Music

Years ago, singer-songwriter Freedy Johnston said that he thought Chuck Cleaver was one of the best songwriters in America, adding that he had almost dismissed Ass Ponys because of their stupid name. “It’s like they’re daring me to hate them,” Johnston said at the time. Other than the record label…

A few years back, while interviewing a grizzled musician who called Austin, Texas, home, he mentioned a Nashville-based buddy of his who had recently landed a big-time recording contract. He was going to be a star. “The first thing the record label did,” lamented the Lone Star native, “was sign…

Summer 1954. As the rickety Greyhound bus winds down Interstate 10 toward Arizona, the ocean breeze slowly melts into the hot desert air. Sitting in the back of the dusty coach, with tears streaming down his face, is a 25-year-old aspiring songwriter named Lee Hazlewood. Stinging bitterly from yet another…

California-born, Phoenix-bred Al Casey is part of the vast secret history of rock and roll, one of a legion of “session men” — though the term is insufficient to describe Casey’s amazing body of work — who contributed to the very formation of the sound in its earliest days. The…

Country music history boasts many fruitful collaborations among family members: The Louvin Brothers, the Carter Family, the Stanley Brothers, Bill and Earle Bolick (the Blue Sky Boys), the Monroe Brothers — the list is long and fabled. You might never have heard of the Good family, depending on how deep…

Albums like Pleasure Forever’s eponymous release make me think of that great Charlie Parker quote, the one about how there are only two kinds of music: Good and Bad. By which I mean that Pleasure Forever is a genre-resistant beast that works more often than it doesn’t, but having said…

Summer’s here and the time is right for . . . well, not much, seeing as how there’s precious little on the horizon worth anticipating except for maybe the new Joe Stummer LP. Still, that release is a few weeks away. In the meantime, here are a handful of musical…

If the Chemical Brothers represent dance music at its most intelligent — and Daft Punk represents the genre’s cheesy, crowd-pleasing appeal — then Basement Jaxx most assuredly offers the art form at its emotional, sensual, visceral best. Remedy, the U.K. duo’s debut after years of DJing in London, flowed cohesively…

Big in Japan is either a name you own, or one that comes back to bite you in the ass later — particularly if your band’s a power-punk trio in an era when Green Day is now being touted as the “grandfathers” of anything. Big in Japan’s debut, Destroy the…

Most musicians like to shroud themselves in mystery. Cast themselves as enigmas, riddles never meant to be solved. It’s an accepted part of the marketing process these days. That somehow a bit of carefully calculated inscrutability will enhance the lure of the product. For journalists, deconstructing those fiercely guarded walls,…

On contemporary maps, Teoc, Mississippi, rests as far off the path as it did in the twilight years of the 19th century. Located almost exactly between Texarkana, Arkansas, and Birmingham, Alabama, Teoc lies several miles from the nearest U.S. Route. And there wasn’t a single paved road anywhere near it…

On a wickedly humid afternoon in late June, singer/songwriter Billy Sedlmayr sits in the sunken room of his barrio bungalow, cursing to the heavens. He’s battling demons and not faring too well. The bestial horrors lurking in the narrow margins between shadow and darkness move too quickly for him, and…

My Morning Jacket is sort of like a Louisville Ween: Playful but heartfelt, artsy but unpretentious, and capable of shelving bizarro freak-tunes alongside evocative and nostalgic songs. It’s a toss-up as to how 22-year-old Jim James, the Neil Young-channeling singer and songwriter for MMJ, would take to that comparison, but…

As it turns out, Tricky’s been making records even he hates — contract-killers, he might call them, if not audience-killers in the process. (Everything since 1995’s Maxinquaye has been one “fuck-off” record after another, he explains, as in: “Fuck off, I’m not giving people what they want,” he offers in…

“Oh, man, don’t ask me. I don’t know where the fuck we’re headed next. We had plans to go off someplace else on the next part of the actual tour, but our cuckoo label decided to send us out to play for some distributors’ thing . . . in Washington?…

Mark Eitzel sits at a long table in a conference room, his trademark short-brimmed hat in front of him. He’s taking part in a panel on new technology issues at the CMJ Change Music Festival with a number of other artists, including Creeper Lagoon’s Sharky Laguana, the Mountain Goats’ John…

Given rock’s smutty half-century, it’s a wonder that The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll (Carroll and Graf), edited by Jim Driver, is only 600 pages long. Fortunately, the British collection passes on the well-known shock fodder by stateside writers and shovels up a pile of lesser-known…

Memorial Day, 2001. Hung over. Dive-bombers unload on the insides of your skull. You are sitting on your couch appreciating little, and doing less. It is not yet noon and already a thin layer of sweat covers your body. Your face stings of bursting blood vessels. The agonizing knob on…

In the lengthy liner notes that introduce the new three-disc collection Thelonious Monk: The Columbia Years, jazz pundit Peter Keepnews is oddly apologetic about the music included in the anthology, at one point confessing that, among his fellow critics, “the notion has taken hold that, all things considered, maybe this…