My brother and I sat on the front stoop, with impressively out-of-tune plastic guitars in our hands. With sibling harmony decades removed from the Louvins, we proudly proclaimed, in front of god and everybody, things we couldn’t possibly have understood. […]
I feel a bit ridiculous dialing Judy Collins’s phone number in Manhattan for an interview. I presume she has been asked every question imaginable during her long, distinguished career in the music business, and I’m guessing that — like a […]
Michael Timmins sees the newest Cowboy Junkies album, Notes Falling Slow, as “a nice stepping stone to whatever our next recording project will be.” The four-disc Notes Falling Slow, released in October, follows 2012’s wonderful five-disc box set, The Nomad […]
I said to Hank Williams: “How lonely does it get?” Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet But I hear him coughing all night long Oh, a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song Leonard Cohen, “Tower of Song” If, […]
1 The Orpheus myth offers a fertile metaphor on the relationship between inspiration and creative maturity. Anne Wroe writes in The Daily Beast: Orpheus … contains within himself two sides of the poetic character. … Traditionally, Orpheus was first a […]
Julie Christensen bowed deeply to the standing-room-only crowd at The Family Wash, a venerable East Nashville music venue, as her band, Stone Cupid, kicked into a full-bore jam. She blew a two-handed kiss to the audience, exited stage left, and […]
There were plenty of valid reasons for the five-year gap between Allison Moorer’s acclaimed 2010 album Crows and her new album Down to Believing. “Well, I’ll give you the list,” she says when I ask. “I became a parent. I […]
Leonard Cohen has been called brilliant, unique and charming but never, to my knowledge, prolific. Between 1967, when his debut album appeared, and 2011—nearly half a century later—he issued a grand total of 11 studio LPs. During one nine-year stretch, […]
Critics, by nature, overanalyze. After all, it’s our job to not only figure out whether music works, but to turn the average listener’s ears in a direction that’ll help them hear things they may not have heard in a casual […]
Leonard Cohen has previously released five live albums and three concert DVDs, and much of that material preserves performances from the past few years, so do we really need this new video? I’d say yes. For one thing, this is […]
