Dear Alex Kapranos, I hate you. I hate your band, Franz Ferdinand. Your new album, Tonight, has damned me with its catchiness. I’ve removed it from my iPod twice, but that shit keeps magically showing up and I keep listening to it. I can’t stop. If I owned...
After opening over eighty years ago, The Fox Theater shut its doors in the mid 1960s, and had pretty much just sat abandoned in downtown Oakland for nearly forty years. But after close to ten years and 75 million dollars worth of renovation, The Fox Theater re-opened...
In his fifty years of making music professionally, Glen Campbell has made seventy full-length albums and had songs scale the charts seventy-four times. That's shocking when laid out so simply in itself, but that anyone could presume to distill and condense such a...
The deifying effect that an untimely death seems to have on musicians has always always been a little eerie. After they die, virtually all musicians are elevated to a plateau upon which the conventional wisdom is that everything done by the deceased was part of a plan;...
In New York City in the 1970s, a fledgling writer, a bookstore employee and a chronically unemployed street urchin all became inspired by the French Symbolist authors of the nineteenth century that included Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Albert Camus and brought...
It has been said that the measure of a musician can be gauged by their versatility. When removed from their established comfort zone, will they still be able to turn in an inspired performance that simultaneously does their reputation justice and still has an element...
There are moments (alcoholics call them moments of clarity, the over-caffeinated call them epiphanies) that, when one peels back the layers of history, look an awful lot like a seemingly forgotten revolutionary occasion. It doesn't seem like the move that...
When you're a musician as prolific as M. Ward is, invariably there's going to be a running monologue that takes shape in your output but never before has the influence of the singer's prior releases (either on his own or with Zooey Deschanel as She &...
Since the style first appeared in the 80s, there has always been a bit of mania and a perceived sensory deprivation attached to the rituals at an all-night rave. Between the crazed beats, the car alarm sirens and the laser light show, it's easy to lose oneself in...
Five years. It has been five years since Ian Thornley crawled out of the crash site left by Big Wreck to begin his solo career. His debut solo outing, Come Again, proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the guitarist could at least summon the raw and bludgeoning power...