Category Features
RADIO CITY’S TRANSMISSIONS AT 50 AND BEYOND: A chat with Big Star’s co-founder/drummer Jody Stephens
In the more than half a century since their inception, demise, and rebirth, the Memphis-bred rock band Big Star have been revered as everything from anachronistic power pop avatars to iconoclastic cult legends making introverted music in an extroverted era. So iconoclastic were they, in fact, that Big Star actually had to break up to […]
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 […]
FROM PANTHERS TO POT TO POETRY: John Sinclair’s Life In Song and Sentences
I was saddened to hear of the passing this week of the writer, blues historian, political activist, and marijuana advocate John Sinclair, at the age of 82. I had the pleasure of interviewing Sinclair, who decades earlier managed the seminal Detroit rock ‘n’ roll combo the MC5 and founded the anti-racist White Panther Party, back […]
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 […]
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 […]
BROTHERS IN AMPS: The Clean’s Kilgours of Kiwi (In Memory of Hamish Kilgour, 1957-2022)
Apologies if the original post of this piece contained text and/or formatting glitches that made it difficult/impossible to read, er, cleanly. Here is the (hopefully) corrected version. Aside from a title tweak, I’ve decided to forego replacing or replicating the video bells and whistles of the original post and present the text straight-up as a companion to the faulty original. I invite you to give it another go with my thanks. Again, sorry the HAL 3000 has decided to get drunk and insubordinate. Now, where the hell is the plug and outlet to that bleary red eye of his?
BROTHERS IN AMPS: The Clean’s Hamish & David Kilgour
The Clean (L-R): Drummer-singer Hamish Kilgour, guitarist-singer David Kilgour, bassist Robert Scott. Sad news reached us last week when we learned that Hamish Kilgour, co-founding member (along with his brother David) of the seminal New Zealand band The Clean, was discovered dead at age 65 at Christchurch, after going missing for more than a week, […]
‘I NEVER MEANT TO BE A SINGER’: REMEMBERING DETROIT COBRAS’ VOCAL POWERHOUSE RACHEL NAGY
“Dear friends, family and fans, It is with a heavy heart and great sadness that we announce the loss of our beloved friend and musical colleague, Rachel Lee Nagy. There are no words to fully articulate our grief as we remember a life cut short, still vital and inspirational to all who knew and loved […]
RPM: Jonathan Perry's Life in Analog 