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 famously used to deduct pay from members of his band if they missed a note. His touring schedule may have slowed toward the end of his life, but the fanfare didn't – even in his final final shows...

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 and they want to deliberately force themselves out of their respective comfort zones and sometimes the power of the almighty dollar is the motivation behind an artistic change or collaboration but, most rarely (and rewardingly), sometimes the...

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 – if one assumes that “Rocket 88” was the first rock song – given it was first recorded by Ike Turner in the first week of March, 1951) and has been from Earth to Hell...

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 dead. She went blank and blinked, then she turned to me and uttered those fateful four: "Alex Chilton is dead." And punctuated it with "Holy shit," but it didn't matter – I was already reeling....

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 Jr. and Superchunk – they even got called “the bookish Nirvana” at one point – and, listening now, one has to wonder what critics were listening to that led them to such conclusions. Sure – there's no arguing...

“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 fact, it's been happening for years and makes very good business sense; from a psychological standpoint, rock n' roll has always been a youthful medium which means the younger demographics purchase the most of it, the most regularly. By the...

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 ends. A remix album is defined as one artist's work being passed through the sensibilities of several others which, in execution, leaves the impression of the original auteur, but little more. The work ceases to be the...

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 metallic sounds. In the same vein, street punks will regularly come to blows (at least in their lyrical content) with any and all comers but, as any Rancid or Roger Miret record implies,...

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 Stone, and Fiona Apple has been known to produce something comparable on occasion) – but it's clear that it's the only tone that Elizabeth Shepherd is able to make in Heavy Falls...

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 producer's chair. How else would one explain the mammoth and sprawling sounds he concocted to run along with The Black Keys on Attack & Release? Or how he stunted the funk in Beck for Modern...