T MAGAZINE strings together three short but insightful interviews with KENDRICK LAMAR, BECK and TOM WAITS for a revealing and quotable package about where songs come from. Waits: "If you want to catch songs you gotta start thinking like one, and making yourself an interesting place for them to land like birds or insects. Once you get two or three tunes together, wherever three or more are gathered, then others come. It’s like a line for a hot dog place, you know?" It's a good read, and a useful counterpart to this MAX MARTIN interview, which suggests songs are more like the hot dogs themselves: put them on grill, put them in bun, add mustard and relish, done. Martin makes fantastic hot dogs, by the way. He probably does more indescribable song-catching than he's willing to admit, and the others probably do more basic grilling and mustard-ing than they'd care to acknowledge. The great songwriters, I'm pretty sure, know exactly what they're doing and also don't have a clue... Also, this being T Magazine, Beck is wearing a $550 t-shirt. Which you can barely see under that $1,195 shirt... For more specific stories about where songs come from, our REDEF MusicSET "Behind the Song, Vol. 4" gathers origin stories from the CHAINSMOKERS, CYNDI LAUPER, MARVIN GAYE and more... Global music revenues soared to $16.1 billion in 2016. Beck's t-shirt is starting to make more sense now... SPOTIFY is reportedly testing a hi-fi streaming option... COACHELLA's website was hacked, and users' personal info including phone numbers and birthdays may have been compromised. Why does Coachella, or almost any website, need to know your birthday?... Why is BREITBART NEWS following so many electronic and experimental musicians on TWITTER?... MusicREDEF is taking this Friday off. We'll return Monday morning... Instead of reading on Friday, perhaps you can listen to some new music by ED SHEERAN, SLEAFORD MODS, IBIBIO SOUND MACHINE, KHALID, BLANCK MASS, TIM KASHER, DEREK JONES (featuring my very talented friend JENNA MAMMINA), ALEXIS TAYLOR, GRANDADDY, BLEACHED and MINUS THE BEAR... RIP HORACE PARLAN and ERIC MILLER.