I’ve been thinking a lot about anniversaries over the past couple of days. It’s given me a better understanding of why some people and organizations make five- and 10-year plans for themselves. Looking at the patterns of my own life (not that I knew they were patterns while I was living them), it’s amazing how […]
Today (February 25, 2018) I decided to celebrate the birthday of one of my favorite musicians and biggest influences by covering two of his lesser-known songs and posting the results on YouTube. Both of the tunes below were written before the recording of 1970’s All Things Must Pass and demoed for that album’s producer, Phil Spector, but […]
At the end of November 2017, I finished an article for Guitar Aficionado that I was really excited about. The subject was one of my favorite guitarists, Adrian Belew, known for his work with King Crimson, Talking Heads, Nine Inch Nails, and many others, including Gizmodrome, a new supergroup with the Police’s Stewart Copeland. Adrian and […]
Twenty years and about two months ago, I was sitting on a plane en route to Spain from New York, playing an advance copy of Radiohead’s OK Computer over and over again. This was part of my preparation for interviewing all five members of the band during the album’s global media launch event in Barcelona. […]
On some level, the rise of the archival megabox may simply be a cynical scheme, designed to coax as much cash out of the pockets of aging baby boomers as possible before the compact disc completes its long, slow slide into oblivion. But when such a scheme actually provides material that rabid fans of all […]
Back in February, I started recording an EP made up mostly of songs that I’d written many years ago, set aside, and then rediscovered. That EP, appropriately titled Germination, was officially released yesterday for free streaming and paid downloading via the Bandcamp website (where you can also find my earlier album I Call Time). You […]
Back in February, I witnessed a bizarre accident during a Mark Eitzel show at the Mercury Lounge that I wrote about here. Eventually, the central figure involved—a photographer named Mike, who collapsed and hit his head badly while Eitzel was playing—read what I’d posted and got in touch with me, to 1) let me know […]
As posted by me on Facebook this morning: The May issue of Music Alive! will be my last as editor. I’m moving on to our sister publication, In Tune Monthly, and I’ll be taking over for its 2016-17 season as editor-in-chief (a post my esteemed colleague Emile Menasché has held down ably for the past 13 […]
Last week I went to the Mercury Lounge on Houston Street to see Mark Eitzel play a solo show. Although I’d been in the crowd at a bunch of his New York-area gigs in the mid-to-late ’90s, I hadn’t seen him live in about 15 years, and I’d forgotten how much I adore his songs […]
I just finished reading Elvis Costello’s autobiography, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, which I’d been looking forward to for a long while. Overall, it was worth the wait. Anyone who cares about even a small segment of the vast Costello catalog probably won’t be surprised to learn that he’s as skilled a prose stylist as […]
