“New album drops on Thursday!” “[Band X] dropped their hit first album in 2016!” When did the word “drop” become the de facto term that music writers choose to refer to an album release date? In the last couple of years, it’s become so overused – even by otherwise good writers. I get that there…
Category: Reading lounge
“Rocket Man”, gnomes and kids on Mars
As I wrote about in a recent post, the music of 1972 seems to be appearing with regularity in my life lately. I was at my local health food store last week and Elton John’s “Rocket Man” (from his 1972 Honkey Chateau album) was playing on the in-store sound system. As I walked through the…
Fuzzed and Rumbling: The Courtneys
Back in the 70’s it wasn’t uncommon for the average hairy rock band to emblazon phrases like “Made to be played LOUD!” on their record sleeves. That practice, thankfully, seems to have disappeared over time. But, if there’s any current music that warrants that sentiment, it’s the music made by Vancouver’s the Courtneys. A power…
The Naturalization of Foreigner
When I was in 6th grade, my class was given the assignment of choosing our favorite songs and creating visual representations of those songs with photos and/or drawings and paintings. This was before the computer age, so you basically had 25 kids raiding their parents’ and neighbors’ magazine collections to cut out pictures. In some…
Feeling 1972
“She was feeling 1972 / Grooving to a Carole King tune…” Back in 2003, Josh Rouse did a whole album aiming to evoke the spirit of 1972. And why not? It was an interesting year, musically speaking. I recently noticed that I’ve purchased a lot of music produced in 1972 in the last few months….
2016: Sixteen Music Things I Loved this Year
In some ways, 2016 was a grim year. A lot of great musicians died, there was divisive political turmoil in the U.S., the environment continued to take a beating worldwide (including up the road from me where even more subdivisions replace the last sections of woods and farms in the area), and the media got…
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