I'll admit it. This is probably the best time ever to be a music fan. Why? Because whatever kind of music you like—from the most popular hip-hop to the most radical avant jazz (and from the most popular smooth jazz to the most radical progressive hip-hop)—it's out there somewhere where you can find it. Someone is not only playing it, they are making it easily available to you. There are two reasons for this, and they both trace back to...

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 its vinyl this album would have a hole in it. I am going to wear it out. I did something similar with a different band, whose name I won’t mention, and I...

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 its doors and exposed its amazing new interior on this evening, and Orange County's Social Distortion were hand picked to christen the stage for a one-off, non-tour show. And quite honestly, I could...

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 mammoth body of work down into a sixteen-track collection is nothing short of amazing. How could it be done? Fans will invariably be disappointed by the omission of one song and inclusion of another but, with so...

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; like the unlucky musician was working toward something that would have made them the single most important figure in the art form had they not been taken too early. The other (very similar)...

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 their own synthesis of those aesthetics to the stage with a garage-y rock n' roll backing. Those three punks – Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell – ended up making history by presenting an attractive aural amalgam...

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 of “them” in it, but also works within the constraints of the host artist's muse and style and doesn't attempt to steal the show from that? It's the finest line to straddle and will spell...

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 ultimately yielded a complete and total shift and rethinking of values and procedures should have happened “right there” in a given timeline but, with enough years removed and enough surveillance of the proceeding damage done, it's impossible to argue because...

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 & Him) manifested so plainly as it does on Hold Time. That doesn't mean that the singer's newest effort feels hastily assembled or like a set of discarded, sub-par tracks collected to capitalize on the...

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 the moment and get carried away but, unless something went fundamentally wrong, the possibility of genuine violence was pretty far removed. At the center of the movement and at the core of...