ItemWorld: Owl City hearts Taylor Swift, Randy Newman loves Minneapolis, and more

Summit Brewing filled 19 million bottles last year, said CEO Mark Stutrud. That’s a lot of beer — and a lot of pain. Summit’s bottle caps are notoriously hard to twist off (some people think they might not even be twist-offs). Stutrud said the St. Paul beer giant feels your pain and has decided to switch to caps that require the traditional bottle opener. Most Summit drinkers fall into a couple of categories, he said: “You’ve got the masochists who enjoy the crown bite, and then there’s another group that is very proud of the calluses they’ve developed over the past 24 years.” Ouch. The brewery will begin rolling out the new pry-off caps within the next month. So there’s still a little bit of time to enjoy the pain.

TOM HORGEN

Before he was an Oscar-winning songwriter and movie scorer, Randy Newman occasionally brought his black-humor pop songs to the old Guthrie Theater on Vineland Place. The piano man recalls playing there in the 1970s with Jim Croce and with Bonnie Raitt. “I remember it being the first place I played that was sort of in the round,” Newman, who performs at the new Guthrie Monday, told I.W. “I remember the color of the seats. I don’t remember five places I’ve played, really. That one I remember very well.”

JON BREAM

What with ostrich-feather fans, golden sandals and a fully equipped chariot, King Tut was pretty well decked out when he checked into the next world. But did you know that his tomb was stocked with 20 gloves and underwear for the afterlife, too? True fact, according to David Silverman, a University of Pennsylvania Egyptologist and curator of the “Tutankhamun” show at the Science Museum in St. Paul. And what type of underwear did Tut wear? “Linen,” said Silverman, who played straight man to Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report” earlier this winter.

MARY ABBE

“Are you all right? Well, we’ll fix that.” That’s how Motörhead‘s Lemmy Kilmister greeted the sold-out crowd Tuesday at First Avenue, and it wasn’t just cocky rock talk. Even for those of us wearing earplugs, the show resulted in a steady ringing. Plenty of fans went home with worse damage, too, be it from headbanging whiplash or alcohol ( the total booze sales during Motörhead must equal five or six nights of wimpy indie-rock shows). Things also got a little dangerous when some idiot threw a drink onstage near the start of the set. “In Mötorhead, we don’t throw glasses of beer onstage because we finish them before we get onstage,” Lemmy said, then made some indecipherable but clearly threatening comment to the guy. Suffice it to say, no more cups were thrown.

The Feb. 11 Minnesota Orchestra concert was an all-Russian affair. Pianist Jon Kimura Parker received a particularly enthusiastic standing ovation for his skillful rendition of Sergei Rachmaninoff‘s Concerto No. 3. The audience was rewarded with an encore by Parker of “my first Rachmaninoff”: Prelude in G major, Op. 32, No. 5. Conductor Andrew Litton turned the second half into a history lesson, explaining how Dmitri Shostakovich‘s little-heard Symphony No. 12, “The Year 1917,” while often seen as a Soviet anthem, actually criticizes communism. Litton called the rousing piece the composer’s “stay-out-of-jail free card.”

MARCI SCHMITT

Dwight Yoakam has a pretty good memory for the places he’s played. Last week at Mystic Lake Casino, he recalled having gigged there years ago (2001, to be exact). He also remembered being in outstate Minnesota in recent years, but he knew it had been a while since he’d performed in Minneapolis. (Let’s see, he was in Apple Valley and Maplewood since he played downtown at First Avenue in ’03). Yoakam determined that Prior Lake qualified as “greater Minneapolis.” Just as long as he doesn’t identify St. Paul that way.

JON BREAM

Like a lovelorn e-mail accidentally sent out to everyone in high school, Owl City’s Adam Young issued a new recording online for Valentine’s Day that openly swoons for the popular girl everyone wants to date. The girl in this case just happens to be Taylor Swift. Young was apparently the last Swift fan in the world to figure out that “Enchanted” — from her latest album “Speak Now” — was written about their meeting in New York last year. Upon learning he’s the “he” in it, Young recounted on his site, “A colorful swirl of memories flashed before my eyes as it all added up.” His response was to update “Enchanted” with such reworked lyrics as, “Oh Taylor, I was so enchanted to meet you, too.” Sure, it’s a wee bit awkward to hear —but not as weird as hearing Swift’s much-older love interests, Jake Gyllenhaal and John Mayer, talk about her.