When Isaac Hayes emerged from the shadows of Stax Studios and his role there as session musician and hit-writer extraordinaire, he stepped into the glare of his solo career, and what a strange, unlikely figure he must have cut.
Here was the consummate behind-the-scenes guy emerging as a buff, bald, flashy figure of African-American assertiveness, bedecked [...]

Bruce Springsteen once posited that “we learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.” After 24 years of listening to Chris Isaak, who never exceeds the four-minute mark and rarely even nears it, I can safely say I’ve learned love will inevitably fall victim to the fatal flaw within the singer, [...]

Has any modern band defied labels as successfully as the Nighthawks? They want it every which way – rock, blues, roots — and the ‘Hawks always get their way, and have for 36 years and counting. Such skillful genre-hopping is the reason their fan base ranges from mohawked skateboarders to dyed-in-the-wool Chicago blues purists.
American Landscape [...]

Randy Weeks has described his music as “late ’60s AM to early ’70s FM,” but on his new disc Going My Way, I hear a bit of early-mid ’70s AM in there as well. Which may be parsing eras and frequencies just a little too precisely, perhaps…but to me, the hits that dominated the AM [...]

Syd Straw works at her own pace when its comes to releasing solo albums. Pink Velour, her first studio CD since War And Peace in 1996, carries the credit line “Produced (very slowly) by Syd Straw.” But it proves to be worth the wait, as Straw delivers an intensely personal collection of songs (ten originals [...]