First came the name. “We actually had the name even before we dared to put a band together and play live,” says singer Michael Roderick about Maria, the rock group he founded with childhood pal Paul Molina. It may seem as if they’re commemorating the Virgin Mary’s Spanish nombre or…
There are many fine lines that all artists and would-be contenders must walk. There’s clever and stupid. There’s sincere and sentimental. There’s influential and influenced. The list is long, and achieving an authentic balance is always more instinctual than learned. Artistry is the illusion that something mundane can walk for…
The smart, unflashy white guitar rock known as emo has become the faceless new face of indie, and, in the form of its sophomore effort, Four Cornered Night, genre standard-bearer Jets to Brazil has released the music’s most high-profile album. Throughout the record’s first five songs, Four Cornered Night sounds…
The Beach Boys did make more than just one great album — speaking of Pet Sounds of course — before they became an oldies-circuit cliché and a mere job for Mike Love. This two-for-one re-release of Sunflower and Surf’s Up, from 1970 and 1971 respectively, proves that. With this release…
Some bands benefit from the box-set treatment and some don’t. Falling into the latter category is Little Feat, on Rhino’s Hotcakes & Outtakes: 30 Years of Little Feat. The box takes four compact discs, eighty-two tracks, and five hours to prove that the band’s best work was done on its…
It’s only 9:00 a.m., but Al Sparhawk is wide awake. Such is life when you’re the father of a six-month-old. As young Hollis Mae Sparhawk lets out an exuberant squawk and her dad gushes on and on about the joys of fatherhood, it’s clear the elder Sparhawk is no ordinary…
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…
On radio the legends of country music might as well be dead and buried. In the recording studio, though, many of that genre’s greatest singers are proving that traditional country music is still very much alive. And this is traditional country in the most vital sense of the word: It…
Is this the home of Rebert Harris?” I asked anxiously. The woman who had answered the phone said yes. “Rebert Harris of the Soul Stirrers?” Yes, she said again. I told her I was writing a story on the legendary gospel quartet from Trinity, Texas, and I wondered if I…
I can’t tell anecdotes,” says Julieta Venegas, between bites of a take-out sandwich in an empty hallway at the Latin Alternative Music Conference (LAMC) in New York City this past August. “I’m no good at it,” she continues. “I have to paint situations.” On her celebrated sophomore release, Bueninvento (Goodinvention),…
People never forget where they were when Kennedy was shot. Or John Lennon. Or the first time they saw the Beatles or the Ramones or Nirvana — on TV. Certain momentous occasions never leave us. For me, I’d add the first time I heard Nick Drake coming out of my…
It shouldn’t be this easy to get Peter Frampton on the phone, but it is: A publicist for DreamWorks Pictures calls, asks if you’re interested in talking to the man, and five days later, he’s on the other end of the line at the appointed time. Twenty-four years ago, such…
It’s easy to predict which songs will receive the most attention on If I Could Only Fly, the new Merle Haggard album being distributed by the indie-punk label Epitaph. In the manner of the black-and-white, wrinkle-centric photo that introduces the album (à la Johnny Cash at American), it’ll be the…
These are some of John Lee Hooker’s earliest recordings, probably his second recording session ever, but one can never be sure given the numerous labels he recorded for early in his career. This is certainly the first time that all twenty of his recordings for the Savoy label have been…
When Fito Paez arrived in the United States for the first time in 1989, the police at the airport gave him a thorough workover. “I didn’t have the right look to get in,” remembers the gangly, long-haired singer currently in Miami to record a new disc. Laughing, he adds, “I…
Don Henley’s massive 1989 hit “The End of the Innocence” was a complex piece of songcraft that reminds me of the kind of portraiture that Paul Simon writes on a good day. Paced at a crawl, with co-writer Bruce Hornsby’s immediately recognizable keyboards underpinning the melancholy sentiment of the lyric,…
The cynic won’t care, the skeptic won’t understand, and the true believer will be overwhelmed: Nearly 30 years to the day of Jimi Hendrix’s death, here come 56 more unreleased-unavailable-unattainable tracks from a man more prolific in death than in life. Three studio albums before his death, three hundred or…
After a decade knocking around in relative anonymity with the indie in-crowd, Stephin Merritt lately has joined the ranks of pop music’s who’s who. The superlatives garnered by his band the Magnetic Fields’ one-of-a-kind, three-CD musical revue 69 Love Songs have turned him into something of an alterna-celebrity. For his…
Andre Williams began his musical career as a novelty-tune R&B crooner in Detroit during the Fifties, penning and singing songs such as “Bacon Fat,” “Jail Bait,” and “The Greasy Chicken.” He went on to more songwriting and producing, working for Berry Gordy at Motown during its heyday, but a fondness…
Launching the first annual Latin Grammys at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on September 13, the Latin Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (LARAS) took no risks. Instead the first-ever predominantly Spanish-language broadcast on a major U.S. television network tailored Latin sounds to prevailing U.S. pop tastes. Nothing ventured;…
It’s no longer news to hear the British are coming. It should, however, give pause to American acts to learn that once again those dastardly redcoats have found a way to hand us our lunch on an old-time rock and roll commemorative platter. We may not think much of our…
The variety of blues lined up for this year’s B.B. King Blues and Barbecue Festival makes for an exciting bill. Susan Tedeschi opens the show as an up-and-coming, third-generation blues singer and guitarist from Boston, Massachusetts, about as far out of the Mississippi Delta as she could hail. Yet with…
