Susan Whitall

It Had to Happen James McMurtry (Sugar Hill Records) In 1995 two songs came out that were sharp expressions of the burden that the freewheeling Sixties left its children: the Charlie Sexton Sextet's "Plain Bad Luck and Innocent Mistakes" and James McMurtry's "Fuller Brush Man." McMurtry continues to wrestle with...

If you could genetically engineer the perfect human female to interpret the decadent Twenties-era cabaret music of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, you would probably come up with Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull, whose fresh blond beauty as a Sixties convent-girl-turned-pop-princess has since given way to a burnished, worldly, hard-edged appeal, has...

The news that there's a new Van Morrison album out should be thrilling. But for some of us there have been so many Morrison discs in the last year alone that it's a bit anticlimactic. And if anyone mentions that Ronnie Scott or that Georgie Fame is on the album,...

Rock music hasn't traditionally been the musical genre that best expresses vulnerability. Teenage angst maybe; romantic loss certainly. But that frightening revelation that usually comes well after adolescence -- that nudge from the universe that lets you know you won't live forever and, by the way, you're on borrowed time...

Utah Phillips and Ani Difranco The Past Didn't Go Anywhere (Righteous Babe) On "Bridges," Utah Phillips intones: "I have a friend, a good folksinger and song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, 'You always sing about the past. You can't live in the past, you know.'...