Author: Grant Alden
Record Review from web archive March 19, 2009
Sometymes Why
Four years ago Aoife O’Donovan, Ruth Ungar Merenda, and Kristin Andreassen spent a dozen hours recording ten songs, and casually slipped them into the marketplace, housed in a lovely black and silver letterpress package, an edition of one thousand. It was and is a fetching record, both gloriously informal and gorgeously professional, for in their [...]
Column from web archive February 9, 2009
‘Albums remind me of plans’
For 29 years now I have quoted a couplet from Squeeze’s 1980 album Argybargy by way of explaining how music fit into my life: “Singles remind me of kisses/Albums remind me of plans.” The song is titled “If I Didn’t Love You”, and I can hear its stop-start rhythms in the back of my head [...]
Column from web archive January 21, 2009
Our last, best hope
Finally, on the eve of the inauguration of president Barack Hussein Obama, we sat down to watch An Inconvenient Truth. For a period of time in the 1980s-’90s, I found bits of writing work as a film critic, which enabled me to see — for free, of course — 100-150 movies a year. And then [...]
Column from web archive December 30, 2008
The end of print
In the year just passing I lost a dream long held so close that never – ever – did I confess it in public, for I have always wanted a magazine of my own. The arc of my career, such as it has been (stretching back to my junior high school typewritten scandal sheet, The [...]
Record Review from web archive December 30, 2008
The voices of Como…now
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 [...]
Column from web archive December 16, 2008
Step aside, curmudgeon emeritus: It’s Maggie’s choice, for kids’ sake
Among the several things parenting manuals don’t prepare you for is this: Those rock ‘n’ roll hours, that going to bed between 2 and 4 a.m., and rising by lunch? Over, at least until she’s off to college. (Nobody smells weakness like a young child with an urgent agenda. And they’re all urgent.) And this: [...]
Column from web archive December 1, 2008
The wayward tale
of Will T. Massey
The Seattle to which San Angelo, Texas, native Will T. Massey moved circa 1990 – he was, what? 20 years old? — was a location sought by way of retreat, an end-of-the-road place that had not yet become the center of genetic engineering, gaming, Microsoft, and grunge. It was still a cheap city in which [...]
Column from web archive November 18, 2008
Tim Carroll beats the devil
Apparently Tim Carroll’s most recent album, The Devil Is A Busy Man, came out about a year ago, at least according to his MySpace page, but it’s only on my shelf because his wife, the gifted singer Elizabeth Cook, sent it to me during the dark and quiet days of this last summer when I [...]
Column from web archive November 4, 2008
“I’m on my way…”
By the time this column is posted on Tuesday morning, I should have finished my second cup of coffee, and will have read some of the news online before cooking and serving and eating breakfast. And I will have taken however long it takes to vote. Because schools close on election day here in Kentucky, [...]
Column from web archive October 21, 2008
Three to not forget: Valorie, Dao and Otis
No more humbling reminder of the impotence of the written word exists than the blank indifference of the marketplace. For 21 years now I have listened carefully to mounds and mounds of music, and sought venues in which to write about the songs and sounds which moved me. For a time I awaited a groundswell [...]
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