Category: Features & Interviews
The Reworking Hour: Songs From The Big Chair
I do enjoy rethinking and resequencing tracklists, but I stumbled onto this Tears For Fears topic by accident. Here on the cusp of The Tipping Point, bookmark this as a fresh way to enjoy the 1985 album that put Tears…
Traveling Miles: Fastball’s Miles Zuniga (2000)
When Fastball guitarist Miles Zuniga checks in from Idaho, he’s operating on one hour’s sleep. He mentions an overnight to Boise and the unfortunate physics of trying to sleep in the rear bunk of a bus carrying a trailer over…
Getting A Read On Rufus Wainwright (1999)
“I would love to be a big movie star, but you know, I want to get this music thing done first. I want to become a great musical force, then become a movie star, and then become, you know, Mother…
Springsteen Reimagined: Talk To Me (and ’78 Sessions box)(2010)
This playlist at Spotify /// M8 home at Spotify Let’s start with a quick look at the U.S. Top 10 album that actually* got released in 1978, then move on to its unusual creation story.Bruce SpringsteenTalk To Me (1978) SIDE ONE4:22 …
Guster Goes Major With Steve Lillywhite (2000)
What band builds a live reputation with two guitars, three voices, and a conguero? That’d be Guster, a trio from Massachusetts who recently parlayed acres of grass roots fandom into a major label debut. They have no traditional drum kit….
Stringing Along With Duncan Sheik (1999)
Duncan Sheik is eating lunch. It’s a fall day in Manhattan, and the songwriter with the Baldwinesque looks is cramming in a bite between recording sessions. This time, however, he’s not the artist, but the producer — “for nobody you…
Solo Swim: A Few Laps With Phish’s Trey Anastasio (2002)
“Summer’s coming and I’d like a revue,” sings Trey Anastasio in the first chorus of the first song of the first solo album of the rest of his life. The request stays airborne above a musical undercurrent propelled by rhythms…
Duncan Sheik: Beyond The Phantom Moon (2001)
In the past 12 months, Duncan Sheik has made music in London and New York studios, in a Cuban music hall, on a stage in Albania, and in Bill Frisell’s living room. Yet by late January, the songwriter was back home in…
John Mayer’s Dream Life (2002)
Winding up a string of tour dates a few months ago, John Mayer explained to an Athens, GA audience that they were in for a special night. The tall songwriter behind the breezy single “No Such Thing” said that on…
Dusk and Floating: Danny Federici (1950-2008)
(This post was originally a spur-of-the-moment submission in 2008 to Backstreets Magazine, who, to my perpetual pleasure, published it.) I walked out the front door with my dog this morning, with the busiest workday of the month ahead. Sunny and not…