel authentic and connect clearly and well with that time, for people now, so that people who were there then and saw the Beatles will immediately connect with it, and yet people who have never heard of the Beatles, who see this game and will be able to experience them for the first time, it will feel connective for them, as well.

Blast’s Ben Lindbergh: How much of a help or hindrance was it that the Beatles have this legacy of visual creativity themselves? We didn’t get to see your dreamscape for “I Am the Walrus,” but I’ve read that it sort of mimics the Magical Mystery Tour ethos that they created. Is that something that made you feel constrained by what they had done in that area already, or did that free you to be even more creative?

DM: No, it was awesome. First of all, they set the bar high, and so there’s a ton of rich material there. There’s all the album art, there’s their movies, their crazy clothes, their avant garde look, the music itself. It’s like they shot for the skies, so there’s a ton of rich material to draw from, for one thing. For the second thing, they — Apple Corps, and the shareholders themselves and everybody we worked with — were very encouraging of us to not hold back. So, basically, as opposed to what you might think could happen with sort of a ‘brand’ that is from that far away of an era, there’s a chance that it could have become rigid, and only presented to the world in a certain way that’s comfortable for them. But no, they totally wanted—once we gained their trust, once they saw that we had people that could interpret the Beatles, and they were comfortable with that—they really encouraged us to go nuts. You know, they told us what they thought, we had weekly calls with them, and we worked through everything together, but they were very encouraging of that. So, again, on another level, it was not constraining. And I thought there was a third thing, but, there’s only two.

JG: Building the characters themselves, the four guys on the stages, were there specific things that the shareholders would insist on, or were there things that you really wanted to make sure you captured, like the way someone stood, or the way someone strummed the guitar, or the way Ringo banged the drums? Were there certain things about the Beatles, when building the characters, that you were encouraged not to miss?

DM: Well, first of all, we absolutely set that challenge for ourselves. We knew that we wanted to make the characters look, visually, a little bit reductive — you know, they don’t have skin pores, and we sort of buffed out certain areas of detail to try to find the distilled version of Paul McCartney’s face. But we really wanted the animation to feel very much like them. So we really tried to nail the movements and the little nuances. We tried to pick up everything little nuance. Generally, peoples’ faces are much more expressive than you find in videogames, and much more nuanced. And we tried to get that. Somebody told me recently — maybe it was a cover band or something — got a hold of one of the demos and was like, ‘Oh, this will be the acid test for this game — did they pick up on Paul’s crazy, weird, extra eyebrow motion on one side? They got it, they got it!’ We concentrated on Paul’s eyebrow for like a week straight.

One of Matheson's challenges was capturing the essense of The Beatles without crafting creepy, hyper-realistic computer people.

But in answer to your question, we had our own bar set very high. And we actually got feedback directly from the shareholders. Most intensely, actually, from Olivia and Yoko. I think Paul and Ringo gave us feedback, but they were kind of like, ‘Yeah, I look awesome in that!’ I think Yoko and Olivia have a legacy to maintain that goes beyond their own selves, so we got a lot of direct feedback from both of them, and it was super-helpful, incredibly useful.

A few of us went out to meet with Olivia in Friar Park out in England, and we brought the George model that we had at that point. And she opened up her private photo albums and showed us a bunch of pictures of George. And we earmarked some, and she had her assistant scan it and send it to us. And Yoko visited here, visited the office, and we looked at the game together. And she gave us a lot of detailed feedback on, specifically, ‘Well, there’s something going on here, there’s a way that John is nodding his head that he just doesn’t do that, he wouldn’t do that.’

So somewhere along the way, we may have added in a little of our own thing, or a motion capture actor added in something extra, and that was something that Yoko didn’t find to be authentic, so we stripped that out. We had pages of notes. She was here for about four hours, and we had pages and pages of notes, and we just responded to that feedback. Super, super helpful.

JG: What was it like being that hands-on with the band and the shareholders? Usually you’re dealing with dozens of bands, and you’re never really putting that much detail into what specific members of bands look like, like in Rock Band or Rock Band 2. What was it like having this level of detail, focusing on this one particular band?

DM: For me, it was great. I love it. I mean, I love Rock Band, and it’s sort of a platform, and that’s its purpose. But because of that, you’re automatically, things get more sort of dispersed. So it’s great for me. This game has been my favorite version of this type of game to work on, because the music — there’s something already that roots it and makes it consistent, and that is that it’s based on a real band that had an artistic legacy. And it was such an artistic legacy that, like with your question, it basically, we had the world to go after with this one.

Blast got to play Beatles Rock Band at the Harmonix Studios in Cambridge (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

BL: Do you feel that some of the customization options that were present in Rock Band or Rock Band 2, do you think that’s something that will be missed? As a fan, I don’t think it would be for me, but if there are players who take a lot of pleasure in dressing up their characters, or making them personalized, putting their stamp on them somehow, do you feel like that’s something that will be lacking here?

DM: Well, I think that the idea of a Beatles dress-up shop would be fun for some people, because obviously they had this very exciting, avant-garde fashion sense. But really, the choices that we made in terms of the design, and what we exposed to the player, we tried to keep everything to the core experience of the Beatles. And I think that that might be a fun novelty, but I don’t think that it would add to the game, and in fact, it kind of would subtract from it. And there are other places that we had to make concessions like that, but I think that with every choice we made, we tried to always go towards advancing this very core, Beatles-centric experience.

BL: Do you feel that in the in-studio portions of the game, does the fact that the band was, at least by modern standards, pretty restrained in terms of their movements and actions on stage — obviously with the dreamscapes, you can kind of get away with it, but with those actual segments in a live setting, was there less for you to focus, less going on on the screen, less action?

DM: Well, the Beatles had a ton of energy on stage. I mean, they weren’t kicking over props or spewing fire or anything, but they had a tremendous amount of live energy. But yeah, in the studio, the great thing about the studio is, so, right, they’re not performing for an audience, they’re not performing for the camera, they’re performing for the audio track. In the studio parts, every time they’re in the studio, and you see that in the game, the song ends up expanding out into a visual dreamscape. So it’s actually really cool, and this is something that we haven’t seen in these games before, where it’s a much more intimate feeling. So rather than having it be about, ‘I’m performing to a million people,’ or whatever, it’s more about, you really do feel like you’re sitting there watching John Lennon close his eyes and rock his head back and just sing into the microphone, and you get this much more emotional thing that just sort of bravado and antics. Which is fine, too, but this is something a little bit nice to have in a Beatles game.

BL: How much research did you do even before you put anything on paper?

DM: Well, I’ve been researching this band since I was six years old. As a team, we did a ton of research, and in addition to other planning meetings and design meetings, we had, a couple times a week, we would spend an hour or two together. We spent, probably, several hours a week, just as a whole team, watching the Anthology, watching the movies, watching whatever we could get our hands on that would expand our knowledge. We were sending around emails with links to anything we could find. It was crucial. On the team, it goes from people who have been mega-Beatles fans since they were born because of their parents’ record collections, to people who, it’s newer for them and they’re learning a lot about it. But it’s crucial for everybody to be experts, Beatles experts, so that’s what we went for.

BL: Have you gotten a chance to see in person any of Paul’s recent concerts, where he had the footage playing behind him? Because for me, certainly, that would be pretty awesome.

DM: Yeah, I did, actually. It was cool, yeah. It was great. I saw him at Fenway Park a couple weeks ago, and yeah, he had two songs where he played footage from the game. One song he had dreamscape footage, and another one, he used some of the Passion Pictures intro footage. Yeah, it was great. He talked about the game on stage, and it was really, really cool.

John M. Guilfoil and Marc Normandin of the Blast staff and Blast correspondents Steve Bagley and Darcy Hofmann contributed to this report.

Who says Saturday night is the best night to go out? If you’re a Bostonian of the fairer sex, listen up because your city just got a lot more enticing during the week. If you’re sick of every girls’ night out being the same ol’ cosmo and lounge combo endeavor after another, the following might interest you and make you oh so fabulously in the know.

1. Fashionably Late at The Liberty Hotel

Ok so I gotta say it, if you haven’t heard of The Liberty Hotel’s Fashionably Late happening every Thursday night, you might be living under a rock. Sorry, but seriously. This is THE place to be on Thursday nights in the city. If you like fashion, an extensive cocktail list and rubbing elbows with the city’s finest, this is the ladies night to look forward to each week. While models circle the upper levels of the hotel as they display the creations of Boston’s hottest designers, you’ll feel the magic between you and that fantastically dressed stranger you keep locking eyes with.

Whether it be that perfectly mixed dirty martini, the stylish new “so now”  asymmetrical dress you’re rocking, or the vibrations of the music pumping with the beat of the fashion show, you’ll feel so chic. Make sure you know your designers before you approach however, as it’s the fashion lovers of Boston that frequent this weekly event.

But don’t let intimidation keep you holed up at home. There is no need to be dismayed by all those waif like types – The Liberty Hotel has made it that much easier to be chic. With one more week of summer, and our prayers for a possible Indian Summer, we may still feel compelled to watch those cals. Order from Liberty’s “Sleek” Cocktail menu, where the drinks won’t cost us more than twenty minutes on the treadmill the next day.

Check out this week’s Fashionably Late on September 3 from 8 p.m. 2 a.m., with clothing designed by Samuel Vartan’s and beats by Michael Savant. For true VIP status, plan ahead of time for your table reservations by emailing fashion@libertyhotel.com.

2. Red Sky’s Ladies Night

Fancy an irresistible concoction with a serving of some rockin’ 80’s tunes? Well, you’re in luck my fellow female liquid lovers; all you need to do is purchase just one $10 drink at Red Sky on Ladies Night, happening every Tuesday night from 5-9pm, and you are game for a FREE three course meal. Yes, you read that right. If that didn’t entice you enough, there is also a DJ spinning your favorite 80’s tunes so we can tap into the nostalgia of remembering our beloved MJ in true style.

Anyone who’s ever heard the word recession (maybe once or twice recently?) is running in their three inch heels every Tuesday night to savor that beloved, and much needed, martini to get in on this deal. The menu changes slightly each week, but always includes a soup or salad to start, an entree and a dessert. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Red Sky is really showing us ladies some respect by always including a vegetarian option. You’ll be hooked on this Tuesday night treat in no time.

3. Suneri Boutique

Snapple Fact: Did you know that Wednesday is actually the worst day of the week for most people, and not the usual suspect (and sworn enemy) we all lovingly know as Monday?

Suneri Boutique of Somerville feels your pain and has come to our rescue with the perfect excuse to kiss that hump day slump goodbye. Suneri carries all things lovely, trendy, and is always feeling generous on Wednesdays from 5-8pm, as they offer complimentary wine, hors d’oeuvres, and discounts on their fine clothing and accessories.

Suneri also boasts its own art gallery for your viewing pleasure while you shop. The store is adorned with various works of art by local and emerging artists and photographers such as Christopher Elsasser and Sarah Pollman.

So stick it to Wednesdays from now on by gathering your group of tight knit girls and revitalizing with some great deals, munchies and of course some vino – just enough to get you to Friday with a smile as opposed to your usual mid-week “Don’t even talk to me til it’s the weekend” frown.

4. The Colonnade Hotel’s Roofdeck Pool

Now this is my kind of ladies night out — the kind where you are so excited for some much needed chick time you’re ready to start at noon. To start the day out right, get to the Colonnade Hotel’s anyone-who’s-anyone-is-there roofdeck pool, open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Make sure to get there by this coming Labor Day weekend when our balmy summer days are tragically over. Be a lady and properly say goodbye to summertime basking in the rays with your teeniest bikini, your impossibly hot female crew, and a strong drink in hand.

It may be a somewhat hefty entrance fee at $30, but who says a splurge isn’t worth it when you’re looking down at Boston atop the only roofdeck pool in the city? With favorable mentions in USA Today, Boston Magazine and Playboy.com, this is one joint you can’t afford not to check out.

Who knows who you’ll meet — the possibilities (and yachts and Miami beach houses…) are endless. Just make sure the when you talk about your extravagant experience at the Colonnade later on that day you refer to it as RTP, its nickname uttered by all the beautiful people in the know. Oo La La.

5. The Greatest Bar’s Country Night with WKLB 102.5

Ladies Love Country Boys.

Trace Adkins tells it like it is. A girl just can’t resist a man with a cowboy hat on, a country twang, and oh that farmer’s tan! Ok, that may be going a little too far. But in all honesty, country music has blown up in America, and females are a huge fan base. Although the Northeast isn’t a place that immediately comes to mind when thinking of those sexy tractors we keep hearing about, you better believe Boston has its share of country  music lovers.

The Greatest Bar caught wind of this trend and has grabbed our attention with their Country Music Night every Sunday from 4pm until the party ends, which won’t be early with $3 apps and frozen margaritas going for $5. With Country 102.5’s DJ Bob playing those county tunes we love so much, it’ll be hard to pass up the opportunity of a mini Countryfest right here in Boston every week!

Instead of making your to-do lists for the week and heading to bed early like every other Sunday, hit up The Greatest Bar this Sunday with your girl crew for something different from your usual. Your weekly routine won’t be completely out of whack, you and your ladies can down some frozen margs, split some apps, snag a cowboy’s number, and still be home in time to watch “Entourage”.

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There you have it, Boston babes. Grab your girls for some fun, and don’t wait until the weekend to do it!

The guitar tuner, which can be accessed wirelessly or by connecting your instrument to the input jack, is very easy to use. It also can play a reference tone for you through the “Accu-Pitch” speaker. This built-in speaker will also play another tone indicating that the instrument is in tune (within 5 cents sharp or flat in actuality).

The metronome is also a nice addition. I often avoid metronomes while playing because I don’t want to put the time into finding my exact tempo with it, but the TU-88 bypasses that with a unique feature I had never seen before. The “TAP” button allows a user to set the metronome’s tempo to his or her tempo. Pushing the button with the beat of whatever your playing will set the metronome to your beat. This ensures that you stick to the beat that you intend to. You feel the beat — you set it, and you keep it. If your’re reading music and do know exactly what tempo you need, the TU-88 can certainly accommodate you.

The tuner and metronome are very useful and innovative, but what really makes the TU-88 stand out in my mind is the headphone amplifier. There are tons of devices that tune guitars, quite a few of them offer built in metronomes, but this is the first device I’ve seen that includes a tuner, metronome, and headphone amplifier.

The headphone amplifier allows one to plug their instrument cable into the TU-88’s input jack, plug and pair of standard headphones into the “phones/line out” and play straight to their headphones. This is ideal for an electric guitar player who wants to work on something quickly without dealing with large amplifiers. Often times while traveling a headphone preamp is useful. Noise level is minimal while using a headphone amplifier, which makes it an ideal addition to your gear for private practice sessions. The “Mix in” jack even makes it possible to plug in a CD/MP3 player to play along with — all within your headphones.

Weighing in at only 7 ounces, the TU-88 has everything you need for your next gig whether its in the living room, a friend’s garage or Gillette Stadium.

We talked to Eric about crossing Abbey Road, the fleeting nature of fame and the tyranny of two-track recordings.

Blast’s Ben Lindbergh: When you sat down to select the songs initially — I don’t know exactly who was involved in that — how much weight was assigned to the popularity of the song of the song or the success of the song, versus how much fun you thought it would be to play, or how easy it would be to represent with the notes?

Eric Brosius: We definitely considered both of those things, like we always do. Actually, that’s pretty much what we do in all of Rock Band, there’s always this balance between playability and how popular it is, and some songs are in there for different reasons. But yeah, we wanted to find—pretty much all the Beatles songs are famous, outside of just a few. They’re one of the rare bands where like 80 percent of the catalog is completely famous, and 20 percent is lesser known. So, it was pretty easy to find songs that we thought everyone would just love playing, but that were also giant hits.

But we definitely looked at that, for sure. We also looked out for — you know, we wanted to grab songs from their entire career. From the beginning, and have roughly an equal number of songs from the different periods, just to make sure we hit all of their major albums and all of the time periods, and stuff like that. So it was just balancing those things together. There were some tricky things in the early songs, because some early songs were maybe harder to get, just because of the limited number of tracks that they had. So, we were always balancing that, and then we were talking to Giles Martin, who did all the actual mixing for us, because he knew the track layouts for every single song they’ve ever done, and he would always go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s problematic because of this, but this one I think we could do instead, because there’s some an extra tape of other stuff on here that we can use to make the song work.’

BL: So he had some sort of software that would be able to pick out the instruments individually when there was only a two-track recording, and then separate them somehow?

Harmonix Music Systems audio lead Eric Brosius makes his living playing with the soundtrack to your life, and he’s never had more fun than with Beatles Rock Band. (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

EB: Yeah. And sometimes with a two-track recording, it also depends on even what was on the tracks, because some things are easier to separate, and some things are not, just depending on how it was mixed. If it’s a two-track recording, and they had some things panned to one side, that’s easy to separate from stuff that’s in the middle or on the other side. If it was a two-track recording where the whole thing was a stereo wash right down the center, that makes it a lot harder. So he kind of knew, not just the number of tracks of each song, but kind of where things were, and whether we would have an easier time separating them. Because yes, you can separate stuff, but it’s not a perfect solution. Some songs are kind of easy to get nice, clean separation, and some songs are harder, so we used all of that knowledge together.

BL: So then he would do all the work in Abbey Road, with some assistants, and then someone would come over here with a briefcase chained to his arm?

Sometimes with a two-track recording, it also depends on even what was on the tracks, because some things are easier to separate, and some things are not

EB: Well, he knew all about the Beatles stuff and mixing, so he and his guy, Paul Hicks, were in charge of actually recreating the mixes. Because the first step is just to like bring up the tapes, transfer them to digital, and then recreate the mix. Because what’s on the raw tape doesn’t usually sound like the raw mix in music. So, they spent a lot of time doing that, just making sure it came out, and they can recreate all the effects if there weren’t effects. Because sometimes effects weren’t printed to tape, right, they were this old gear, so they spent a lot of time doing that. And then we would usually fly over there and spend like five days there when we were going to pick up a batch of songs, and where they would bring up the mixes they had, and we would do some further editing, deciding which parts are going to be our playable guitar part, and which parts are not.

And then while we were at the studio, we’d bounce out the actual stems we needed for the game, and then we’d encode them into the final version that the game ships with right there, which was encrypted and high-security and all that kind of stuff. So we did everything there, and then we just brought the finished game assets back with us, because they were pretty keen on leaving all the original assets at Abbey Road, because they’re somewhat protective, as they should be.

BL: Was the fact that the remasters were being developed simultaneously, was there any work that was able to be saved or shared there, or was it just two separate processes?

EB: It was pretty much two separate processes, because on things that we’re doing, we’re going back to the multi-tracks. I’m not sure what was done in the mastering process, but usually remasterings are just, you go back to the two-track mixes, and then you use modern mastering techniques. So it was kind of separate, what they were doing was totally separate. I mean, it’s nice that they’re going to release them at the same time, which kind of shows how enthusiastic Apple and the Beatles are, which is cool, but it was really two separate processes.

Blast editor John Guilfoil: Can you kind of run our readers through the process of taking a song and putting it into Rock Band?

EB: Sure. So, for old songs like this, a lot of them are stored on magnetic tape. So the first thing to do is to transfer them to a digital format like Pro Tools, which is the standard that everyone uses. So you digitize all the tracks, and then the next step would be to take those and remix the song so it sounds like the original. Once the song is sounding good, with all the effects and levels balanced, then we bounce out stems, according to our specific needs, the ones we need in the game. Because we have one guitar player in the game, so if there are several guitars playing, at every given moment through the song, we decide which one is going to be the part you’re going to play. And that ends up being a composite of, maybe a little of John’s guitar here, maybe a little of George’s here, and that kind of thing.

And we bounce out the stems that we actually need for the game, then we basically encrypt them, interleave them into a single file that our game reads. So we have that, and that’s the audio part of it, it’s fairly straightforward. And then we have a team of people here that kind of transcribe all the music, putting down all the gems that you see, laying down all the tracks and putting the lyrics in. And that’s basically kind of like transcription using MIDI files, basically.

BL: So for someone who grew up listening to the ’80s pressings of the CDs, or compressed .mp3 versions of the songs and hasn’t heard the remasters yet, would this be the cleanest and the best they’ve ever heard the Beatles, even though it’s meant for playing as well as listening, and so there are compromises that have to be made there?

Blast spent the day at Harmonix learning about the game and its development. (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

EB: I think so. And the thing that’s going to — yes, because part of the thing with Rock Band is, we’ll sometimes make some changes to the mixes. Sometimes, if there was a guitar part that was pretty buried in the original mix, but we want that to be the playable one, sometimes we’ll boost it a little bit so you can hear it more, because you want to hear the notes that you’re actually playing. So we always try to walk this line between — we don’t want to change history or anything like that, but with Giles’ approval, we would sometimes alter things. You know, ‘Let’s bring that up a little bit, because that’s going to be the playable part.’ So there are some things like that.

And the other really cool thing about the game is that, because most of our game is kind of featured around live stuff, most of the songs, we don’t have fadeouts in them, usually. And many times they went back to the way they actually played it in the studio, that usually had a proper ending. Because they’ll usually do the fade-out later, right in the mix. So in our game, a lot of times you get to hear the proper endings, which is really cool. So it’s like a little bit of extra material in most songs. And probably the biggest one is in ‘Helter Skelter,’ we don’t do the big fade back in, so you get to hear the way they played it through, which is pretty cool, and I think Beatles fanatics will love that stuff.

BL: Did you sit down initially and say, ‘We know we’re going to have forty-five songs,’ and then get a list of the catalog and cross things out, or did you start with a blank page, and say, ‘We have to have this one, and we have to have that one?’

EB: Well, we knew that we were going to have roughly forty to fifty songs, but we didn’t know exactly until the whole deal was worked out. So basically, everyone wrote down sixty or seventy of their favorite songs, and it was a bunch of the higher-ups at Harmonix, and the people at Apple, and Giles, and everyone, and we all kind of got together and came up with about forty-five, and then once in a while Giles would say, ‘Oh, I know this one can’t work, because this was actually just recorded on one track,’ and we would just kind of work it out.

And then there would be a little bit of back-and-forth, of course, about, ‘Let’s make sure that we have a good balance of Paul and John songs, so that we don’t just by accident have too many John songs and too many Paul songs,’ and ‘Make sure that we include the important George songs,’ and all this balancing. Same thing we do when we select songs for Rock Band. You balance out a bunch of things—we want to have songs from different decades, different styles, different things, so the same kind of process went through. And then we presented what we thought was our song list to the shareholders, who were Yoko and Paul and Ringo and Olivia Harrison, and they would give us their two cents on it, and we would make some adjustments. The song list was fairly easy to do.

BL: So they weren’t dictating anything, like ‘This song has to be in there, this one’s off-limits.’

EB: No. And the good thing is that Giles has worked with them before. He did the “Love” show, which is the big Cirque du Soleil thing in Las Vegas, he’s already kind of gone through this process with them, and he knows them very well, and they trust him. So that was one of the best things. Because we could kind of make all of our musical decisions, and if we got them blessed by Giles, then we were pretty confident that he could get them blessed by the important people. So, it made things very smooth.

Three-part vocal harmony is part of what makes Beatles Rock Band different from all other music games

BL: Were there any specific challenges that you faced as a result of the Beatles’ experimentation in the studio, or using somewhat exotic instruments that might not conform to the four-instrument mold? I know you have songs like ‘Because’ or ‘She’s Leaving Home’ coming out soon—how do you face those challenges, or how do you conform to this set-up?

EB: Well, in some songs—in the Beatles game, one of the cool things is we’re doing the harmonies, so that’s a big thing, because there’s so much importance on that. On other things where they had, maybe not a prominent guitar, but they had different instruments, we would probably swap them around, which we do in Rock Band once in a while. Like in, I think in ‘Strawberry Fields,’ you might end up playing the string parts a little bit on the guitar. And in a song like ‘Because,’ which has no drums, right, that would be a song where the drummer just kind of sits out and relaxes for a while. We’re not going to add anything to it, because we don’t want to change the song.

BL: I know you wanted to span the whole career and represent each part accurately—was there any thought that maybe the early Beatles or the late Beatles would appeal or connect to the modern audience more? Your first three downloadable albums coming out are from the middle-to-late period—is there any consideration given to emphasizing that period?

EB: We didn’t really think about that too much. I think that we wanted to—different fans have their different favorites, of course. So we really just wanted to tell the whole story of their career, so we wanted to just do that. As far as the downloads go, we know that technically we have an easier time with the later albums, because they tend to be cleaner, on four-track, where it’s easier, and harder times on the earlier albums. So it would be difficult to do Please Please Me as a full album, because while we could probably do a lot of the songs, it might be difficult, there might be some there that we’re just like, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get the separation.’

But that being said, if we choose to do more albums, I’m sure we’ll do some early ones too, because we want to do as much as we can. It just also happened that I think the first three albums that we picked are three of the pretty big, iconic ones—Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper’s. And we were going back and forth between Rubber Soul and Revolver, because we wanted something from that period, but we were debating back and forth.

BL: Would most of the team working on the game have described themselves as Beatles fans coming into it, or just sort of passionate music fans who came to appreciate the Beatles more during the process?

EB: Well, everyone’s a passionate music fan. I don’t think we had everyone was a passionate Beatles fan — certainly a fan in some ways — but we have a few people who were just obsessive. And so we set those guys on all the research. They’re the ones who spent hours poring over things, and making sure that the right person was playing the right guitar part, and they would look up, ‘Okay, is John playing this lick, or is George playing this lick?’ And they would try to figure it out to make sure the animations looked right, because we can kind of control that. So we had at least a half a dozen Beatles fanatics, which was really good.

John M. Guilfoil and Marc Normandin of the Blast staff and Blast correspondents Steve Bagley and Darcy Hofmann contributed to this report.