Rock God Math
My current favorite music writer, Steven Hyden, goes beyond the simple album review for the new Pearl Jam disk. Instead, he examines the band’s entire career, assesses what’s overrated, what’s underrated, and what’s been properly rated, and then does the final math. Pearl Jam made some great records in the ’90s, some not-so-great records in the early ’00s, and some…
For Those About To Rock
I recently came across a new classic rock station1 that has a “Twelve O’Clock Double Shot” lunch show. Which is great, because I pick up L. at 1:00 so while I’m sitting in line waiting for the kids to come out, I get to listen to the last few minutes of the program. One day last week I lucked into a…
FR Friday
I don’t obsess about music the way I once did. I blame that on the digital music revolution. As much as I love having access to a seemingly endless stream of music, it also means I don’t live with an album for weeks at a time the way I once did. But there are exceptions to that, certainly, whether it’s…
Slow It Down And Play It Again
Each week, as I go through my RSS feeds, Twitter, email, and other mediums through which I find cool stuff, I come across things that I’ll open up in my browser but forget about. They may sit in an open tab for days, but at some point a mental alarm goes off and I think, “Well, I haven’t read that…
25 Favorite Songs Of All Time, 2013 Edition
As I mentioned a couple weeks back, it’s been five years since I first posted my 20 Favorite Songs of All-Time list. Which means it’s time to review and tweak the list. There wasn’t any great, complex methodology to this. I simply took the original list and evaluated those 20 songs against each other. There was some movement, and one…
So Very Eighties
Last weekend I was sitting around, enjoying an 80-Acre Hoppy Wheat when Madness’ classic 1983 tune “Our House” came on the radio. Being the reflective cat I am1, I savored my beer and considered that I very well could have been listening to the same song exactly 30 years before that moment. I also thought if you had to sum…
A Few Digital Music Thoughts
The horse is long out of the barn. That’s my reaction to Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke’s announcement earlier this week that he was pulling his solo and Atoms For Peace music from the streaming service Spotify to protest the minuscule royalty payments it, and other similar services, issues to artists. I absolutely agree with his point: there needs to…
Worst Song Ever
Another great series at the AV Club is Hate Song, where they invite artists to talk about a popular song that they hate. Duh. The latest entry, which features Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio,1 just happens to focus on my least favorite song ever, “Two Princess” by the Spin Doctors. Holy crap do I hate that song. Why? Because it…
Spin The Black Circle
You would think, as much as I love music, that I would have some sweet set-up for listening to my tunes. A nice stereo receiver/amp with kick ass speakers and some high end headphones for use when I couldn’t crank it up to 11 You would be wrong Since going fully digital about a decade ago, I’ve relied on pretty…
Pedestrian Verse
I’m the dickhead in the kitchen Pouring wine in your best girl’s glass With that, the first line of the lovely opening track (“Acts Of Man”) to Frightened Rabbit’s new album Pedestrian Verse, lead singer Scott Hutchison sets the stage for another epic album of wallowing in sorrow, guilt, and misery. For three verses he offers a litany of the…