Performing live, Lindsey Buckingham has developed this knack for stripping away his familiar in-studio sorcery — an exacting, very revealing process. You May Also Like: How Lindsey Buckingham Balanced It All on the Underrated ‘Gift of Screws’

When Jon Anderson told us earlier in the year that he was writing more “Yes-style music” these days, this — even more than his well-received subsequent solo release — was what most people had in mind: A conceptually epic piece, filled with wonderment, musical twists and a theme as broadRead More

It’s one thing to cover somebody, quite another to expose something fundamentally true about the original song through your interpretation — and that happens with Johnny Cash’s take on this Bob Dylan classic. You May Also Like: How Johnny Cash Challenged Convention Once Again on ‘American Recordings’ How Johnny Cash’sRead More

by Fred Phillips In the early days of my metal fandom, one of the best ways to sample new music was the compilation albums from K-Tel and the like. They were a lot cheaper than a standard cassette, usually running $4-$5 as opposed to $7-$8 for regular albums You MayRead More

Ben Folds, for all his blind-alley turns into jokes that go nowhere, retains a particular eye for the turn of phrase, for the precise word the opens your heart like a flower You May Also Like: Ben Folds Returned to Older Work on ‘Stems and Seeds,’ and Vastly Improved It

Half a decade later, Hurricane Katrina still has this devastating power to inspire, as heard on Peter Novelli’s new self-titled release You May Also Like: Dr. John’s anger over Katrina powered The City That Care Forgot to greatness

There’s a world-weary melancholy, a hard-won realism, to Styx’s new song that didn’t exist in Tommy Shaw’s fun-rocking “Renegade” days, and that points the way out of the band’s more recent habit of backtracking You May Also Like: No related posts.

On an album boasting a number of dark ruminations on this digital age, Billy Sherwood takes a second on “Living in the Now” to contemplate the answers.

Todd Rundgren’s oddball “Love My Way” is perhaps the most perfectly, head-scratchingly reformulated song on ‘(Re)Production.’

You hear, for one final time, the promise of Amy Winehouse — if only in the way she can so expertly imitate the memorable phrasing of Dinah Washington. You May Also Like: Jazz Reedist Daniel Bennett on How Musicians Can Thrive In (and After) the Pandemic Age [Part 1 ofRead More