Music Reviews: The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ Special Edition, plus Sean Rowe, Lizard Music, and Mark Rogers More than half a century after the Beatles’ breakup, the flood of new material continues unabated with the latest in a series of dramatically expanded editions of their classic LPs. In just the past few years, we’ve witnessed […]
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Music Reviews: Tennessee Ernie Ford and Brinsley Schwarz, plus Jeremy Ferrara, Tony Kamel, Noel McKay, and Nathan Bell Tennesse Ernie Ford’s Acoustic Trios Many people probably remember Tennessee Ernie Ford only for his biggest crossover hit, “Sixteen Tons,” which topped the pop charts in 1955 and found the country-based singer lamenting a coal miner’s plight: […]
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Music Reviews: New Albums Pay Tribute to Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Led Zeppelin, and Walter Hyatt of Uncle Walt’s Band Chrissie Hynde Covers Dylan Hundreds if not thousands of artists have covered Bob Dylan but in this writer’s opinion one interpreter has until recently stood head and shoulders above the competition: the late, great […]
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If you’re a serious Bob Dylan fan, you might want to start thinking about adding a room to your home to store your collection of his CDs. In addition to his dozens of regular releases, he has issued such mammoth sets as the 14-disc The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings and the 36-disc […]
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A Definitive Anthology from the ‘Queen of R&B’ It’s a safe bet that most listeners in 2021 don’t even know Ruth Brown’s name but some 70 years ago she was hailed as the “Queen of R&B” and Atlantic Records was sometimes called “the house that Ruth built.” She scored about two dozen R&B hits, including […]
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Music Reviews: The Monumental ‘R&B in DC’ plus Bob Marley, Gene Pitney, the Faux Paws, and Brad Vickers Major record companies like Sony’s Legacy, UMI, and Warner’s Rhino have all produced great box sets, but nobody can match the ones from Germany’s Bear Family label, which has been turning out meticulously researched, beautifully packaged, and […]
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Music Reviews: ‘The Jimmie Vaughan Story’ plus Suzie Ungerleider, Connie Smith, Karen Jonas, Matt Jaffe, and Ward Hayden Texas-based blues-rock singer and guitarist Jimmie Vaughan marked his 70th birthday this year, and we get the present (even if we do have to pay for it): a limited-edition box set due out September 17 that includes […]
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When Bob Dylan saw Girl from the North Country on Broadway right before the pandemic temporarily closed the show, he was bowled over by the performance, which draws all its music from his catalog. “The play had me crying at the end,” he told journalist Douglas Brinkley in a New York Times interview last year. […]
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Music Reviews: Beach Boys’ ‘Feel Flows,’ plus Colin Hay, Gram Parsons, and Ellen Foley The Beach Boys will undoubtedly be most remembered for the first two chapters of their career. In the first, which ran from 1960 into 1965, they produced a long list of irresistible harmonic numbers about surfing, cars, and young love—songs like “California Girls,” “Surfin’ Safari,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” and “Don’t Worry, Baby,” […]
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Music Reviews: Archival Releases from Nina Simone, Plus Dallas Burrow, Son Volt, Mick Kolassa, & Kate Taylor If you knew nothing about Nina Simone or her discography, the contents of Little Girl Blue would probably lead you to guess that it was at least her dozenth album. In fact, this newly reissued LP is her […]
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