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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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. […]
Continue Reading
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,” […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
Music Reviews: A Must-watch Concert Blu-ray from Little Steven, Plus Joan Armatrading If you weren’t among the lucky folks who scored tickets to one of the 2019 concerts by Little Steven & the Disciples of Soul, you have a second chance to witness the extravaganza on a new Blu-ray. Called Summer of Sorcery Live at […]
Continue Reading
Once Beatles fans had digested the news of their breakup, which became official in April of 1970, attention turned to what would come next. Would John Lennon produce the first blockbuster solo album, or would that come from Paul McCartney, the group’s other principal songwriter? The answer turned out to be neither of the above. […]
Continue Reading
