I’ve always felt strongly attuned to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous short story, “Ethan Brand.” The title character forsakes his life to search the world for the unpardonable sin. He finds it. It ends badly for him. The nature of the sin? He remembered with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe,
Read moreWhen we think about rock & roll and its various derivative styles, we pretty much think of the US and UK. And why not – just about every thread of the popular music universe has arisen in one of the two countries. But when you invent something cool, everybody is going to want to play, which is why you can
Read moreWhen we’re kids we like the damnedest things, don’t we? There was a moment, I guess during the summer of 1972, when my two favorite songs were the Jackson 5’s “Rockin’ Robin”…
Read moreSo many places I haven’t been, so many places I want to go, so many songs about places. But I guess the place I haven’t been that I want to see the most is Scotland. My favorite Scottish artist is Fish. And as he sings here, when he was still with Marillion, he was born “with a heart of Lothian.”
Read moreSomething we’ve wanted for awhile is a logo – not just the text logo, which we like, but something visual and iconic. Many ideas have been kicked around and set aside for one reason or another (my lack of design skill being at the top of that list). But not long ago, we hit on a rough idea and were
Read moreAnd I’m back from several days of packing and moving, just in time to find this emotional and spiritual landmine waiting for me. [sigh] When you’re a kid in America, nothing is as tangibly magical as Christmas. The excitement, the presents, the lights, the sheer spectacle of the entire world gone shimmery. And nothing is more special than family, the
Read moreEvery movie has a soundtrack. And let’s be honest – most of them are as unmemorable as … well, as the movies themselves. At its best, though, the music captures the spiritual essence of the auteur‘s vision, interacting with the film in ways that are simply transcendent. One plus one equals infinity, and it’s impossible to ever conceive of song
Read moreSweet hell, what was I thinking when I came up with this entry I mean, it isn’t that I can’t think of songs, it’s just that there are several people I consider best friends: people who have been close to me at various points in my life, people I have relied on, shared good times, survived the bad. People whose
Read moreI imagine most of us have loved. And lost. I also imagine that most of us look back, on occasion, and wonder what the hell we were thinking. Some years ago I made what I still regard as the worst mistake of my life. When it went to hell it didn’t destroy the whole world, it didn’t leave me any
Read moreIn a way, this is kind of a trick question. If you’re doing it right, a song doesn’t last nearly long enough. So when I was creating 30-Day Song Challenge, the Sequel, maybe I should have designated day 13 for your favorite make-out album. In any case, this may be the single easiest day of either the original challenge or
Read moreIf you’ve been following the series, you may have noticed that instead of simply offering up a song that fits the criteria (“a song you love from the ’00s”), I’m trying to write about songs that are in some way definitive. Maybe it was something that typified a dominant movement, or perhaps it was a tune that marked an important
Read moreFor a long time – basically, from the British Invasion through the end of the ’80s – there was a great deal of shared history between the rock of America and the UK. What was happening on one side of the pond made its way in short order to the other side, and this was generally a good thing. But
Read moreI’ve always thought that Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town” was just about as perfect a pop song as it is possible to write. The story captivates. The tune itself is so intuitive that it feels like it has been inside me my whole life, waiting for an artist to set it free. As for the performance and production,
Read moreI remember a conversation with an old girlfriend back in the late 1990s. We were talking about the sounds of the times, I guess you’d say, and I commented that the decade had been dominated by a lot of pretty rebellious music. Grunge, Punk, Industrial – everybody was well and truly pissed off, it seemed. The music of my youth
Read moreI’ve never much cared for the musical genre broadly known as Americana, and lately I’ve been thinking about why this is. I suppose it’s acceptable to say hey, I’ve listened to a lot of these artists and most of them just kinda bore me, but that seems unsatisfactory for a guy who thinks about music like I do. After some
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lullaby pit 