If I were performing a play titled The Americans, I’d want Jim White to write the score for it as well. It just makes sense to have one of the great songwriting documentarians of the weird, wonderful, holy and sacrilegious aspects of the American South on board to document something with as broad a title [...]
The oldest cliché in rock is the casualty list. There are the high-profile heroes of misadventure: Buddy Holly, Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan. There are those that couldn’t handle success and took the ultimate way out: Nick Drake, Kurt Cobain. But perhaps saddest of all are those huge talents who unaccountably chose simply to fade into [...]
Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 26 (SIRIUS), and channel 43 (XM), can now be heard twice, every Friday – Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST. SIRIUS 180: Jean Michel Bernard – Generique Stephane ++ Ofo And The Black Company – Allah Wakbar ++ Witch – Introduction ++ The Ify [...]
Welcome to the latest installment of an ongoing mixtape series in which I highlight some of my favorite voices online and beyond. This week we catch up with Vancouver’s Dirty Beaches, the nom de tune of ghostly crooner Alex Zhung Hai. As mentioned last month, Zhung Hai crafts surreal washes of mood and sound—an aesthetic [...]
Originally released in 1969, Marva Whitney’s James Brown produced LP It’s My Thing plays out something like the JBs fronted by Betty Davis. Brown’s leading female vocalist during the late 60s, Whitney expertly works the material here (arranged and co-written by Brown, backed by the JBs) as only someone who spent time in Brown’s touring [...]
Cut in Holland in ’71, and touted as Chubby Checker’s ‘psychedelic’ record, I grabbed this on a lark over at the Twilight Zone expecting (if nothing else) an interesting look at Checker’s later work. What I found ended up on repeat for days. Dump your preconceptions—forget “The Twist” and listen to the session’s first track, [...]
This shit just works on so many levels. Like most everything Nina Simone chose to cover throughout her career, this, her incredibly funky take of Aretha Franklin’s “Save Me,” adds a muscularity to Aretha’s already powerful performance. No one emotes quite like Simone—who really gets inside the material and wrestles it, hell, exorcises it, from [...]
If you follow my twitter feed, or really, if you keep up with much music ‘news’ in general you may very well have come across last week’s interview between Will Oldham (donning his interviewer’s cap) and R. Kelly. If not, you’re in for a treat. Held last December in New York—in Kelly’s dressing room prior [...]
Come for the ear candy that is “Venus“—stick around for the pop trash goodness of “Hot Sand.” (Is that a sitar I hear? Yes, yes it is). Culled from a 7″ vinyl rip of early 70s Dutch rock weirdos, Shocking Blue. MP3: Shocking Blue :: Venus (vinyl rip) MP3: Shocking Blue :: Hot Sand (vinyl [...]
Rough demo of “Writing A Novel“; the first taste from the upcoming Son Tillman LP. MP3: Son Tillman :: Writing A Novel ——————— ____________________________________________________________________________________
