A Rockstar in Rwanda: Reflections from The Fray's Isaac Slade

Forty-thousand people were staring at me, and the second song wasn’t starting. We were opening for U2 in our Denver hometown stadium last summer. We finished our first song of the set and after the cheering stopped, I realized something was wrong.  read more

Are novels boring? In Defense of An Art Form

Even in an age when fiction must compete with blogs and Facebook and tweets and God knows whatever else is about to take over, novels continue to amaze and astound and entertain me, in all of their various forms and setting and styles. One of the latest styles, however, starts to worry me, posing questions about exactly what a novel is and whether it still excites a shrinking coterie of fiction readers.  read more

What Happened to the American Protest Song?

Quick—name a song whose lyrics protest the war in Afghanistan. Got anything? Now try Iraq. Did you get one? Two? Still nothing? You wouldn’t be alone. In the Vietnam era, the protest song was an institution. Today, it’s a rarity; even an oddity. What changed?  read more

From the Vault: John Lennon & Yoko Ono, 1969

Paste has access to a rich archive of historic audio interviews from a variety of sources. Many of these interviews have never existed in text form. Our new From the Vault series will publish a different interview each week from our favorite rock ’n’ roll icons. We begin with John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous Bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel on May 26, 1969.   read more

Singer/Songwriter: Separated by More Than a Slash

The Curmudgeon: Questioning Assumptions in Popular Music Rodney Crowell once described his career to me like this: “I developed quickly as a songwriter, slowly but surely as a producer, but the last thing that came into focus was the performing.” What struck me was the distinction he made between singing and songwriting, as if the two activities were so different that they needed to be considered separately. He made me realize that the slash in the middle of the phrase, “singer/songwriter,” is the most tenuous, unexamined, over-hyped piece of punctuation in American music. The folk-music and Americana scenes operate...  read more

Sherlock: Why It’s The Best Show on TV

The greatness of Community, Archer, Game of Thrones and Mad Men notwithstanding, there’s only one that combines entertainment, intelligence, humor, and seamless narrative to snatch the title of Best Show on Television. Sherlock is the only contender.  read more

Witty Britain: Why are British music legends funnier than Americans?

Steven Patrick Morrissey has always been a difficult man to read. As such, it’s probably a futile endeavor to speculate about his motives for writing “Frankly, Mr. Shankly.” The song, a thinly veiled ode to a despised real-life record executive, is full of invective and highly personal insults. It’s also incredibly funny. Take this couplet, where he strikes a blow at his target’s artistic pretensions: Oh, I didn’t realize that you wrote poetry I didn’t realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry, Mr. Shankly Later, lamenting the shallowness of his own life, Morrissey shows that he’s clearly not afraid to...  read more

A Beginner's Guide To Enjoying French Film

In certain corners, admitting a fondness for French film is tantamount to saying you’ll only eat caviar for breakfast, or that you can’t leave the house wearing anything but silk underwear.  read more

The 10 Best and 10 Worst New Band Names of 2011

A band name is about as important, I think, as the name of a person. Which is to say that it can help or hurt in minor ways early on, but is basically inconsequential in the end.   read more

The Fleeting Season: Songs for the Inevitable Change

There’s too much pressure on New Year’s Eve. As a holiday, it’s in a league with Valentine’s Day and Mother’s/Father’s Day, those weighty times when you never feel quite like you’re living up to expectations...  read more

Long Live Play: When Games Tell The Truth

There is value in escaping reality, but if that’s all videogames can do, it will remain a shallow medium. I believe games can and are doing more. If we have eyes to see, games will not merely give us a break from reality but confront us with it.  read more

Unknown Sessions: The Aching Sadness of Iron & Wine

On his last two albums, Sam Beam, the genius behind the folk band Iron & Wine, has introduced noise. And while I enjoy almost everything about the new music, I have to confess that I miss the naked sadness of the beginning.  read more

Ticket Scalping (and other sins)

I live in a college town, and that puts me in close proximity with recent graduates. There are a lot of people in this world I pity, but the 21- and 22-year-olds who have just lost the paradise of undergraduate life forever are near the top of the list.  read more

CoverArt: Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto

If there’s a place where the words “Coldplay” and “underrated” fit together, it has to do with the band’s ability to cohesively integrate sound and image. The artwork looks the way the music sounds.  read more

The Greatest Era in Film History: 10 Movies From '70s America

For me, the single best era in film history will always be the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s, the short period just after the general public got sick of the mundane, cloying dramas and comedies the ‘60s, but before the studios discovered the lucrative benefits of franchises.  read more

The Half Light: Bishop Allen and the Reality of Failure

Ripe with talent, ambition, and the connections to make an impact, they seemed like a sure thing. Would they ever be as big as similar bands like The Shins or Belle & Sebastian? The sheer odds made it seem improbable, but at the time, I would have vouched for them. This was a group that couldn’t miss. But they did.  read more

Americana Gets The Blues: A Weekend at the AMA Conference

On Thursday night at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, “the mother church of country music,” the lead singers for the two biggest blues-rock bands of the 1970s were on stage together—Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and the Allman Brothers Band’s Gregg Allman.  read more

Assessing a Legacy: Why Pink Floyd? Reissue Series

EMI just reissued all 14 albums from Pink Floyd, and we asked writer Stephen M. Deusner to take a look back through the entire four-decade catalog, album-by-album.  read more

Listening To My Life: Pop-Punk As Religion

Despite an overwhelmingly negative critical consensus, pop-punk is a sacred genre, a fact I will argue until my dying breath (after which “At Your Funeral” by Saves the Day will undoubtedly play as my requiem).  read more

This Week in Album Covers

Each week Rodney Lee takes a look at the lost art of the album cover.  read more