It’s been nearly 40 years since Jesse Winchester released his first album, a spare and loose-limbed masterpiece right down to the gaunt cover shot of the exiled Winchester giving the camera a haunted stare. Looking at that picture and hearing that record’s anguished songs of pained longing on, it was hard to imagine that Winchester [...]

One of the great love stories of the rock era came to a sad end in August 2006, when Kim McLagan – beloved wife, best friend and muse to ex-Small Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan – died in a car accident in Texas. That’s a blow you wouldn’t wish on anyone, but especially the impish McLagan, [...]

There exists a parallel rock ‘n’ roll universe in which Elvis Presley ran away after his 1968 comeback special to Germany, his stomping grounds during his Army days. And there he lives to this day, making records very much like the Dex Romweber Duo’s Ruins Of Berlin. Back here in this dimension, of course, Romweber [...]

Back when he was a callow young man, Randy Newman wore his youth uneasily, like clothes that never quite fit. But he was smart enough to turn that into an advantage. An all-too-human awkwardness was the saving grace of Good Old Boys, 12 Songs and other long-ago landmarks. There’s just no way that anyone overly [...]

This trunk-clearing two-disc compilation includes covers of songs by Bob Dylan, Magnetic Fields, Ryan Adams, electro-pop group Hot Chip, ’80s-vintage cheese-pop band Prefab Sprout, and old Irish punkers the Undertones. And yet that range of names still doesn’t even begin to hint at the range of Portastatic, which has evolved from Superchunk guitarist Mac McCaughan’s [...]

Some bands aspire to gravitas. Others have it thrust upon them, whether they want it or not. So it is that New Orleans’ Iguanas – a polyglot party band that has never exactly been accused of heaviness – step up with a new album steeped in the aftershocks of Hurricane Katrina. Even though the news [...]