Early in April 2014, Delbert McClinton was headed down to play a show in St. Augustine, Florida. He’d just returned from Austin, where his son, Clay, lay in a coma that doctors had induced to heal the brain trauma Clay […]
0
Sometime in late 1965 or early 1966, a slogan spray-painted on a wall in London proclaimed: “Clapton is God.” Although he later said he was embarrassed by the slogan, Clapton’s fluid guitar riffs across a range of styles revealed his […]
On July 4, fireworks burst thunderously over city parks, smells wafting from charcoal grills hang heavy in the air, and music played by high school bands provides the drumbeat and the soundtrack for holiday parades in towns both large and […]
It’s a good year to be Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, probably even better than the short time they existed as a “supergroup” in 1969 and 1970. Andrew Slater’s film Echo in the Canyon recalls the heyday of the idyllic […]
Best known for his pop standard “Cruel to Be Kind” and his pensive anthem “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” Nick Lowe remains a bit of an enigma. He’s a hard-working, ceaselessly inventive songwriter and a first-rate musician, […]
Although many of us might be stacking up piles of summer books—those novels we didn’t get to earlier this year, the thick biographies of cultural figures—to breeze through over the next few months, publishers are already tantalizing us with their […]
In the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss deliver a sprightly bluegrass version of “I’ll Fly Away,” the transcendent vocals of the pair riding on a wave of cascading banjo. Many filmgoers were likely already […]
In 1962, the legendary George Wein, who had produced the Newport Jazz Festival, was invited to New Orleans to create a similar jazz festival. As he writes in the foreword to the stunning new book and 5-CD box set Jazz […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you missed it last week, you can read The Reading Room’s interview with Ani DiFranco about her new book here. Many, if not most, music memoirs are simply tiresome, with the authors reveling in the minutiae of endless […]
Ani DiFranco has a recurring dream that she’s on an empty stage late at night, “looking into a dark, empty house.” As she heads out of the house, she wistfully reflects on the now-empty room that earlier in the evening […]
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
AVAILABLE NOW
AVAILABLE NOW
