Music
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Albums of Our Lives: Willie Nelson’s Shotgun Willie
I refused to listen to the B-side. This was, I guess, an extension or reflection of the poverty of those years after leaving my marriage and buying the 10 Willie Nelson records at a small town Goodwill store for 10…
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Brilliant Corners of Popular Amusement Coming Soon
A brand new festival called Brilliant Corners of Popular Amusement is making its way to Chicago this September, with the aim of reinventing Vaudeville in a contemporary context with some hybrid musical/carnivalesque acts. If it seems like this is a…
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Notable San Francisco 8/1-8/6
This week in San Francisco, it’s the first week of the month, so that means a lot of (free!?!!) stuff to get to. It’s also August, so here’s to some sunnier days (please?!?) to do all this stuff in. Monday…
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Albums of Our Lives: Boysetsfire’s The Day the Sun Went Out
When I listened to those songs I felt like I could do anything, and had a place to direct my aimless angers and frustrations.
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Attention All Radiohead Fans
Radiohead has just released a remix series of their latest album, King of Limbs (2011). The band has commissioned some of their favorite contemporary artists to remix tracks from the album, which are now being released every couple of weeks…
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Albums of Our Lives: Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black
Amy Winehouse was my contemporary—exactly my age, 27, when she was found dead at her London home on July 23.
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Albums of Our Lives: Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut
From the moment that music and literature convened in my family’s suburban rec room, the one soundproofed with mustard shag carpeting, nothing was ever the same. I’m talking about the liner notes to a curious song called “Wuthering Heights”…
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Pop Strategies, Political Ends
John Maus converses with BOMBLOG about his recently released album. Topics include utopia, isolation and collaboration, the “language of pop,” lyrics as an afterthought, gender as an effect of language, Minnesota, and more. Stick with the philosophy-dense interview and the…
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Albums of Our Lives: Sound of Genesis’ Journey to the Moon
The Space Age drifted all around me: Major Matt Mason toys in various heroic poses on the basement floor, plastic red-and-blue rockets ascending and landing, the interstellar playing out under the pool table as astral 45s by Eumir Deodato…
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Me-Focused Pop Music
Psychologists, nonfiction writers, journalists, concerned parents, and probably Jonathan Franzen, are increasingly focused on critiquing this “me”-focused generation, or the “cult of self-esteem” that shelters and coddles kids and invites a dangerous amount of first-person-based thinking. And this inward focus…
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When Literature and Music Become One
Bringing together different artistic domains, authors merge and connect music with their words on the Book Notes series, featured on largehearted boy. Featured now is the playlist Reif Larsen created for his debut novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.…
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Albums of Our Lives: The White Stripes’ De Stijl
When I listen to the White Stripes’ De Stijl I relive December 2001, which was when I accompanied my friend Hung on a road trip from New Orleans to Tucson.