Whether it's deserved or not, some records just get a bum rap. Sometimes it makes sense – there have been occasions when the makers of the “bad record” in question were in an unfortunate place personally that reflected in the band's music or had been inspired by something that seemed like a good idea in theory but ended up being ill-advised in practice – and sometimes no one is ever quite sure why or how a record flopped but, either...

Hey – where ya been junkie? I dunno about you, but I always get a kick outta cover songs. I dunno why, but I always think it's cool to hear when some musician decides to show where he came from or what got his attention as a kid by raiding their books and knocking out a new take on old tunes. Sometimes it's funny and sometimes it's awful, but sometimes the band doing the covering actually does a better job...

It's hard to believe that the Vans Warped Tour is now in it's sixteenth year, but it sure as hell is. At this point, there's actually a tremendous amount of history and no shortage of great band that have crossed the Warped stage but, just when you thought that Kevin Lyman and his cohorts could not possibly come up with yet another line-up of 80+ bands to play on what is now the longest running annual tour in North America,...

After so many years working in the record industry – watching and commenting on trends, watching the rise and fall of stars and their meteoric egos – it has become very easy to forget that, while the music business is a business, everyone got started in it because it was fun. For the performers, making music was fun; it was fun for everyone else too but, eventually, people started watching the bottom line  and everything started getting serious. Looked at...

The nature of a collaborative music effort – be it an album, concert or even something as simple as a duet – can be a dicey proposition which renders all bets off if just one variable doesn't line up. Certainly the hearts of contributors are always in the right place in the beginning; the artists likely believe in the reasoning that initially spurred the collaboration but, in some instances, their desire to turn in a performance that stands out from...

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 complicated line that successfully feminized post-punk thanks to the band's ability to cross tight and succinct New Wave-y compositional themes (synths, robotic rhythms, fried lyrical repetition and singer Steve Bays' higher pitched and melodic vocals) and sublime pop savvy....

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 '70s, Cash's schedule of appearances was enormous and the records which came from that period (Live In San Quentin and Live At Folsom Prison among them) went on to become not just cornerstone releases,...

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), subject and cartoonish libido of that magic time in life when the hope of getting laid was representative of the ultimate in the human experience and the greatest sight in...

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 – after all, he was the king of it. That same set of word association happens with the phrases “Jefferon Airplane” and “Fillmore.” In the Sixties, as hippies began to congregate in San Francisco, Jefferson...

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 tuxedos (check out the cover of American Classic), this Setlist album represents an excellent stitch in time; back to that period when Nelson's backing band was small, the songs were just North of vintage hill country (Nelson had drums –...