Since first smashing into the mainstream consciousness in 2003 with their sophomore album, Make Up The Breakdown, Hot Hot Heat has charted a surprising and unlikely course to rock stardom. Songs like “Bandages” and “No, Not Now” tread a...
Those familiar with Johnny Cash's story know that, if one were to collect all of the material the singer released in just one year at the height of his career and released it, the results would be a staggering, multi-disc tome. Particularly in the '60s and...
Outside of Kiss and maybe The Who, no band in rock history was so perfectly able to sum up and speak to the teenaged experience as Cheap Trick was at the height of its' game. The band was able to encapsulate the sound (Kiss may always have the image locked),...
In case of music history, some terms are just synonymous. If someone were to say “punk,” and people instantly think of The Ramones or Sex Pistols first. If someone were to say “pop,” one of the first names that will come up is Michael Jackson...
As one of the few artists included in the Setlist series still writing and recording material in the present day, Willie Nelson's entry into the collection creates a very different impression from the rest. Now clean-shaven and occasionally photographed wearing...
The terrifying thing about working in music journalism lies in those moments when sounds and styles of music you hated before you signed on start appearing again. When that happens, it suddenly seems possible that, soon, both radio and television airwaves may become...
What quality is it that might make a covers album good? They do exist (in fact, 99 Songs Of Revolution: Volume 1 is one of them), but what is it that qualifies one covers record as good and makes another bad? Is it song selection? Is it performance? Is it a combination...
You have to respect a musician who, even with a potentially lucrative “hired gun” job on the go in a world-class band, still feels like he needs to express his own muse, without asking any of the all-star assistance he has access to or otherwise standing on...
Since 2006, producer/musician Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton has regularly described himself as being less a producer of music and more an “auteur” and patron for music like a director is for film. He has said, “I want to create a...
It took a while (longer than anyone expected, actually) for the trends in rock to start shifting away from the guitar-pop masquerading as “indie rock” which has held the popular imagination of the record-buying public for the last couple of years, but it...