Month: June 2024

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:…

The vault of go-to stories that, in one way or another, capture something of what we understand to be the American experience is both deep and diverse.  There are the Horatio Alger-esque “bootstraps” stories. There are “The New Colossus” stories of immigrants, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. There are the “underdog” stories of athletes and artists,…

A little more than a year ago, Memphis got a second classic hip-hop radio station when Cumulus switched the format of WKIM from talk radio to “100% Throwback.” For the first week or so that WKIM (“The Vibe”) was on air, I listened to it nonstop and, since then, it remains one of the pre-set…

I’d give roughly 10 to 1 odds that you don’t know who that guy is in the picture to the left. That’s Rupert Holmes (born David Goldstein), British composer, singer-songwriter, musician, playwright, and novelist. He won two Tony Awards for his musical Drood and has released no fewer than 16 albums over the course of…

For the most part, bar band songs become “bar band songs” in the first place because they’re the sort that people can hear over and over again without tiring of them. So I don’t really have a beef with most bar band songs.  I wish that Beale Street bands didn’t play “Sweet Home Alabama” so frequently,…

NOTE: I’ve gotten behind in my posts for the 30 Day Song Challenge, so the next few days are going to be short and sweet, so I can get caught back up. If I choose to listen to music when I’m angry, more often than not I’m looking for some kind of cathartic release, rather…

Most of the kinds of music I like– blues, gospel, country, rock n’ roll– are better heard live.  I don’t know if this is true of all genres of music.  I’ve heard my jazz-loving and classical-loving friends speak of some of their favorite albums as if the recording were absolutely perfect, as if no “live”…