60. Ryan Adams – Heartbreaker [Bloodshot] The dawn of the 21st century found Ryan Adams venturing into venues armed with little more than an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a music stand hastily overflowing with scribbled pages of lyrics. As opposed to… Read More
John Darnielle is a man of many interests. As the creative force behind indie mainstay the Mountain Goats, Darnielle has used his music to explore a ridiculously wide range of topics: Dungeons and Dragons (In League with Dragons), rural America… Read More
Just what was the secret sauce that made the string of ABBA albums, from Arrival (1976) through to The Visitors (1981), so uniquely satisfying? Even the less consistent earlier albums, particularly 1975’s Abba, bore signs of brilliance. I can only… Read More
In 1982, Paul Weller committed what many fans considered an unforgivable sin. The Jam, the influential mod pop-punk trio he’d led as singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter for five years, were disbanded at the height of their popularity – and… Read More
Seventeen years have passed since Ane Brun delivered her critically acclaimed debut album Spending Time with Morgan. On her latest outing, After the Great Storm, the Stockholm-based Norwegian artist still displays a singular knack for painting words that leap off… Read More
Excerpt of Chapter Five from Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll by Maureen Mahon reprinted with permission by Duke University Press (footnotes omitted). © 2020 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt… Read More
This year has been a dark time for rock ‘n’ roll, with the coronavirus pandemic sidelining the live music industry. But rock music has long been about responding to troubled times with cathartic songs to provide fans with an emotional… Read More
In 2013 and 2015, drummer/composer/arranger John Hollenbeck released Songs I Like a Lot and Songs We Like a Lot, collaborations with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band and singers Kate McGarry and Theo Bleckmann. He mainly reworked relatively popular songs from… Read More
Of all the versions of “I Can See Clearly Now” that have been circulating since Johnny Nash died on 6 October, my favorite is the one from 1973, when Nash performed the song on the late-night variety show The Midnight… Read More
Our previous installment of Dread Reckoning, “Horrors in the Closet: A Closet Full of Monsters” describes how, within the context of horror culture, the construction of non-heteronormative sexual identities exhibits a telling duality. That is; because of the impurity and… Read More