“Maybe someone knows what fate is, maybe someone just knows why,” Gene Clark posited in a wistful melancholic meditation that makes “Some Misunderstanding” one of the climactic moments and centerpiece of his 1974 album No Other. Looking back the singer seems to be sharing the most intimate and vulnerable details of his complex character, the […]
It could have been just a trip down memory lane but it wasn’t. When Blondie landed in Washington, D.C. this summer, Debbie Harry, 74, stood before a visual of Donald Trump as she sang the theme song played from “To Russia With Love.” The band, helped propelled by drummer Clem Burke, upstaged headliner Elvis Costello […]
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Carlene Carter first stepped onstage at the age of four next to her mother June Carter and aunts Helen and Anita. She’s spent the next sixty years solidifying her place as a “Carter Girl,” the title she used on her 2014 homage to the original Carter Family who changed the landscape of country music since […]
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The recent passings of Donnie Fritts and Jimmy Johnson—two iconic figures who helped shape what we call the Muscle Shoals Sound and left us within ten days of each other—casts a sadness that will be particularly heartfelt when Jason Isbell comes home to his native Alabama and sets foot onstage in Florence for the inaugural […]
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As a 21 year old in 1965, Roger Daltrey once sang the defiant words of Pete Townshend “I hope I die before I get old.” And when asked by an interviewer if he could see himself singing “Satisfaction” at age 40, Mick Jagger, not yet thirty, said “I hope not.” But here it is five […]
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Early in the evening of what would be a ten-hour event at the Outlaw Music Festival in Virginia Beach, Bonnie Raitt was still thinking about the night before. She had to follow Warren Haynes at the Mann Center in Philadelphia. “Phew,” she said her eyebrows rising and facial expressions saying she had her work cut […]
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“The name of the man you need to see is Stanley Coles.” I can still remember the stern British accent and directness of the words. I was a fifteen-year-old aspiring music writer standing in a hotel lobby near the Springfield Civic Center in Massachusetts. A publicist from A&M Records had confirmed I’d be on the […]
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Brandi Carlile was standing in the Basement East in Nashville when someone approached her, drink in hand and carrying a proposition. “I want to start a band called the Highwomen and I want you to be in it,” Amanda Shires told her. Maybe it was the alcohol that helped her get the courage up. Or […]
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Since time began we’ve marveled at the notion that we could create a machine and go back in time. Growing up watching Samantha Stevens of Bewitched, slipping back into history was as simple as twitching your nose. This week it felt like Carlos Santana had perfected the art of transporting us between yesterday and today. […]
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It was a Sunday we’ll never forget. On a morning when the country was still reeling from the tragedy in El Paso, we woke up to learn of the massacre in Dayton. Amid the disbelief that “it can’t happen here,” was the sobering realization that yes it can and it is seemingly happening all around […]
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