Spin the Black Circle: A Lifetime of Vinyl Obsession

By Corey Dubrowa on 12:35 PM on May 20, 2009

I suspect that most OCD-addled, music-worshipping fans can point to one particular influence—pusher, “The Man,” gateway princess—who enabled their rock ’n’ roll addiction...  read more

Listening to My Life: Brothers in Arms

By Henry Freedland on 4:03 PM on April 13, 2009

My brother was a classic-rock kid, a Baby Boomer’s baby. Though born in 1983, only three years before me, Seth strode into record stores with the confidence of a guy...  read more

Joltin' Joe and the Hospice Bed

By Andy Whitman on 11:30 AM on February 18, 2009

My dad, who died a couple months ago, was not much of a music fan. He had the same small stack of vinyl LPs that could be found in millions of suburban American households...  read more

Listening to My Life: The Sublime Years

By John H. Richardson on 12:00 PM on November 10, 2008

Julia left last week—got in her little Honda, backed out and drove away. West to California. With her long brown hair streaming and her boyfriend riding shotgun. My oldest daughter, gone...  read more

Hard Times in New Orleans

By Alison Fensterstock on 10:00 AM on October 17, 2008

Last summer, I got a frantic phone call from my friend Jeanette. Her boyfriend had heard a noise in the front yard just after dark the night before. He opened the door, stepped onto the porch and was killed—shot in the chest...  read more

Dublin Calling: How the Irish Bagpipes Point Me Home

By Jason Killingsworth on 3:10 PM on September 12, 2008

What do I remember about my first seven years? I remember that I spent them in Ireland. I remember the rain and the pervasive grey skies that made every color on earth below—natural and manufactured—seem bottomless. I remember those rare sunny days that occasionally prompted women to stand in their front yards wearing bras like bikini tops, soaking up what sun they could. We were deadly pale, the ghostly descendants of Adam and Eve, and we felt no shame....  read more

Wake of the Flood

By Steve LaBate on 8:00 AM on September 8, 2008

I hunched sniffling and red-eyed over the sea of copied cassettes scattered across the peeling grey hardwood floor of my Athens, Ga., living room. Sick-to-my-stomach heartbroken, solid food was out of the question: A liquid breakfast would have to suffice...  read more

Listening to Old Voices - Daddy Wainwright

By Andy Whitman on 12:00 AM on April 1, 2005

Rufus and Martha get all the headlines these days, but their old man deserves more than a passing mention...  read more

Listening to Old Voices: Merle Haggard

By Andy Whitman on 12:00 AM on January 19, 2005

Before bands like The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers merged country and rock music, musicians from the two genres...  read more

Listening To Old Voices: Richard Thompson

By Andy Whitman on 12:00 AM on December 1, 2004

Sustained musical greatness is as hard to find as a Britney Spears chorus in the Norton Anthology of Poetry...  read more

Listening To Old Voices: Remembering Ray

By Andy Whitman on 12:00 AM on October 1, 2004

When Ray Charles died in June at the age of 73, few members of the post- Baby Boomer generations had any real understanding of his musical greatness...  read more

Listening To Old Voices

By Paste Staff on 12:00 AM on August 1, 2004

Frank Sinatra, Chairman of the Bored to my barely adolescent ears, was mangling The Beatles’ “Something” on a late-’60s TV special...  read more

Listening To Old Voices

By Andy Whitman on 12:00 AM on June 1, 2004

I didn’t discover Joni Mitchell until her 1971 album Blue. I was holed up on a Christmas morning in a Chicago suburb, 16 years old—not wise enough to make it on my own and not foolish enough to pretend my helliday home was normal...  read more

Nick Drake: Out From the Shadows

By Andy Whitman on 12:00 AM on February 1, 2004

It was a bad fit all along. Painfully shy people don’t make good pop stars, and Nick Drake may have been the most awkward and unlikely ever to grace that category...  read more