Finding a Home with Tom Waits
When the light hits the music just right, Tom Waits’ body of work unlocks and reveals itself: to be at home anywhere is to be at home nowhere at all.
All Things Reconsidered
Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ Subverts Being Trapped in a Glass Castle
For her 1989 album, Taylor Swift wrote breakup songs that cleverly conveyed to fans she had personal freedom even from within her glass castle.
All Things Reconsidered/Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Film/Film Feature/Pop Past/Pop Past Film
Wherever You Go, There You Are: ‘Interstellar’ at 10 Resonates
Although it aims to portray humanity’s future, sci-fi film Interstellar‘s message – that our greatest asset and liability is ourselves – resonates in our times.
The Blood Brothers’ ‘Crimes’ Retains Its Malevolent Relevance
The Blood Brothers Crimes is a pitch-black satire and critique of its time showing how little has changed. It would be depressing if the music weren’t thrilling.
The Dismemberment Plan’s Pre-millennial Tension: ‘Emergency & I’ at 25
Post-punk band the Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I is a landmark about loneliness, confusion, and isolation and how to bounce back from them.
How Bob Dylan Reinvented the Blues Highway for Contemporary America
Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” captures America at the peak of the civil rights struggle when African Americans were forced to fight for a country that had left them impoverished and disenfranchised.
The Style Council’s Café Bleu and David Sylvian’s Brilliant Trees at 40
With Café Bleu and Brilliant Trees, Paul Weller and David Sylvian looked forward to jazz as a renewed source of inspiration; but was their pop music still pop?
Arcade Fire’s ‘Funeral’ Still Amazes As a Conceptual Statement
On Funeral, Arcade Fire found catharsis in music while processing grief for the loss of loved ones. As a result, they shifted the course of indie rock.
Paul McCartney’s Beautiful Tribute to Lovely Linda McCartney
When Paul McCartney lost Linda McCartney in 1998, he described his grief as all-consuming, grief that haunts her sole solo studio album, ‘Wide Prairie’.
Elvis Costello’s ‘Almost Blue’ Was Rescued by Its Bonus Tracks… for a While
The release history of Elvis Costello’s Almost Blue provides a framework for examining how the delivery of recorded music can relate to our experience of it.
Skank’s Postmodern ‘Calango’ Keeps Trippin’ at 30
Skank’s Calango mixes Jamaican reggae, Latin percussion, keyboards, and guitars into a blend that sounds very much from Brazil and yet completely alien.
Everything Feels Alright: The Promise Ring’s ‘Very Emergency’
The Promise Ring’s Very Emergency succeeds by subverting expectations but delivering ten nuggets of power pop and a rebuke of the emerging emo tropes.