The What-ing What Project? Never, perhaps, has a figure in rock music been simultaneously so famous and so … anonymous.

Fans of their initial music could be forgiven for barely recognizing Chicago by the 1980s, as fussy power ballads eventually flushed out the band’s signature horn sound. A group that had built its reputation on organic experimentation, a kind of prog-fusion that earned heavy rotation on a then-new FM radio format, never returned to the album-length suites that once defined [...]

by Mark Saleski So I was bored the other night and decided to flip through the on-demand offerings on the cable, and came across a short concert segment of Deep Purple doing “Space Truckin.”

ONWARD (“Dirty Work”) >>> *** STEELY DAN SUNDAY INDEX *** The first song from the first album, and their first hit (#6, Billboard Hot 100 in 1973). The theme of people succumbing to their worst tendencies again and again is the theme that will get many return visits from the Boys of Bard.

> *** STEELY DAN SUNDAY INDEX *** One big thing that everyone at SER has in common is that music to each us represents certain touchpoints in our lives: events, places, times…even certain moods are tightly bound to a piece of music that somehow became forever connected to one of those things. This was never a conscious thing with me and [...]

When most think of Rush, it’s their instrumental virtuosity (especially drummer Neil Peart) that comes to mind first. Or the love or hatred of Geddy Lee’s vocals. Other times it’s Peart’s second role as lyricist for the band that garners attention, and it’s another love or hate area of focus: Ayn Rand, sci-fi, songs about balding, fights between dogs and, [...]

by Nick DeRiso Known now (unfortunately) for its jokey songs — that headband-couture video-hit “Money for Nothing,” the silly baseball-park ditty “Walk of Life” — Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms wouldn’t perhaps seem like a top candidate for inclusion in the Forgotten Series. Except that elsewhere on the album, when they weren’t “playing guitar on the MTV,” Dire Straits shared [...]

by S. Victor Aaron So yesterday I read that Billy Joel has written an autobiography that he plans to publish June 14, called The Book Of Joel, and the book’s editor promised that “there is a lot in this book that he has never revealed before.” (Ex-Van Halen frontman Sammy Hagar’s memoirs, incidentally, arrive on March 15, so there’s two [...]

by Mark Saleski Several years ago, I had an email exchange with a couple of my fellow music obsessives about a certain rock group. We never got to the details of the music, instead focusing on “love ‘em” / “don’t.” Actually, “don’t love ‘em” isn’t quite right. It was more like “don’t understand the attraction”.

Photo by Mark Seliger by Nick DeRiso “The Afterlife,” featured on Paul Simon’s forthcoming album So Beautiful or So What, is pulsing and sinewy — almost like a lost track from Graceland. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. See, Simon has said the premise of this new recording was to get away from the rhythmic focus he’d had since [...]