If 2008 was the year the masses finally became acquainted with the extraordinary talent of Glen Hansard – through his Oscar-winning song with Marketa Irglova under the name Swell Season – it’s likely that Hansard would be the first to tell you how many others shared that long journey to the top with him. Perhaps [...]

In the darkness of this last summer, when listening to music had become a reminder of things lost, and not of joys yet to be discovered, this simple album of unaccompanied voices singing to a god I do not worship…this album was a balm.
It still is.

Como Now was recorded July 22, 2006, at the Mt. [...]

Ersi Arvizu is best-known for her stint with El Chicano, a jazz-inflected East Los Angeles rock band of the early 1970s, but she sang in several other Chicano soul groups both before and after that, and also worked as a boxing trainer who herself went 4-0 in the ring. She’d been out of music for [...]

Any time interesting male and female singers team up, the comparisons are obvious and tempting: Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra, Johnny Cash & June Carter, George Jones & Tammy Wynette, and so on. Yet the differences between those famous duos and the pairing of Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan are more telling than the similarities.
For [...]

Trying to pick the best among the Replacements’ three mid-period masterpieces – Let It Be (1984), Tim (1985), and Pleased To Meet Me (1987) – is a bit like trying to select a favorite season. Springtime brings balmy temperatures and baseball, but then again, don’t those fall colors look great?
Of the three, however, there’s little [...]