Once, there was a time when James Brown was called “The hardest-working man in show business.” The title was deserved; Brown was a notorious workaholic – sometimes playing as many as three hundred and thirty one-nighter shows in a year – and...
Creative focus is always an admirable trait in a musician, but sometimes a diversion is in order too – if only to fulfill a desire to do something a little different. Sometimes it happens because the players involved fear that they're stagnating creatively...
Ancient Chinese wisdom says that if one travels long enough and far enough, the traveler will eventuall meet himself in the future. Could the same be true of institutions? To date, rock n' roll has been an institution for fifty-nine years (almost to the day –...
At around one o'clock this afternoon, the wind got sucked from my lungs with four simple words. At one o'clock this afternoon, my wife/girlfriend/partner was sitting at the dining room table sorting through the news of the day when all of a sudden she stopped...
Even at the height of the band's powers in the mid-Nineties, Pavement was never allowed to stand on its' own two feet, autonomous from anyone else making music around the same time. They drew near-constant comparisons to other guitar-driven bands like Dinosaur...
“This is gonna replace CDs soon; guess I'll have to buy The White Album again…." – Tommy Lee Jones, Men In Black. The practice of bands and labels re-issuing material after it has reached a certain vintage isn't uncommon. In...
Without meaning to sound simple, I must humbly ask, “Why do remix albums bear a single artist's name?” True, the work contained on any such record began life as the work of a single creative body, but that's almost always where their involvement...
In rock n' roll in general but punk rock in specific, there are few things that bands love more than contradictions in terms. Take emo for example; this sub-set of punk rockers craves the act of soul baring, but can't resist setting it against very plastic or...
How intoxicating is a singer who, from the moment she opens her mouth, can soothe rattled nerves with just the smooth, sweet and self-assured tone of her voice? Voices like that are a rare breed – Norah Jones has one, as do Kelli Dayton, Shara Nelson and Joss...
If anything can be taken as true about Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton given his operating procedures over the last twenty-four months, it is that he seems to deliberately try to force musicians out of their comfort zones as soon as he sits down in the...