From Sum 41's "Fat Lip" to Pill's "Trap Goin' Ham", great music videos are bursts of sound and vision that leave an indelible impression. Director's Cut is a Pitchfork News feature in which we chat with music video directors about their creations. The men and women behind the camera are often overlooked in today's YouTube era, but this feature aims to highlight their hard work while showcasing the best videos currently linking around the internet. A little behind-the-scenes dirt couldn't hurt, too.

Tom Scharpling is half of the comedy duo Sharpling and Wurster with Superchunk/Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster. He hosts the cult favorite "The Best Show" on WFMU in New Jersey. He was a writer and a co-executive producer on the TV show "Monk". And now, thanks to his work on Ted Leo and the Pharmacists' "Bottled in Cork" clip, he's also a music video director. Scharpling's ridiculous video finds Ted Leo attempting to sell out with a Broadway musical that uncannily recalls Green Day's American Idiot. Comedy-world buds like Paul F. Tompkins, John Hodgman, and Julie Klausner appear, as does a particularly manic Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles.

We talked with Scharpling about the Green Day musical, the Bon Jovi musical that should exist, Stickles' acting, and how to not make an OK Go video. Our interview is below.

Hey gang. This is just to remind you that we will be performing tomorrow night at Glasslands Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, near the intersection of s 2nd and kent, just around the corner from Death by Audio. The concert is a benefit for a very admirable organization of local activists called Neighbors Allied for Good Growth, or NAG for short, who have been protecting North Brooklyn from the cruel march of "progress" for sixteen years now, whether taking the form of their legendary battle with and victory over a garbage incinerator to the contemporary concern of greedy over-development and so forth. A very worthy cause indeed, say we. Learn more about the group at their website, nag-brooklyn.org. We will be performing with Bad Credit No Credit, one of the scene's very finest up-and-coming bands, and Bottle Up & Go, who I don't really know anything about, but I am sure they are very good. As this is, for all intents and purposes, the first show of our Fall 2010 North American tour, it will be yr first opportunity to observe our up-to-date repertoire; forgotten favorites will abound, the perfect antidote, we hope, to all you who grow weary of the same old T. Andronicus setlist. Tickets will be fifteen dollars, the entire proceeds going to NAG. You can buy tickets here if you are really feeling saucy. The show is...

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It even looks like frontman Pat Stickles trimmed his beard for the occasion! Titus' album The Monitor is in stores now. The "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" performance of "A More Perfect Union" is below (via The Audio Perv):

Hello friends. It is with great wonder that we announce to you now that our humble rock and roll band will performing this Thursday night on reputable network television program Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Yes, for three and a half glorious minutes, Titus Andronicus will invade the living rooms of America, sweep out all the cobwebs of our bankrupt society and replace them with the seeds of a glimmering punk utopia. Right? The show will air on the National Broadcasting Company, which was Channel 4 the last time I checked, at 12:30 am - also appearing will be "Rescue Me" star and singer-songwriter behind perrenial classic "Asshole," Dennis Leary, a man as smart and funny as Dennis Miller and as subversive and challenging as Timothy Leary, or something like that.

So yeah - that should be pretty interesting. You can be a part of this historic event too, if you so please. There is such a thing on the show as a "band bench," I have learned - the musicians perform on a stage which is unlike the stages we usually perform on, in that there is standing room for the audience above, rather than below, the performer. It can be you that has this bird's eye view on the proceedings, if you follow the instructions at this here website. I encourage strongly all of you Titus Andronicus fans to join in, lest we be surrounded by ambivalent tourists fresh out of Mars 2112 or the ESPN...

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Artists: Titus Andronicus/Free Energy
Release: Split 7"
Release Date: Available on tour
Label: Self-released

-- At this year's Pitchfork Music Festival, artists including Sleigh Bells, Major Lazer, Titus Andronicus, Local Natives, St. Vincent, and more personalized records, posters, and other items for Rock for Kids, a Chicago organization that provides music education for youngsters. The items are currently up for auction-- check 'em out here.

-- Experimental metal guitarist Mick Barr (Krallice, Orthrelm, Crom Tech) has a new guitar-only opus under his Ocrilim moniker called Absolve. It's a limited-edition, 100-copy CD run only available at his site.

-- Montreal-based dark electro-rockers Suuns have signed with indie powerhouse Secretly Canadian. Download their six-song Zeroes EP for the price of an e-mail address here. Suuns go on tour with Besnard Lakes and Land of Talk this fall; dates here.

-- Archer Prewitt (The Sea and Cake), Freakwater, Bottomless Pit, Robbie Fulks, and Scotland Yard Gospel Choir are a few of the bands playing this year's Wavelength Music and Arts Festival in Three Oaks, Michigan this Saturday, July 31.

Okay, gang - if you guys keep up with the blogs that talk about indie rock and the like, maybe you have heard about how last night's party at Shea Stadium, celebrating the success of the performance by Wavves, Dom and Cloud Nothings at the Knitting Factory earlier that evening, hit an enormous snag when some rascal threw a bottle off of Shea's scenic balcony and shattered the back window of a police car. Believe it or not, I was scheduled to act as a DJ at this party, sharing wheels-of-steel duties with Ryan Schrieber of Pitchfork Media fame. I arrived late due to various public transit mishaps, as the police were seemingly just cooling down from their earlier rage(and who could really blame them?), and were on their way out. It looked at this point like the party might be DOA - the organizers were unsure if there was going to be any sort of DJing at all, which was annoying to me because I had schlepped all of my pedals and my four track and so on (I use these when I DJ, for reasons that are still unclear) all the way from Greenpoint, which isn't the end of the world or anything, but not the sort of thing I do at one am for my health. Whatever the fate of the party, those few who were still in attendance seemed to be in a big hurry to get out. Before long, Shea Stadium held...

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Hello dear friends. It is our distinct pleasure, this day, to announce what will likely be the last leg of the proper "Monitour," the ongoing promotional exercise behind our latest record, The Monitor. Monitor + tour = "Monitour," remember? Thus far, it has taken us all over these United States, and over a reasonable chunk of Western Europe, and this Autumn, we will fumble across the beautiful American landscape once more to entertain you. A daunting task, we know, for yr palate is sophisticated and yr standards elevated. You deserve the best, and happily for us, we have been able to enlist five of the most entertaining and straight up party rocking young people in all of rock and roll to travel with us and spread the good news about the electric guitar. Who could I be referring to but Philadelphia's number one neo-classic rockers Free Energy?

Our relationship with Free Energy goes all the way back to the Autumn of 2009, when we had just completed our "Bring on the Dudes" tour with our BFFs the So So Glos. We agreed to tack on a show at Georgetown University in DC at the end of the tour. Naturally, after forty or so days of slugging it out on the American indie rock circuit (and putting up with all the SSG's antics), we were dead tired and ready for an evening of zombie-esque behavior. This was until the opening act at the show, a group we had never...

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Photo by Elisabeth Vitale

New Jersey's own Titus Andronicus unleash their sprawling suburban blues all over North America this summer. So get ready for big, bleating major chords, and even some goofy dancing. They'll play songs from their recently Best New Music'd, Civil War-themed album The Monitor, including the super-long ones. Neo-classic rockers Free Energy join them on select dates. Titus' full itinerary and a live video can be found below:

Titus Andronicus:

06-26 Brooklyn, NY - Barge Park (Northside Festival) *
07-01-04 Roskilde, Denmark - Roskilde Festival
07-10 New Haven, CT - Lily's Pad #
07-11 Northampton, MA - Pearl Street #
07-12 Albany, NY - Valentines #
07-13 Buffalo, NY - Ninth Ward #
07-14 Toronto, Ontario - Horseshoe Tavern #
07-15 Grand Rapids, MI - Intersection Lounge #
07-16 Chicago, IL - Subterranean (Pitchfork Music Festival Afterparty)
07-17 Chicago, IL - Pitchfork Music Festival
08-21 Boston, MA - Royale %
08-22 Montreal, Quebec - Il Motore %
08-23 Ottowa, Ontario - Mavericks %
08-25 Ithaca, NY - Castaways %
08-26 Columbus, OH - Summit
08-27 Toledo, OH - Mickey Finn's
08-28 St. Louis, MO - LouFest
08-29 Memphis, TN - Hi Tone
08-30 Little Rock, AR - Rev Room
08-31 Dallas, TX - Sons of Hermann Hall
09-01 Austin, TX - Emo's
09-02 El Paso, TX - Percolator
09-03 Phoenix, AZ - Trunk Space
09-08 San Francisco, CA...

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