This Girl’s On Fire

If Thompson Twins are remembered for anything, it’s for being on of the weirder-looking 80’s bands. When we look back with a cringe at the depths of 80’s hairstyling depravity, Alannah Currie is never far away. Besides her massive curls, Currie also favored gaudy makeup …

This Fire

Let me direct you to the image of Alex Kapranos seductively licking an envelope (he does this twice) in what remains one of the most formative and iconic videos of the 2000’s. This fire wasn’t yet out of control, but it was a spark – …

This Feeling

I really thought that Alabama Shakes would be a mainstay for many years, based on the phenomenal success of their breakthrough album Sound & Color. The acclaim and huzzahs thrown their way gave me hope about the future of roots rock. Even more so when …

This Dog Barks

What 2020 needed was a new album by Cowboy Junkies. Truthfully, off all the things I wished for in 2020 – well, that wasn’t one of them, but I’m grateful for it anyway. Between the two (2) moods allowed to flourish in the Pandemic Years, …

This Devil’s Workday

Am I the only one who sees the irony of the weirdness and the popularity of Good News For People Who Love Bad News? Popularity despite weirdness isn’t unheard of, and it’s fair to say that it offers more on-ramps than any previous Modest Mouse …

This Depression

It’s a neat sleight of hand to write a song about depression with such an upbeat tune. You could easily hum it all day while not noticing the subject at all. Well, Bruce Springsteen has always been a master of Trojan-horsing some very heavy subject …

This Country

Fever Ray’s Karin Dreijer is Swedish, and I’m curious as to what, besides the cold, is so wrong with Sweden that it makes Dreijer say “this country makes it hard to fuck”. From where I’m sitting here in Texas, Sweden sounds like an egalitarian wonderland …

This Could Be the Start of Something Big

I thought I knew most of the movers and shakers both behind and in front of the cameras, but there’s always an unsung entertainment industry great who I’ve never heard of. For example, I had no idea who Steve Allen was until today, and now I know, because I was researching an Ella Fitzgerald song, and thought I knew most of the composers of the Great American Songbook. Well, then there’s Steve Allen. In the 1950’s he created America’s first-ever, and for a many years, only, late night talk show: The Tonight Show, still going strong since 1954. Besides creating an entertainment format that is now ubiquitous, being its first host and writing his own theme song, Allen was a prolific composer who frequently wrote for film and television. His best known song is the one he wrote for his nascent talk-show project; although the show moved on to different intro music, the song was picked up and popularized by vocalists like Fitzgerald, and joined the canon of jazz standards. It seems like a pretty inauspicious beginning for a great standard; television was far from a prestigious gig back then, and no one expected a talk show aimed at night-owls, or its theme song, to make a cultural impact on anyone except said insomniacs. I don’t watch a lot of late night talk shows, but I’ve seen enough to have an opinion about who’s hosting The Tonight Show, and it seems that a lot of people who don’t even like the format still know enough about it to have an opinion too. So that’s what you call cultural impact.

This Could Be A Dream

Ever since it was released a year ago, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Aurora’s The Gods We Can Touch. It has come to be a definitive part of the soundtrack of 2022. Something ethereal and poignant in the Norwegian singer’s voice feels …

This Corrosion

I suspect that any impressionable young person who caught the Sisters of Mercy on MTV (presumably at 2 a.m.) would have instantly become a goth. Maybe Andrew Eldritch and Patricia Morrison didn’t introduce the aesthetic, but they presented it in its highest form, and helped …