Celebrating Community
For many newspaper readers in the United States, Brexit feels like the story that simply – almost perversely, given our short attention spans and massive self-absorption – refuses to end: a baffling saga of tortuous parliamentary procedure, protracted negotiations, political flameouts, and missed deadlines, requiring minute-by-minute updates from the international press. In a concise book focused on the crisis’s origins, […]
Two million Americans live in public housing. Because conditions at housing authorities across the country have deteriorated for decades, most of them live in substandard homes – amid rats, lead paint, leaky pipes, mold, broken elevators, and heating outages. Since the government owns public housing and could, using only a small fraction of the federal budget, allocate enough money for […]
You are outraged, and have written a protest song. You’d like it to be a part of the catalyst for change; march out in the streets, sing it, have all the radio stations play it with a new anthem for a better world out there and change on its way. Well…it’s happened before. According to Wikipedia, a protest song is […]
As part of LA’s Paisley Underground, The Long Ryders were one of the first American groups to combine the cosmic country of The Byrds with the DIY punk ethos of the early 1980’s. The band recorded their debut LP Native Sons with Henry Lewy who worked with The Flying Burrito Brothers on their legendary album Gilded Palace of Sin. Former […]
This July, a new collaboration debuted at the Newport Folk Festival. The name? The Highwomen, a riff off the original supergroup of country renegades, The Highwaymen. The players? Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires, with a host of supporting characters that counted Yola and Sheryl Crow in their ranks. The uniform? Pantsuits. Morris wore a pink one […]
The Billboard charts have long been the industry standard when it comes to determining music’s popularity and success. However, recent years have seen controversy surround Billboard. To varying degrees, Billboard has been affected by industry tricks to boost streaming numbers and song plays with bots, payola, etc. Additionally, the Billboard charts’ historical dependence on radio airplay has made the chart […]
Rafe Stepto is a singer-songwriter & multi-instrumentalist with a smokey voice that brings to mind Al Green. He will be playing a solo set on guitar and piano Thursday, October 3 from 8:30-9:15 at Branded Saloon in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Stepto will sing original songs from his current project “Kiss Attack”, which employs a wide variety of jazz, funk, and […]
It’s easy to take Chrissie Hynde for granted. The songs she wrote and sang with her band the Pretenders shoot straight from the heart. You don’t think about her performance because you’re too busy thinking about her, about the story she’s telling and the character she’s portraying. The communication is so direct that it’s easy to miss the singer delivering […]
Life has a funny way of coming full circle sometimes. Someone I don’t know writes me about a piece I had placed in the Red Hook Star Review on Louis Prima a few weeks prior. That someone, my new friend Charlie Diliberti, then tells me that Louie Prima’s son, Louis Prima Jr, tours around the country playing New Orleans style […]
Take a little walk to edge of Park Slope down on 5th Ave between St. Marks and Warren to Lizzie King’s Parlor, a name with an origin story that seems ripe for a Nick Cave murder ballad. It comes from Elizabeth Lloyd King who lived around the corner in the late 1800s and is famous for having shot her estranged […]