I admit I’ve never been an easy person to shop for – even worse when it comes to music. Christmastime at my house usually meant fat gift certificates to Newbury Comics since no one had any idea what I was listening to at the time. Besides, if there was a band I was into, I [...]
Bill Evans isn’t the jazz pianist I think of first when asked about favorites but I find myself coming back to his albums time and again. His version of “Autumn Leaves” seems to sneak into lots of mixes and for every Erroll Garner disc I listen to I’m just as likely to listen to Evans [...]
Country and Punk don’t have a lot in common but they do share an important characteristic - shorter songs are almost always better. Sure, there are epic country songs out there but when a track clocks in at under three minutes it usually means something went right. (Long, weepy country songs were part of what [...]
The fun of listening to the last batch of songs Colourbox made is half about the music, half about identifying the samples they used in their songs. Sampling in the late eighties was still just getting started so hearing stacks of obscure movie samples in with pounding drums and guitars was still very new and [...]
I originally heard of the Sneaker Pimps from a friend who was a massive vintage sneaker junkie. He had figured with a name like that they would have been an old-school hip-hop outfit from Queens. He was not pleased to discover they were a trip-hop band from the UK (“With a female vocalist no less!” [...]
When I need something quiet and soft for the headphones I tend to dial up Fat Jon’s Lightweight Heavy. I love the slow, dreamy quality of the album and how the tracks flow together so smoothly. To date I still can’t tell what half the sampled voices are saying on the various tracks but [...]
Many years ago I spent a long afternoon in a bus station in Springfield, Massachusetts. The bus I was riding had some serious mechanical problems and the timing was such that each bus that rolled through was already packed or only had room for a handful of people. If it hadn’t been for my trusty [...]