It’s been some 30 years since a bunch of young Cajun musicians started talking to their grandparents and learning the music that had kept the bayou dancing back in the ’20s and ’30s. Now, we have young Cajun musicians who have never known a time when the two-steps and waltzes weren’t in their lives. The [...]

“I haven’t been to the lake since music’s mystery has been replaced.” For many musicians, this would be a profoundly sad lyric, but “Weary Apology”, the second-to-last song on Weary Things, doesn’t have such a feel. Instead, it’s a nostalgic look at accomplishments, a mixture of past joys and current responsibilities which is echoed in [...]

Last April, Andrew Bird wrote in The New York Times “Measure For Measure” blog: “The record I want to make here and now – the one I wish I could find in my local record store – is a gentle, lulling, polyrhythmic, minimalist yet warm tapestry of acoustic instruments.” Yep, he’s done what he set [...]

Tom Jones doesn’t get enough credit. Older than most pop singers of the late 1960s, Jones was seen as the guy trying to connect with the young and hip crowds while appealing to a much older demographic at the same time. The fact that his concerts became known for the tossing of women’s undergarments made [...]

Let’s say you lived in Kansas City between 1978 and 1981. The odds were great you still didn’t know much about the Titan Records label, which released eight singles and a compilation album in those years almost completely unknown to the general public and the rest of the world. This brings us to the Numero [...]

When K.D. Lang stepped up to duet with Roy Orbison on “Crying” in 1987, she became recognized as probably the biggest-voiced contemporary pop singer in the world. Nobody else could go womano a mano with that magnificent operatic vocalist and achieve something slightly greater than a tie. With the expectation that at any moment she [...]

If the name’s familiar, you most likely are steeped in mid-1980s music trivia. Digney Fignus had a modest MTV hit in 1984 called “The Girl With The Curious Hand” (beating out author David Foster Wallace’s short-story collection with its similar title by a few years). This new record has nothing to do with that, as [...]