by Tom Johnson I have two amazing young daughters who constantly remind me of the distance in age between them and me. The youngest is too young to ask much, but is plenty busy with toys and books, and being the family comedian. My older daughter, however, she is fullRead More

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

Music obsessives and “regular” folks alike know of the song/memory retrieval phenomenon — you hear a song and instantly remember where you were the first time you heard it. The speed and clarity of detail associated with the song can be quite amazing. There have been claims that odors produceRead More

by Mark Saleski After listening to certain Tom Waits songs, I get to thinking about what the man might have stored in his garage. Sure, it’s become sort of a cliché, doing a mental inventory of Waits’ collection of bullhorns and whatnot, but it sure is fun. Even more funRead More

by Pico We’ve used this space for bringing telling the world about the recorded accomplishments of artists both popular and obscure, and for us, at least, the talented ones who haven’t emerged yet are usually the ones that are most fun to write about. With those types, there’s a greaterRead More

Rock stars whose dad jammed with Django Reinhardt when said rock star was an infant, and dated Nico not long after after high school deserve my eternal respect and admiration, but as far as I know, only Jackson Browne falls into that category. It was only years later when heRead More

It’s a classically American record by an American who was an expatriate for half of her young life. Being the daughter of a globe trotting missionary didn’t give Diana Birch a first hand indoctrination to American culture the way most Americans get it, but she was always a quick studyRead More

by Pico The last time I covered a band out of Providence RI, I was thunderstruck by the wonderfully weird folks who make up the musical buffet table Barnacled. On the other end of the spectrum but in the same seaside New England town hails an folk-rock outfit called TheRead More

Crosby, Stills & Nash hadn’t produced a new studio record in fifteen years (or ten, if you add Neil Young), but there hadn’t been a more active period of release activity of new/previously unheard material by these three than there have in the last few years. David Crosby and GrahamRead More

‘Mama Rosa,’ named after Brian Blade’s grandmother, is a thematic album built around family, faith and early life events, as well as people he’s come to love along the way.