If you’ve been paying attention you know that our boy Jim Booth recently published a novel. And that it’s really good. And that it presents us with the opportunity to consider fame and substance at war over the soul of an artist. He has now authored a guest essay on “Southern Rock Stardom, Postmodernism, and the Persistence of Memory” over at
Read moreI’ve been thinking about Completeness of the Soul: The Life and Opinions of Jay Breeze, Rock Star, the third novel from my friend and fellow scrogue Jim Booth. I finished reading it a few days ago, but for me it’s been a slightly disjointed experience because I’ve seen most of it in its pieces before: chapters like “Fins” and “The Balcony Scene”
Read moreThe new Ryan Shaw CD dropped today and I’m giddy as a schoolgirl at her first sock hop. Shaw has one of the absolute best pure voices in the entire neo-Soul genre – maybe the best. It’s like listening to Otis or Marvin or Wilson Pickett or, in more recent days, the criminally underappreciated Malford Milligan. Still on my first listen,
Read moreIt has been observed, here and elsewhere, what a fucking embarrassment Steven Tyler has become. Once Aerosmith was among America’s greatest bands, and today they occupy the #5 spot (with a bullet) on my Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen list. It was refreshing, then, when Joe Perry brought the hammer down on his silly-ass 64-going-on-14 Teen Beat bandmate. Reports TMZ:
Read moreEarl Scruggs, the legendary master of the bluegrass banjo, is dead at 88. It was just a few days ago that I was writing about the music that I grew up with, and rest assured, Flatt & Scruggs were welcome in the Smith household. There’s honestly not a lot I can say that I feel is worthy of the man’s genius
Read moreFriend: Hey, Yogi, I think we’re lost. Yogi Berra: Yeah, but we’re making great time! It’s probably clear to anybody who pays attention that I’m a rock & roll guy. But I was raised by my grandparents, two country folks who were born in 1913 and 1914 respectively and grew up through the Great Depression. There were two kinds of
Read moreOnce upon a time, marketing music must have been so simple: in the ’50s you just bribed a local DJ and off you went. By the ’80s it was a little more complicated – in addition to cash you needed to bring coke and hookers, but still, it was a straightforward process and everybody understood the rules. Maybe that’s understating
Read moreOn September 24, 1991, a little-known band from Seattle released a CD called Nevermind. Nothing was ever the same again.
Read moreDon Dixon and Mitch Easter co-produced REM’s first two (and arguably best) albums, Murmur and Reckoning. S&R contacted Dixon earlier today to ask if he had any thoughts on the band’s break-up. Here’s what he had to say. I’ll miss R.E.M. but I completely understand why they’re calling it quits. I haven’t spoken with anyone in the band yet but I
Read moreToday, if we choose to listen, we’ll hear a great deal about America, about the last decade, about the lessons we’ve learned. Football will be played. Flags will be waved. Tears will be shed. And tomorrow we’ll be exactly what we were yesterday, only moreso. Maybe today is a bad time for critiques. Or maybe it’s the perfect time. Hard
Read moreWe all have our favorite artists and songs and albums. Even those of us who listen to a lot of different styles and have thousands of CDs in our collections undoubtedly have a few we keep coming back to more than others. While I have never really had this discussion with anyone, I imagine that there are all kinds of
Read moreEvery once in awhile I come across unrelated stories that somehow associate themselves in my mind. Take these, for instance: First, I hope you saw Lex’s tribute to Starchild (given name, Gary Shider), he of P-Funk fame. As Lex notes, Shider experienced problems where the cost of fighting the cancer that killed him was concerned. Second, another American music icon,
Read moreThere’s been an interesting upsurge in decidedly old-fashioned chorale-style music of late. Perhaps we should have seen it coming a few years ago with the emergence of the upbeat, multi-layered harmonies of The Polyphonic Spree, but now the trend is upon us in full throat, if you will. A capella is big enough that it spawned a TV show, The
Read moreI remember distinctly how I first discovered Jag Star. I was snooping around on eMusic for new bands and was using the old triangulation method – who sounds like band X? One of my favorite bands is VAST, and Jag Star turned up as a “Similar Artist.” That was both a great moment and a confusing one. On the one
Read moreLilac, lovelace / remind me of / your true grace About four years ago I tripped across a band called The Lost Patrol. Since then I’ve noted their work a number of times: they made my best CDs for 2007 and 2008 reviews; their music served as a key element in a piece on the nonlinearity of influence; and they
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lullaby pit 