Swinging Modern Sounds #104: Paradise
For me, performance is a conversation with the sacred and timeless, the sublime.
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Rick Moody
Swinging Modern Sounds: Observations on the Occasion of a 100th Column
The clash of opinions about music is music itself.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #103: Song Turned Blue
I’m not writing confessionals; I’m trying to write hooks.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #102: Ten Influential Albums
Music columnist Rick Moody writes on ten albums that influenced him through his life.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #101: A Really Big Band
Zappa, on the other hand, was never sentimental.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #99: One of These Days It’s Gonna Set You Free
I’m just being an artist. I’m just being creative.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #98: Against Jazz
Nate Wooley, the reason for this piece, is a essential force in the contemporary music.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #97: It’s a Wonder We Can Even Feed Ourselves
What follows, then, is a sort of first-thought-best-thought discussion of MORE BLOOD, MORE TRACKS.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #96: Voices of Displacement
Thank God music has wings and it can fly wherever, even countries we can’t reach.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #95: Omnidirectional
If you love this album as much as I think you’re going to, make sure to tell a friend.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #94: I Think I Might
This is a deep dive, therefore, into the site of brilliant, uncompromising contemporary work.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #93: Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy
I see both subjectivity and objectivity as constructions.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #92: Perfection
You will now find some version of the list below. It is imperfect.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #91: In Four Equal Parts
Part of what makes Belly important and lasting, that is, is that they really think and feel a lot.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #90: Haikus for Pets
If you like Owen’s haikus, and even if you don’t, you’ll really love his album.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #89: In Praise of Tom Petty
Because Petty was so prolific and so popular, the intense craftsmanship of his body of work has been hiding in plain sight.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #88: Music for the Masses
The interview, like the project Iso Omena, is both funny and revealing.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #87: The Low and Dishonest Years
[T]hese are albums to distract you from the horrors taking place daily in the theater of American political life.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #86: Transcendentalism!
The point is not to control the medium, the point is to interact with the medium, to find out what’s natural to it and what’s native to it and work with that, respond to that.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #85: The Introduction of the Pitch
It seems like it’s the point of this piece to draw attention to the fact that these instruments are wounded; it shouldn’t be something that tries to hide it.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #84: Music for Spaceships
Perhaps space is an inevitable resting place for music of this kind, because time is completely different when conceived of in the vastness of space, and not only because of relativity.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #83: On George
There really is not a day that doesn’t go by that I don’t stop at some moment and think about George Harrison.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #82: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark: A Symposium
…yet she did what she did, and in the process made the most successful album of her career.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #81: On Cultural Preservation
The Lost Boys had their moment in the media, but these people, these survivors, not boys at all and not lost now either, are still here, living lives, growing and changing and thinking and reflecting.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #80: I Just Don’t Want to Wait Around Anymore
Mulcahy’s Possum is, like the animal titularly referred to, a sly and imaginative affair…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #79: The Rhythm Section Speaks
Maybe there is something important about rock and roll now, rock and roll the neglected past tense of a musical form, and that is that it is the music of adults.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #78: Conceived as a Playlist
Shadowbahn […] is among the most unusual, and most extreme, in a literary career that has often been marked by its unpredictability.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #77: People Give Me Things, Part One
[T]he thing about receiving music from other people is this: there is always some grace associated with the transaction.
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The Rumpus Interview with Abraham Burickson
Rick Moody talks with Abraham Burickson, Artistic Director of Odyssey Works, a San Francisco-based theater company whose works are designed for an audience of one.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #76: American Songbag
In the broadest sense, I think of this work as being about the stuff of life: excitement, love, disappointment, pride, nature, cities, war, loneliness, work, class distinction, communication.
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