Steve Winwood—Nine Lives

Quite honestly, I don’t expect much from my ‘60s rock ‘n roll heroes. With the exceptions of Bob Dylan and Richard Thompson, who still manage to surprise me from time to time, most of the artists who made me care about rock ‘n roll in the first place are either dead or have been coasting since the Nixon administration. Paul McCartney? That 1970 solo debut album was really something. And that’s about the best I can muster. Van Morrison is hit and miss (and entirely miss on his latest Keep It Simple), Eric Clapton only emerges from his now three-decades-long...  read more

Hayseed

Last Thursday night I spoke at a fun and challenging gathering of Columbus artists called Wild Goose Creative; a group of writers, musicians, actors and actresses, and visual artists who come together once per month to share their work and support one another. There were a few people from my church and many people I didn’t know. Since this was my first public speaking opportunity that didn’t take place on the campus of a Christian college/university, I reveled in the absence of unanswerable and fundamentally misguided “What are five rules we can use to determine what Christians should listen...  read more

Danny Federici

Danny Federici, longtime keyboard player in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, died of melanoma yesterday. He was 58. I have a DVD of Springsteen and his band that was recorded in Los Angeles in 1973, when Bruce was just starting out. Danny Federici looks like he’s about 12 years old. Neil Young told us a long time ago that was it better to burn out than to fade away, but he was wrong, and thankfully wrong about himself as well. Nevertheless, it’s unsettling to encounter news like this, to find that the guys who manage to escape the car and...  read more

Sun Kil Moon—April

The recently deceased Madeleine L’Engle once said that said that she was immune to the effects of aging because she could so easily recall all the years that went before. When she was eighty, she claimed that she was also 21, and 35, and 50. The years ran together, the warp and the woof of an unbroken tapestry that stretched across a lifetime. It’s a sentiment that singer/songwriter Mark Kozelek must have taken to heart. April, his third album under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, is the perfect encapsulation of memory and longing. He conjures up the past again...  read more

Rediscovering the Dusty Gems

This isn’t a quality to emulate, but I have great swatches of my music collection that are totally unexplored. And by “totally unexplored” I mean I’ve either never played the music or played it so long ago that I have no memory of ever playing it. So sometimes I rummage through the old, dusty stacks of vinyl looking to see what I might have missed. And this is what I find. Moon Martin—Escape from Domination Okay, I played this one. Back in 1979. But it had, umm, been a while. Moon Martin may be the least likely rock star in...  read more