Year: 2015

I’m resisting every last urge of my lesser self to pick “Sweet Caroline” today. You’re welcome. First, allow me to set the proper mise-en-scene for today’s prompt. There is, blessedly, a wide variety of live-entertainment bars in these more-or-less-blessed United States, with a correspondingly wide variety of  what counts as “appropriate” music to play in them.  And…

I do not abide total silence well and so, as a consequence, it is hardly ever completely quiet in my living space  I turn on NPR first thing in the morning, I listen to music or news-programming when I’m in the car, I always have something playing in my home or office while I work,…

Falling out of love with something (or someplace, or someone) can be awkward to experience, even more awkward to explain.  Our affections are mercurial, often unpredictably so, and there isn’t always a neat and clean account to be given for why you stopped to stare amorously into one of life’s store-windows only to then, well,…

It seems like bad juju to pick the theme song to your life before you’ve finished living it, but oh well. [*throws salt over shoulder*] I miss the days when television gave us real theme songs, by which I mean songs with words, not the sonic mood-setters typical of so many popular programs now. (Listen:…

I suspect today’s will be the most difficult prompt of the month, because it requires me to step outside of myself and try to think about what others think about what I think about music. Others know that I think a lot about music, so what I really have to consider is what others think about me, my tastes, my…

As a rule, I don’t like the category “guilty pleasure” when it’s applied to music.  You like the songs you like.  No harm, no foul Most of the time, when asked to report their “guilty” music pleasures, people tend to pick from artists like ABBA or Neil Diamond or Boyz II Men— all of whom I love, by the way– but what…

I’ve made no secret over the years about my dislike for NashVegas wunderkind and fake-country recording artist Taylor Swift.  She even made it into my “Uncanny Valley” series on this blog (see here) as an example of what I called the very Form of the Fake.  Now, I’ll admit I’ve been pretty harsh in my evaluations of Swift–…

First, let’s just get something straight right away: The Rolling Stones is the greatest band of all time.  Full stop. Several years ago, my favorite music magazine No Depression ran a contest they called “Exile on Main Street vs. The White Album Smackdown” and invited readers to write in and explain why one album was better than the…

If you’ve ever lived close to a train track, which I have for many of the years of my adult life, you know exactly what it means to love and to believe in the sound of a train in the distance.  There’s something seductive and promissory about that sound, something that assures you that there…

There are any number of songs by the late, great Michael Jackson that make me want to dance. Most of them, in fact.  In addition to being a phenomenal and innovative dancer himself, MJ also had a preternatural talent for producing songs with just the right mix of rhythm and groove to force listeners’ bodies to…