I’ve always felt strongly attuned to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous short story, “Ethan Brand.” The title character forsakes his life to search the world for the unpardonable sin. He finds it. It ends badly for him. The nature of the sin?

He remembered with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and, however desecrated, still to be held sacred by a brother; Full story »

When we’re kids we like the damnedest things, don’t we? There was a moment, I guess during the summer of 1972, when my two favorite songs were the Jackson 5′s “Rockin’ Robin”…

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So many places I haven’t been, so many places I want to go, so many songs about places. But I guess the place I haven’t been that I want to see the most is Scotland.

My favorite Scottish artist is Fish. And as he sings here, when he was still with Marillion, he was born “with a heart of Lothian.”

Perhaps I was, too, just a bit… Full story »

And I’m back from several days of packing and moving, just in time to find this emotional and spiritual landmine waiting for me. [sigh]

When you’re a kid in America, nothing is as tangibly magical as Christmas. The excitement, the presents, the lights, the sheer spectacle of the entire world gone shimmery. And nothing is more special than family, the entire family gathered together, the food, the sense of absolute belonging. You are home, in every way it is possible to be home. Or at least that’s how it was for me. Full story »

Every movie has a soundtrack. And let’s be honest – most of them are as unmemorable as … well, as the movies themselves. At its best, though, the music captures the spiritual essence of the auteur‘s vision, interacting with the film in ways that are simply transcendent. One plus one equals infinity, and it’s impossible to ever conceive of song and scene independently again.

There are three such instances that stand out in my memory, and they run the gamut from ridiculous to sublime. Rather than picking one, let’s consider all three. Full story »

Sweet hell, what was I thinking when I came up with this entry I mean, it isn’t that I can’t think of songs, it’s just that there are several people I consider best friends: people who have been close to me at various points in my life, people I have relied on, shared good times, survived the bad. People whose commitment to ing me as I am has shaped me, improved me, and perhaps even saved me, because the truth is that there have been some very, very dark nights in my life.

I guess I could come up with a song that reminds me of each one, but we might be here awhile trying to do them all justice. Full story »

I imagine most of us have loved. And lost. I also imagine that most of us look back, on occasion, and wonder what the hell we were thinking.

Some years ago I made what I still regard as the worst mistake of my life. When it went to hell it didn’t destroy the whole world, it didn’t leave me any more destitute than I was already, it didn’t put me in rehab, and in truth I recovered quicker than I had any right to. But this was a relationship that I should never have gotten into, and doing so involved me selling out just about every principle that was important to me. I betrayed myself, my values, and thank all the gods that my grandparents, who raised me to be a better man, weren’t alive to see the shame I rained down on us. Full story »

In a way, this is kind of a trick question. If you’re doing it right, a song doesn’t last nearly long enough. So when I was creating 30-Day Song Challenge, the Sequel, maybe I should have designated day 13 for your favorite make-out album.

In any case, this may be the single easiest day of either the original challenge or the sequel, because there is one CD that stands alone at the top of Make-Out Mountain: Avalon, by Roxy Music. Full story »

If you’ve been following the series, you may have noticed that instead of simply offering up a song that fits the criteria (“a song you love from the ’00s”), I’m trying to write about songs that are in some way definitive. Maybe it was something that typified a dominant movement, or perhaps it was a tune that marked an important point in my personal narrative. Whatever, I’ve been trying to write a series not just about songs, but about significant songs. And that’s what I’m going to keep doing, starting right now. Full story »

For a long time – basically, from the British Invasion through the end of the ’80s – there was a great deal of shared history between the rock of America and the UK. What was happening on one side of the pond made its way in short order to the other side, and this was generally a good thing.

But then the 1990s rolled around and the exchange program collapsed seemingly overnight. Over here we had Grunge, second-wave Punk, Alternative, Industrial, Jam bands and Hootie & the Motherfucking Blowfish. Full story »

I’ve always thought that Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town” was just about as perfect a pop song as it is possible to write. The story captivates. The tune itself is so intuitive that it feels like it has been inside me my whole life, waiting for an artist to set it free. As for the performance and production, it is impossible to imagine a single, minute addition, subtraction or alteration that wouldn’t lessen the song’s effect.

If ever there has been a greater one-hit wonder I don’t know who it was, and it’s hard not to feel bad for the band. Full story »

Jeffrey Dean Foster and Friends

Review – Concert Performance: An Evening with Jeffrey Dean Foster and Friends featuring Special Guests Greg Humphreys, Sam Frazier and Snüzz (Britt Harper Uzzell). April 29th, 2011. Hanes Brands Theater, Winston-Salem, NC. Photo Credit: Merch Mike.

As we become a distributed culture, one of the things that, instead of being eviscerated as I’d once hoped, has become perhaps more pronounced is the “siloing” of artists. Writers, visual artists – and especially, musicians – get categorized by some aspect of their artistic vision that more often than not is either idiosyncratic to the categorizer or, worse, convenient for “marketing.” Full story »

I remember a conversation with an old girlfriend back in the late 1990s. We were talking about the sounds of the times, I guess you’d say, and I commented that the decade had been dominated by a lot of pretty rebellious music. Grunge, Punk, Industrial – everybody was well and truly pissed off, it seemed. The music of my youth hadn’t been terribly revolutionary by comparison, I thought.

This particular girlfriend turned out to be wrong about quite a lot before all was said and done, but she made a very good point that I’ve never forgotten. Full story »

I’ve never much cared for the musical genre broadly known as Americana, and lately I’ve been thinking about why this is. I suppose it’s acceptable to say hey, I’ve listened to a lot of these artists and most of them just kinda bore me, but that seems unsatisfactory for a guy who thinks about music like I do.

After some reflection, I think it comes down to a couple of issues. The first one, I admit right up front, is objectively unfair of me, but there is a part of me that associates Americana with the Baby Boomers, and in particular sees it as a late, faint attempt by the post-Reagan iteration of the cohort to recapture lost authenticity. Full story »

I know I threatened yesterday to play some more Sam Cooke for my 1960s entry, but I’m trying to spread the love around and prop as many great artists as I can, so how about some Van Morrison instead?

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I’ve always been convinced that the greatest R&B singer who ever lived was Sam Cooke. I know, that’s a massive claim and there are plenty of Otis fans (and Aretha fans, and fans of many other incredible artists) who’ll argue the point. And hey, if they do, then I can take pride in the fact that I started a great argument.

The point is that I pretty much worship Sam Cooke. Most of his greatest work came in the ’60s, but he had several hits in the late 1950s, too. Full story »

My guess is that “Radar Love” is going to get a lot of love in this category, and it’s easy to understand why. Still, as I have explained before, I’m a simply country boy.

So let’s see how many dueling lead guitarists Molly Hatchet can line up across the front of the stage for the solo to “Flirtin’ with Disaster.”

Happy Saturday. Y’all drive safe now, y’hear? Full story »

The summer of 1986 has lodged itself in the pleasure centers of my brain, although a hard look at the details makes me wonder why. Yeah, I was working in what passed for a cool job for a kid who’d recently graduated from college (copy and production manager at a rock radio station, albeit one that paid me less than $13,000 a year), and maybe that’s most of it. I remember lots of sunny weather, pool parties, incredible music, and I remember Karen, the staggeringly beautiful woman that I dated for awhile. Tall, lean, a study in elegance with a quiet smile that could have lit every stage on Broadway. Full story »

Yesterday’s song was tough, but today? This is easy. There are a lot of great sunny day songs out there, but I don’t know that anybody has ever quite captured the magic like Scot Sax. So dial up the smiles, folks – here’s Bachelor Number One and “I Am the Summertime.”

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I didn’t realize how hard this one was going to be when I slotted it into the challenge. I just spent the last hour and a half sifting through my iTunes, playing, sampling, searching. Checking to see what was available on YouTube. Deciding, undeciding. So many choices – The Samples, Garbage, Queensryche, REM, Van Morrison, Peter Gabriel, The Pinetops, on and on and on.

I finally settled here, with Jets Overhead, a band I think may be the best of our current generation. Full story »