Category Indie Pop
KING SIZE TALENT: Charlie Chesterman, Scruffy Sweetheart of The Rodeo
Besides his exuberant rock & roll music — and he made a lot of it, thankfully for us, over the years — his easy laugh is what I most identified with Charlie Chesterman. The Iowa transplant who moved to Boston and made his mark as one of the city’s most beloved singer-songwriters, first with the essential local ’80s outfit Scruffy […]
GUIDED BY BOB: A Salty Salute to GBV’s Robert Pollard Who Turns 56 (which is less birthday candles than he’s made records)
A very Happy 56th Birthday to Robert Pollard of the long-running Dayton, Ohio rock band, Guided By Voices. Pollard is, at this point, one of the few indie-rock artists who’s always made me feel young. Not because he’s even that old, or his music or sensibility is old, mind you. Naw, it’s just that, when you’re […]
ELVES & ELEPHANTS FLY IN AN AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA: Neutral Milk Hotel Soars Again
The recent news that members of the once-vaunted Elephant Six musical collective — Neutral Milk Hotel and Elf Power, chief among them — are reuniting for a series of U.S. and international tour dates that will take them into 2014, brings back wonderful memories of the time when their alternately sun-splashed and dusk-toned hues of […]
DECIBELS TO DEFEAT DISEASE: Boston Rocker/Writer Amanda Nichols On How MS Made Her Stronger — And Louder!
Of all the stories I’ve written about the Boston music scene over the last 15 years, few have felt as feel-good satisfying as my feature about Amanda Nichols, a talented local rocker, music writer, and lovely soul who just happens to be afflicted with multiple sclerosis. With her husband Nick Blakey, likewise a talented local […]
DAYS OF DESERT DREAMS: Steve Wynn’s Syndicate of Sound
How do you live up to — or down, such as the case may be — a uniformly, universally recognized classic debut album that becomes the artistic barometer for everything you write, record, and release from that moment on? (The easy answer is, you don’t). Singer-songwriter Steve Wynn has had this unenviable task for more […]
VERMONT WOODSHEDDING AND THE AUTONOMY OF ASHMONT
One of the more enjoyable afternoons I’ve spent lost in a supermarket in Vermont, thanks to Ashmont Records co-founder and Pernice Brothers manager/band wrangler Joyce Linehan, who stole me away one Saturday to hang up north with the boys in the band as they worked on what would become the “Yours, Mine, & Ours” album. For the piece below, which […]
RPM: Jonathan Perry's Life in Analog 