Celebrating Community
I dream of you often nowadays. I must admit that when the Beatles broke up, I was mad at you. We had spent far too much time together. Like brothers, we slept in the same bed sometimes. We were boxed into hotel rooms, having to take refuge from a world that wanted to steal a piece of us. We wrote […]
Jason Moran is at the Whitney, and it doesn’t seem right. Not that he doesn’t deserve such an honor, nor that jazz should not be recognized by our important institutions – Moran should be celebrated as widely as Bob Dylan or Beyoncé, and jazz should be at the forefront of American culture, every day of the week, all year round. […]
You are outraged, and have written a protest song. You’d like it to be a part of the catalyst for change; march out in the streets, sing it, have all the radio stations play it with a new anthem for a better world out there and change on its way. Well…it’s happened before. According to Wikipedia, a protest song is […]
As part of LA’s Paisley Underground, The Long Ryders were one of the first American groups to combine the cosmic country of The Byrds with the DIY punk ethos of the early 1980’s. The band recorded their debut LP Native Sons with Henry Lewy who worked with The Flying Burrito Brothers on their legendary album Gilded Palace of Sin. Former […]
This July, a new collaboration debuted at the Newport Folk Festival. The name? The Highwomen, a riff off the original supergroup of country renegades, The Highwaymen. The players? Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires, with a host of supporting characters that counted Yola and Sheryl Crow in their ranks. The uniform? Pantsuits. Morris wore a pink one […]
The Billboard charts have long been the industry standard when it comes to determining music’s popularity and success. However, recent years have seen controversy surround Billboard. To varying degrees, Billboard has been affected by industry tricks to boost streaming numbers and song plays with bots, payola, etc. Additionally, the Billboard charts’ historical dependence on radio airplay has made the chart […]
Rafe Stepto is a singer-songwriter & multi-instrumentalist with a smokey voice that brings to mind Al Green. He will be playing a solo set on guitar and piano Thursday, October 3 from 8:30-9:15 at Branded Saloon in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Stepto will sing original songs from his current project “Kiss Attack”, which employs a wide variety of jazz, funk, and […]
It’s easy to take Chrissie Hynde for granted. The songs she wrote and sang with her band the Pretenders shoot straight from the heart. You don’t think about her performance because you’re too busy thinking about her, about the story she’s telling and the character she’s portraying. The communication is so direct that it’s easy to miss the singer delivering […]
Life has a funny way of coming full circle sometimes. Someone I don’t know writes me about a piece I had placed in the Red Hook Star Review on Louis Prima a few weeks prior. That someone, my new friend Charlie Diliberti, then tells me that Louie Prima’s son, Louis Prima Jr, tours around the country playing New Orleans style […]
Take a little walk to edge of Park Slope down on 5th Ave between St. Marks and Warren to Lizzie King’s Parlor, a name with an origin story that seems ripe for a Nick Cave murder ballad. It comes from Elizabeth Lloyd King who lived around the corner in the late 1800s and is famous for having shot her estranged […]