Listening to My Life: Stereolab, North Carolina

When I first moved from the flatlands of south Alabama to the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina, I felt obligated to play bluegrass or old-time fiddle music during every country drive...  read more

Listening to My Life: American Music Club and the Dregs of Winter

[Illustration by Edward McGowan] February in Columbus, Ohio, means the fourth consecutive month without sunshine. Eight months of the year, it’s a great place to live. But during the winter, a dismal pall settles over the city. Too far south to offer much in the way of invigorating winter sports, but too far north to escape the general crud, the typical Columbus winter day features ominous grey clouds, sleet and temperatures hovering around 35 degrees. Coincidentally, this is also how Dante describes the innermost circle of hell....  read more

Listening to My Life: Michael Azerrad on Punk Rock and Michael McDonald

I never thought I’d quote former Doobie Brother and MCI pitchman Michael McDonald, but he recently said something interesting to Paste about recording with Grizzly Bear: “The punk movement swung towards being as primitive as possible, but now it’s back to where these guys are good musicians. I never thought that would come back around, but it has.” Of course, punk was about tearing down what people like McDonald had built, and putting up something better. It’s just that punk’s legacy has finally gotten to the point where Mr. Yah Mo Be There himself gets it....  read more

Spin the Black Circle: A Lifetime of Vinyl Obsession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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