Brief intro to Big Star: this Memphis-based power-pop quartet was led by Alex Chilton, trading in the deep croon he brought to the Box Tops as a teenager (check out “Cry Like a Baby” for a perfect example; “The Letter” is also a terrific song) for a raspier but more emotive vocal, paired with […]
Unfortunately, I don’t think this is going to be a very long article, since I’m not going to dig into the history of the Carpenters themselves. They were active before my time– I was 18 months old when Karen Carpenter died– and much has already been written about how their sunny soft-rock style often […]
Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock has long been one of my favorite lyricists, with his gift for introspection invoking the philosophical and the universal, the great questions, in a way that’s always haunted me and stuck with me. Though follow-up Good News For People Who Love Bad News was the more popular album, off the strength of lead […]
(CONTENT WARNING: There’s no real way to discuss this album without discussing Eminem’s lyrics, which are offensive in nearly every way, with sexism, homophobia, violence, callous jokes about sensitive subjects, and more. I’m not going to use this article to discuss the lyrics from my moral point of view of 2019 (much), but I […]
Look, I’m not gonna tell you Pete Shelley was sexually frustrated. I don’t and didn’t know the guy; how can I say for sure? He sure as hell knew how to capture the feeling in song, though. The Buzzcocks’ stateside introduction, Singles Going Steady (really a compilation of singles that had been released in the […]
As a deep dive, Talking Heads are a bit of a late-in-life discovery for me. I’d been long familiar with the singles; as a child of the 80s, I was especially familiar with the big hits of the MTV era (“Once in a Lifetime” and “Burning Down the House” chief among them). It wasn’t […]
As Radiohead has entered their third decade of existence (it’s now 25 years since Pablo Honey was released), it’s become increasingly fashionable to call the band overrated in hindsight, particularly among younger folks who didn’t spend any of their formative years with the band (I’m 37). Perhaps that’s just a function of perception and […]
I fear this might not be an album that lends itself to deep analysis, but I also think it’s the best album released between August 23, 2005 and November 22, 2010, so I had to take the opportunity to write about it. Released March 22, 2008, In Ghost Colours was the second album from Australia’s […]
If we’re lucky in this life, we’ll get to see a couple of moments where the confluences of the personal, political, artistic, and spiritual create unforgettable moments and experiences, where the unspoken energies flowing beneath everything run together, like tributaries to a river, to burst forth into our reality with the magic and soul […]
Everyone knows about the M&Ms, but very few people know why. It’s a famous story, one that would almost be mythological (“If the M&Ms didn’t exist, we would have to invent them”) if it weren’t true and confirmed by the band. In articles and anecdotes about rock star excesses and the absurd riders rock bands […]
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