by Nick DeRiso Corinne Bailey Rae isn’t the same singer, maybe isn’t even the same person, that she was at the time of her celebrated 2007 debut. Three Grammy nominations, including one for best new artist, couldn’t shield her from this world’s knifing truths: Her husband, 31-year-old saxophonist Jason Rae,Read More

by Something Else Reviews Perhaps Todd Rundgren’s own restive muse — he’s dabbled in every major rock subgenre over the past four decades — simply makes him too difficult to categorize. Maybe Rundgren never stuck with one thing long enough. Somehow, this pop music maverick hasn’t consistently found the widerRead More

Editor’s note: Here’s a repost of our review of 1978’s City to City by Gerry Rafferty, who died today in London from liver failure after a lengthy battle with alcoholism. Rafferty scored Top 10 hits first with Stealers Wheel (“Stuck in the Middle”) and then with his own “Baker Street”Read More

by Something Else Reviews Writing can feel akin to tossing a flat rock across the surface of a shimmering river. You never know how far it will go, or just how wide those concentric circles left behind might eventually spread. Sometimes, the thing just sinks. Like, well, a rock. ButRead More

By Nick DeRiso For all of her wandering, Allen Toussaint remains this touchstone for New Orleans-born vocalist Christina Gaudet. But Gaudet doesn’t let her lasting affinity for a hometown soul legend pigeonhole her wider ambitions on Solid, though it’s subtitled “Featuring new songs by Allen Toussaint.” She’s particularly adept atRead More

I had intended for this essay to start out something like this: OK, I’ll come right out and say it. I used to hate John Mellencamp. Back then he was known as John Cougar. All of my friends had their copies of American Fool, and I had to put upRead More

“Come Down in Time” works as a perfect metaphor, and a sad rebuke, for what later happened to Elton John and his songs.

I had thought Phil Collins had stopped making regular studio records altogether, and I’ll bet many of you did, too. After all, it had been eight years since Testify and he seemed to have settled into a successful little niche of making soundtrack music. However, there would be at leastRead More

Bursting forth as rock teetered between too-big prog pyrotechnics and mawkishly symphonic concept records, it comes as little surprise that Big Star seemed to disappear with barely a ripple. That, and the fact that Alex Chilton, who died yesterday at 59 after a heart attack, always seemed to be disappearing,Read More

by Pico Lately, a recent CD by Nicki Gonzalez has been getting out into wider release, this one being her first album in the newest phase of her varied music career: that of a solo hard-edged singer-songwriter. Washington, DC native and local star Gonzalez has been around the block aRead More