Warm and Cool: Thoughts on Television’s Tom Verlaine (1949-2023)
Tom Verlaine’s death symbolizes the continued denouement of a certain period of New York City history, a time when the word “bohemian” still held some meaning.
Music Features
Hip-Hop Matters: The Best Hip-Hop of January 2023
The best hip-hop of January focuses on albums from underground veterans, viral upstarts, and hyper-productive modern masters.
Johnny Cash’s ‘American IV’: A Farewell to the Man in Black
Johnny Cash’s American IV: The Man Comes Around was the final album released while alive, and contains some of Cash’s best and most crucial work.
JazzMatters: The Best New Jazz of January 2023
Will Layman rounds up the best new jazz albums and cocoons with jazz documentaries, Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues and Ron Carter: Finding the Right Notes.
Post-Punk Tree of Life: Twin Tribes and Black Swan Lane Sustain the Genre
Post-punk bands Twin Tribes and Black Swan Lane hail from the sunny climes of the southwestern and southeastern US, and yet sonically mirror the late ’70s/early ’80s post-punk from the rain-sodden UK.
All Things Reconsidered/Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Interviews/Music/Music Features/Pop Past
Revisiting Cotton Mather’s Classic ‘Kontiki’ 25 Years on with Robert Harrison
Cotton Mather’s Kontiki sports almost relentless invention, vitality, toughness, brightness, and irrepressible exuberance—a powder keg full of the joy of making music.
The 10 Heaviest Nirvana Songs
We have compiled ten tracks from Nirvana’s small yet monumentally impactful discography to form the heaviest Nirvana mixtape of them all.
Carly Simon’s ‘No Secrets’ Created the Bond We Feel with Singer-Songwriter Music
Carly Simon’s No Secrets established what’s known as the “Carly Simon Principle”: the bond we feel with singer-songwriter music and how fans map their own meaning onto popular songs.
The 10 Best Warren Zevon Lyrics
With Warren Zevon’s acerbic, graceful, and macabre wit still lingering long after his death, we look back on his most lasting lyrical contributions.
The 10 Best Nirvana Songs
Nirvana’s songs melded heavy riffs, captivating pop hooks, dynamic verse/chorus shifts, and soul-scarred catharsis into the most notable rock of the 1990s.
Ellen McIlwaine Made Music For ‘We the People’ 50 Years Ago
By combining multiple styles, playing techniques, and cultural influences, Ellen McIlwaine challenged notions of genre classification and embraced music as a “universal language”.
Call for Papers: All Things Reconsidered – February/March 2023
We are seeking essays for our February and March 2023 All Things Reconsidered series. These essays analyze classic albums in music history.
