Category Essays
THE WAY HE WAS: Robert Redford 1936-2025
There was was something essential and intrinsic to Robert Redford’s being that lent his characters a magnetic, down-to-earth humanity; a knowing, watchful intelligence that imbued them with a kind of innate self-possession that offset the undeniably bright wattage of that Redford grin.
SEPARATING THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF: A Goodbye and a Reclamation
This is a preface, and a piece, I never thought I’d share. Here’s the press kit band bio I was commissioned to write by Wheat’s short-lived Rhode Island-based label Shorebird — more on them in a minute — back in 2014. It was an undertaking that was to coincide with both the label’s reissue of […]
Memories of Steve Morse (1948-2024): Hobnobbing with Bono, Saving the Stones (or, at least, my review), and House Party Heinekens
How many people can boast about having Bono (a rock star so famous he only needs one name) attend their retirement party? For Boston Globe scribe Steve Morse, a music critic at least as legendary as a few of the star-powered folks he wrote about over the course of five decades, that kind of happenstance […]
Meditations On Memory and a Short (Story) Announcement
To my “RPM: Life In Analog” subscribers, frequent or occasional readers of my writing, or anyone who may have stumbled upon this page and decided to have a look around, I’m delighted to report that my memoir piece, “The Calm Hiss of Bided Time,” has been published in the new issue of the literary journal, […]
IT WAS 60 YEARS AGO TODAY, THE BAND TAUGHT THE WORLD TO PLAY: Reflections on Getting The Beatles Bug A Decade After Feb. 9, 1964
Friday marked the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ seismic, game-changing appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, on February 9, 1964. I wasn’t old enough to have seen or remembered it, being just two months old at the time. But on second thought, maybe my parents did watch the Sullivan show that evening with me in […]
THE SWEET SOUNDS OF HEAVEN: Rolling Home With Hackney Diamonds
I was driving home early one Friday morning through the back roads of Pennsylvania, listening to rock ‘n’ roll music on the niche-specific Sirius radio station, when a voice came on and said, “I hear the sweet sounds of heaven …” Which, to my ears, was akin in spirit to “You know, you always have […]
A LION, A COBRA, A PHOENIX FROM THE FLAME: Sinead O’Connor (1966-2023)
When my wife and I watched the superb 2022 Sinead O’Connor documentary, “Nothing Compares,” a month or so ago, my ultimate takeaway — besides being struck, again, by Sinead’s singularly arresting voice, artistic fearlessness, and political courage in speaking truth to power — was this: She was right about pretty much everything she spoke out […]
ONE MORE SONG THE RADIO WON’T LIKE: Kathleen Edwards and the Twenty Year Success of ‘Failer’
It’s a bit surreal for me to believe “Failer,” the effortlessly self-possessed and polished debut album by Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards, turned twenty this year. I won’t say it seems only yesterday that I first heard the record, and immediately wanted to talk to the talented person behind it. Or that, interview secured, my cat […]
LITTLE DITTY ‘BOUT JACK & DIANE: Holding On To Sixteen Forty Years Later
Forty years ago, one of the big hits of the day during my senior year of high school was, for better or worse, “Jack & Diane” by John Cougar (the Mellencamp moniker was still a few years away). It was a ubiquitous soundtrack playing everywhere on any given day — outside at my school’s parking lot, cranking from cars and boom boxes, and emanating across the football field.
BACK TO THE FUTURE: Sno-Cone Songs, Sherbert Pants, and other Fashion Faux Pas of the ’80s Stones
Funny how back at the dawn of the ’80s, the punks, goth kids, and New Wavers thought the Stones were dinosaurs lumbering from a prehistoric age, lumbering toward the conclusion of their two-decade run after having outlasted everyone else from the black-and-white TV generation. Little did any of us know that unlike the T. Rex — they even outlasted him — the beasts of burden weren’t even at the halfway mark.
RPM: Jonathan Perry's Life in Analog 