John Floyd

R.L. Burnside Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down Fat Possum Back in the late Sixties, Marshall Chess, the son of Chess Records co-founder Leonard Chess, made some of the most jive-ass albums in the blues lexicon. The young Marshall paired the label's greatest artists, among them Muddy Waters, Howlin'...

Ornette Coleman is the kind of artist trad-jazz idiots like Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, and the editors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz love to hate. Since his foundation-shattering debut in 1958 with the aptly named Something Else!!!!, the saxophone genius has scorched a singular path through modern jazz; he's...

Like a zombie in a shopping mall, impervious to the bullets fired at its heart by the desperate and weary, the tribute album continues to stomp across the landmarks of rock, pop, and soul, destroying all in its soulless, heartless path to destruction. The latest victim is Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen's...

Watch any fairly recent interview clips with Brian Wilson, and you're faced with a very good example of therapy gone horribly forever wrong. A jittery knot of unsettled nerves and body ticks, mush-mouthed and seemingly mush-brained, Wilson clearly is damaged in a way that makes candidly accessing his work feel...

It's seldom a good thing when songwriters decide to indulge their literary pretensions and try to set the great American novel to music. For every Paul Kelly, who did a bang-up job back in 1989 with his interpretation of Raymond Carver's So Much Water So Close to Home, there's a...