Archive for April, 2011
India.Arie
Part of the experience of traveling to Africa reaffirmed for me why I do my music — with the intent to spread love and healing and upliftment and education and all that through music. I formulated a mission statement after the Grammy’s because I was like, “I don’t ever want to forget why I do […]
Nick Lowe
I don’t actually like rock music. I like rock ’n’ roll music. I know it’s a debate that isn’t exactly original, but the “roll” part of rock ’n’ roll is the interesting part. Any dimwit can play rock music, but the roll part of it is altogether more difficult. It’s subtle, and it’s rare to […]
Matraca Berg: The Dreaming Fields
Matraca Berg’s first release in 14 years is a gorgeous and emotional journey that exemplifies her extraordinary talent.
Farewell, Phoebe Snow
Phoebe Snow left the earth this morning after complications from a brain hemorrhage she suffered in January, 2010. She was only 59. In that too-short life she helped define the ’70s singer-songwriter movement, and in 1972 gave us “Poetry Man,” the sultry Top 5 hit single that won her a Grammy nomination for Best New […]
Nancy Wilson
Thirty years after Dreamboat you’re not the same person, because you’ve gone through a few lifetimes in between. When you hear the album, Ann sounds like a 12-year-old compared to the more soulful way she sings now. No less range, just more experience. I could relate to the person I was when I co-wrote those […]
Chuck D.
My news source for songwriter is everything. It has to be. It’s not just anything—it’s everything. I can’t ignore what people are saying in the world or in the streets. I hate that term now, “the streets,” because it’s so commercial. You have to use the world. Your head has to be open. I was […]
Dr. John
Everybody in my neighborhood in the ’40s, they played pianos. That’s how people partied. They didn’t try the TV, the radio was OK, records was cool, but when people wanted to party, they got around a piano. My mother played piano, my sister played. I’ve been around a lot of piano all my life. When […]
Foster and Lloyd: It’s Already Tomorrow
Country-rock duo Foster & Lloyd released their first album in over 20 years, and it’s a reunion well worth the wait.
The Swell Season’s “Falling Slowly”
It is December 2005. Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová are at the Sono Records recording studio, a few miles outside Prague, to lay down a couple of songs for Czech filmmaker Jan Hřebejk’s movie Beauty in Trouble. Friends since 2001, they’ve been collaborating on a series of intimate, emotionally jagged ballads based around Irishman Hansard’s […]
Melissa Etheridge
When you enter into something like cancer, especially in the Midwest—my father died of cancer, my grandmother, my aunt—you don’t talk about it. When I got it, I was like, “OK now, wait a minute … ” There’s a lot of things that we put up as fear around us. We’re not going to talk […]