Category: Music
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Top 40 Over 40.6: Unplugged Youth
I can think of few artists more identified with the electric guitar than Thurston Moore. Unlike the guitar god of classic rock, Jimmy Page, who layered his hard rock records with gobs of acoustic fretted instrumens, the guitar god of post punk / undie music always stayed electric. The only exception I can think of…
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To the victor go the spoils…
The record producer Joe Boyd visited a studio in a former eastern block country shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The engineers there proudly showed off what they thought was a state of the art newly acquired reverb unit they had acquired from some western engineers who visited their studio. When Boyd asked…
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Top 40 Over 40.5: Sun Ra, live in 1989
One of my great regrets in life is that I never got to see Sun Ra and his Arkestra live before the great man passed. If I had arrived a little earlier, I would have. They played the campus of the University I attended the year before I got there – which was in fact…
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Prarie Wind P.S.
As an addendum to my post of April 8th on Neil Young’s album Prarie Wind in general, and song “It’s A Dream” in particular, I’m posting this video clip of the late Thai monk Achaan Chah, in whose lineage many of the Western Insight Meditation teachers I have studied with over the years trained.. “(One…
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Top 40 Over 40.4: Prarie Wind
I don’t usually pay much attention to stories about the circumstances in which a particular record came to be. However, the stories about the timing of this record are an exception. Neil Young made this record in Nashville in 2005, shortly before going to the hospital for surgery for a brain aneurysm. Combined with the…
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Top 40 Over 40.3: Dimanche a Bamako
My next fave record in this series is Dimanche a Bamako by Amadou & Meriam, which came out in 2005. I have to thank this record for introducing me to the amazing music that has come out of Mali over the years. I heard this album on the radio after it came out on WERS…
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Top 40 Over 40.2: Let England Shake
When I quit making records in 2001, I had a lot of different thoughts bolting around my brain. One of them was that since musicians almost always do their best work in their 20’s, I was heading for a period of diminishing creative returns, even if that didn’t mean diminishing rewards in terms of money…
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Top 40 Over 40.1: She walked in through the out door
Emmylou Harris : Coat Of Many Colours (1977) I’ve just finished listening to Wrecking Ball by Emmylou Harris. It’s a phenomenal record. Why have I never heard anyone talk about it? Below the above picture you’ll find a link to an early clip of her covering another underrated songwriter, Dolly Parton. Could it be that…
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Jumping to Conclusions
I’ve been listening to some records by Kurt Vile this week. (Smoke Ring For My Halo, Childish Prodigy, Constant Hitmaker, God Is Saying This to You…) I first heard his name from an ad on NPR music. I assumed at the time that it was a play on words referring to the composer Kurt Weil. …
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Halftime
Madonna is scheduled to perform shortly after the conclusion of the second quarter of today’s Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants. I saw Truth or Dare when I was in 8th grade and remember all the controversy surrounding her persona when she first came out, most of which had…
johnhdavis / inundation records 