On the face of it, the pairing of John Doe with the Sadies seems so head-slappingly obvious it’s a wonder they haven’t managed to hook up before now. In the 1980s, as a member of X and the Knitters, Doe stood tall on the tightrope between punk iconoclasm and country tradition. That’s the same gap [...]

Music history has a tendency to frequently favor the reputation of easily defined artists, but that’s at the expense of music makers as singular and strange as Chris Darrow. How do you pigeonhole a multi-instrumentalist who has traces of his DNA detectible in his own work with psychedelic purveyors Kaleidoscope in the ’60s, neo-trad practitioners [...]

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, [...]

It could be argued that the very thing which assured the Bee Gees’ commercial triumph also guaranteed their exile into the critical wilderness. While the group’s heyday riding the Saturday Night Fever juggernaut is celebrated as kitsch in some circles, for those of us who resisted their utter dominance of popular culture for those few [...]

Despite some generally lousy indicators (the economy, the environment, international relations), the world faces 2009 with a sense of hope for better days ahead. Whether or not that hope is well-placed, don’t we tend to close off the year by thinking sunnier times lurk around the corner? My musical 2007 ended with a big bang [...]