Some musicians use live performances to demonstrate that they can deliver in concert what they do on disc. Others take an opposite approach, seeing their shows as an invitation to experiment and take their work in different directions from where […]
I’m probably the last person on the planet to discover that Desert Island Discs wasn’t merely a feature in Tower Record’s free monthly Pulse magazine, but a 76-year-old radio show on BBC Radio 4. The idea for the program came from Roy Plomley, […]
Carly Simon might have been guided by the clouds in her coffee but David Bowie had mammoth moonage daydreams. There was something larger than life, other or outer-worldly about Bowie, who transformed folk songs originally made under his birth name Davy […]
As tributes pour in about the death of David Bowie, including Kim Ruehl’s excellent piece on this site, a recurring theme continues to resonate with me about this boundary pushing and genre-bending artist: He was always living in the moment […]
I can’t put a finger exactly on when I became a Lou Reed admirer — fan is a word he alternately would have loathed and loved. But I’m sure he would have appreciated that I came to admire his music — […]
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 […]
The Velvet Underground’s eponymous third album is also the third record from the group to be the subject of a “super deluxe” 45th anniversary reissue. Like its predecessors, this six-CD edition offers upgraded sound, several mixes of the original LP […]
To say Suzanne Vega was skeptical that her song “Luka” could be a hit would be completely understating it. “It was my manager at the time, Ron Fierstein, who heard in it a possible hit,” Vega says by telephone before […]
