Alejandro Escovedo: “Real Animal”

Alejandro Escovedo’s last studio album, The Boxing Mirror, was his first project following a nearly-lethal bout of Hepatitis C, and, accordingly, the album sounded just the way Escovedo’s fans expected it would-brave, ambitious, triumphant. Sure, it mostly avoided the sorts of navel-gazing and musings on mortality that brushes with death tend to provoke in artists, [...]

Shearwater: “Rook”

Jonathan Meiburg is an ornithologist–a guy who studies birds–though any geekiness that might imply stands in sharp contrast to the grace and poise he displays as the frontman and composer for indie rock outfit Shearwater. Still, read almost any interview with the guy and it becomes clear that, semi-retired though he may be, his day [...]

PSA: Ron Sexsmith

Over the weekend I heard from my good pal David Kennedy, who alerted me to the fact that he had received his shipping notification for the new Ron Sexsmith album– and would you believe what arrived in my mailbox just a few hours later? In other words: If you order the album now from the [...]

On Repeat: Coldplay

No one likes being wrong, and having to admit you were wrong is even worse, but there’s at least one exception that that rule: When it comes to music, it’s not a frustration or an embarrassment, but, rather, a true joy when something great comes from an unexpected source. And I’ll be the first to [...]

2007 Review Archive

Just a quick note to say that I’m in the process of uploading some older reviews on to the site, as well as working on several new ones to post next week. As of this morning, most of my reviews of albums released in 2007 are online (the good ones, anyway); I filed them under [...]

Emmylou Harris: “All I Intended to Be”

Emmylou Harris offers an explanation of her new album’s title in the thank-you section of the liner notes, expressing her gratitude to the musicians who play on the record for “helping me to be all I ever intended-a singer of songs, a writer of songs, and a strummer of a few chords…” It’s a fitting [...]

Film Break: “WALL*E”

Just a quick break from regular programming to note that my review of WALL*E– the most glorious and remarkable film of the year thus far– is up at CT Movies.

Peter Gabriel & Friends: “Big Blue Ball”

No one has done more to bring third-world music to Western audiences than Peter Gabriel, and no one has done it with a greater sense of artistry and creative synthesis. Even on his very earliest solo albums, Gabriel was blending ethnic instruments and rhythms with his finely-honed instincts as a pop songwriter and as a [...]

On Repeat: “The Gardner”

A song so good, I just had to post it again.

Coldplay: “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends”

More than almost any other act in 2008, Coldplay isn’t really a band so much as a brand– or at least that’s how it feels sometimes. It’s not their craft, or even their songs, that gets them the most attention, but their comforting reliability, the fact that, for three albums straight, they’ve traded in the [...]