One reviewer has called Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky the best Eagles record the Eagles didn’t make, and it’s impossible to shake the timeless soft-rock vibe in the sound, the vocals, and the easy pace. “A Ghost Is Born was to me really jagged … abrasive,” bassist John Stirratt said of his band’s last studio album. “And this record has a certain warmth.”
The lyrics that open Low’s Drums and Guns are as forceful as singer/guitarist Alan Sparhawk is tentative.
Singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer tells about a friend who leads a group of people who knit for the local food bank. They’ll set up somewhere and knit with a sign that reads, “Knitting for the Food Bank.” “People will come and talk to them,” Newcomer said in a phone interview last week. “Folks who might not maybe go up to someone on the corner and talk to somebody who has a sign will sit down with a group of women knitting and talk about the issue. ‘What’s happening with the food bank?'” The lesson is that directness often isn’t the best way to reach people. “Sometimes our most powerful activism, our most potent activism, comes out of what we love,” she said.
It’s no surprise that Jen Chapin was pulled in several directions. Her father, the late Harry Chapin, is most famous for writing and performing “Cat’s in the Cradle” but was also a humanitarian, co-founding World Hunger Year in 1975. Jen Chapin is following her own social-justice calling.
Year-end lists of the best albums of the past 12 months are cruel, because either you’ll go bankrupt buying all these fantastic records or you’ll resent how much great music you’re missing because you can’t afford to buy them. I’m not typically a nice person, but these are the holidays, so my year-end list is something that most anybody can afford.
You hear it and you cringe immediately. Who the fuck thought of that stupid-ass name? So Culture Snob here introduces a regular feature, offering free band names to whoever wants them.
In part three of my River Roots Live trilogy, I present the September 22, 2006, performance of guitar hero Junior Brown.
My recording of Alejandro Escovedo’s one-hour set at River Roots Live in Davenport, Iowa, on Saturday, September 23, 2006.
Pretty self-explanatory: Martin Sexton’s one-hour set at River Roots Live in Davenport, Iowa, on Friday, September 22, 2006.
