Lovely, gentle new album from Clem Snide: “Oh Smokey.”
music
Low, “The Plan” (Can I hold it?)
Saturday, April 13, 2024
This rich new New Yorker piece on Alan Sparkhawk — about the death of his late wife and Low partner Mimi Parker and the music he’s been making since — sent me back to band’s incomparable catalogue. There was a stretch of months in 2003 when I’d started a new writing job at the Saint Louis Art …Year in Review: 2023
Saturday, December 30, 2023
Continuing a 23-year tradition of rounding up cultural highlights from the past 12 months, here’s a recap for 2023: 15 Books I Especially Loved This Year An Additional Batch I Enjoyed (That first hard-to-ID book is “Pentagram: Living By Design," which I had to scramble to procure …Fantastic interview on the Time Sensitive podcast with a writer I admire: “Jelani Cobb on 50 Years of Hip-Hop and the Future of Journalism.”
Rick Rubin, talking with Tyler Cowen, gets to the heart of what we lose as streaming music fans:
I’ll say the most difficult thing about it now is that all of it has a disposability that it didn’t have before. In the old days, you would buy a piece of music, you would own it, and you would be invested in that piece of music as yours. Now everything is available, which is fantastic and I love it. As a fan, I love it.
When something comes out by an artist that you love, it doesn’t have the same gravitas that it once had because it’s on this conveyor belt of music that’s always going by. Even the thing you love, you listen to it, but then there’s something new right behind it, coming right behind it, always something new coming right behind it. I don’t know how the music of today can get to the point of the canon of the music of the past based on that short term, the fact that the music goes by so quickly. Even the things we love, the shelf life is very short now.
In The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot explores the “melancholy grandeur” of Weyes Blood, my favorite new find of last year.
What a match: Remnick on Dylan.
For the generation that has listened to music only in earbuds, intimacy is the new punk rock.
Bono, speaking generally but also of Billie Eilish specifically, in an engaging NYT Magazine interview.
I’m just catching up with Björk’s podcast, Sonic Symobolism. One album per episode. Unsurprisngly, it’s excellent. On a few walks today I listened to a deep dive into the lush and intimate “Vespertine”, which she made after acquiring her first personal laptop. Loved this part:
And I still meet journalists today that always have this, ‘If it’s done with a computer it doesn’t have a soul’ — that argument. But it’s not about the tool. You cannot rely on a guitar to put the soul in a song. Or a violin. Or a laptop. If there is not soul in it, it’s because the human did not put it there.
"What's Good: Notes on Rap and Language”
Saturday, June 11, 2022
What a supremely fine and lovingly crafted book this was. Astute, admiring, and entertaining scrutiny of decades of rap lyrics. Huge kudos to author Daniel Levin Becker. A few especially great passages I drew circles around in my copy: I will go to my grave wishing my self-conscious rhetorical …Year in Review: 2021
Friday, December 31, 2021
Since 2000, I’ve had a year-end tradition of sharing my cultural highlights of the past 12 months. For this year’s post, I’ll first note the major life change I had in 2021. After eight years leading comms and marketing for the nonprofit conservancy Forest Park Forever, I re-entered the agency world …Nice line from Kelefa Sanneh’s “Major Labels”:
Unlike many virtuosos, Eddie Van Halen had a knack for making virtuosity seem like a good time, and all the early Van Halen albums sound as if they were recorded at house parties, with the party noise somehow edited out.
Jeff Tweedy’s new Substack newsletter, Starship Casual, is unsuprisingly great — at turns goofy and thoughtful, just like his books and interviews. Today’s post, “Heart of Glass (Rememories 5), was especially memorable. He’s a slyly penetrating artist.
Year in Review: 2020
Thursday, December 31, 2020
*Sylvie, sipping through a backyard quarantine concert by a friend and SLSO musician* Year 20 of my annual cultural-recap tradition was quite something. Thus far my family’s had good fortune amid the global pandemic, so we’re spending most of our time feeling grateful, yet exhausted, then grateful, …Weeknotes #02
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Odds and ends from the past few weeks: What a fun treat to see Forbes spotlight ListenForestPark.org, an audio microsite my team launched a few years ago as a side project. It’s found a new audience these days. Finished “Devs” on Hulu. Dug the style and performances; so-so on the ultimate substance. …Weeknotes #01
Sunday, April 19, 2020
Borrowing the structure of a few other online writers whose websites I enjoy (Paul Robert Lloyd and Mark Boulton, among others), I thought I’d start weekly low-key look-backs on the week, bullet list-style. Perhaps weekly is aspirational. We’ll see. Greatly enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s long New Yorker …Playing Haley Heynderickx
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Thanks to a chance moment listening to KDHX in the car, I’ve now had Haley Heynderickx on repeat — especially her record “I Need to Start a Garden,” and especially the song “Oom Sha La La.” Looked it up, and sure enough, there’s a Tiny Desk concert in the books as well, with that tune kicking …Tweedy + The Beasties
Saturday, August 24, 2019
Two relatively new music books I enjoyed this summer: Jeff Tweedy’s Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back:) A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. (honest, often funny; really enjoyed the sections about his sons) and the bluntly titled Beastie Boys Book (their mischief has been carried over to …Remnick on Buddy Guy and the Blues
Sunday, March 24, 2019
While not personally a blues guy, I loved every paragraph of David Remnick’s terrific New Yorker feature exploring Buddy Guy’s long career, the change of blues’s place in culture and what the future holds, if anything, for the genre as Guy’s been playing it. Toward the end of the piece, Remnick …“Will Oldham: Unmasked” — For GQ, Alex Pappademas gets unusual access to one of my favorite songwriters.
Our house suddenly feels warmer with the recent arrival of this 1963 Wurlitzer Spinet. Props to the kind folks at [http://www.jacksonpianos.com](Jackson Pianos).
Cultural Notes: January 2018
Sunday, February 4, 2018
With a nod to Kottke's monthly "Media Diet" posts, I'm experimenting this year with short monthly recaps of interesting things I've read, watched or listened to. (This is as much for myself, as noting what I took in can help me better recall it.) Read Paula Scher: Works — Terrific, from …Tim Carmody on Bill Callahan
Friday, November 3, 2017
With this terrific Kottke.org guest post — “Bill Callahan, the only sad man worth loving” — Carmody had me immediately returning to the handful of albums I own. (As Carmody points out, Callahan’s not on Spotify, my own daily streaming service: “This means his legacy risks …When Lapham Played Beethoven for Monk
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Thanks to a surprise purchase by my wife, I’ve been enjoying the new issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, which takes music as its cover-to-cover subject. I’ve enjoyed reading Lapham for years, but hadn’t known that he’d studied piano as a youth, or that he’d spent time …Nick Paumgarten Profiles St. Vincent
Monday, September 4, 2017
Following his exceptional profile of Father John Misty, Paumgarten goes deep with the intriguing, shrewd and self-aware St. Vincent: When she listens to a playback, she often buries her head in her arms, as though she can hardly bear to hear herself, but, really, it’s just her way of listening …Fascinating, entertaining profile of Father John Misty in The New Yorker.
Demo of Low’s “Will the Night.". Among the most beautiful three minutes of music I know.
Song Exploder
Saturday, April 8, 2017
Where have I been to miss this marvelous podcast for its first 101 episodes? Hrishikesh Hirway interviews musicians and asks them to break down a single song, which we hear in bits … and bits … and then in its entirety. It’s a fantastic idea executed with great polish, …Jack White's World
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Insightful and entertaining New Yorker profile by Alec Wilkinson. I can still vividly recall seeing the White Stripes at The Pageant in 2002, a blazing tricolor duo that owned that room from start to finish."Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl"
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Really enjoyed Carrie Brownstein’s impressive, observant, terrifically titled memoir.