Swinging Modern Sounds #69: Meaning Yes
When in need of comfort, it’s always worth trying close reading.
Rick Moody
110 posts
Swinging Modern Sounds #68: A Way of Life
The thing about Scott Tuma is: the immense pathos of the recordings... Almost no one, frankly, is allowed to sound this sad and continue to have a musical career.
Swinging Modern Sounds #67: The Franchise Restaurants of Song
Musician Owen Ashworth on his new album, Nephew in the Wild, literary influences, self-expression in songwriting, and how becoming a father has changed his work.
Swinging Modern Sounds #66: The Library of Babel
I want to propose a fine recent example of the gesamtkuntsler, the total artist, in Paul de Jong, the cellist, composer, collagist, archivist, and former member of the band The Books.
Swinging Modern Sounds #65: Tragedy Plus Time
Jesse Malin is a lifer in a business that rarely features lifers anymore.
Swinging Modern Sounds #64: Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack!
Many of you will not want to believe that “Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack!” by the Californian punk band the Urinals, is the greatest song ever written, but that is simply because there is some kind of vise or blood-occluding mechanism attached to the thinking and feeling part of your limbic region.
Swinging Modern Sounds #63: It’s Supposed to Be Bad
Rick Moody emails with Scott Timberg, author of the new book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, about Bob Dylan's new Sinatra covers album, the need for cultural gatekeepers, and the "slippery sub genre" of bad-on-purpose art.
Swinging Modern Sounds #62: Stillness as Metaphor
I am after a music that renders life as it is, and which invites in the intermittent pulsations of life.
Swinging Modern Sounds #61: Songs for the Alliterative at Heart
Michael Hearst has come a long way from the guy who played plastic wind instruments on Seventh Avenue, to an admirably creative and original adulthood.
Swinging Modern Sounds #60: On Mentorship
In an empirically-preoccupied world, mentorship appears to be unscientific, impossible to quantify, and perhaps even sentimental.
Swinging Modern Sounds #59: Not a Folk Singer
There is a lot to learn from Vashti Bunyan, therefore, about how to live a self-designed life, and how to be unapologetic and decisive about the habit of songwriting.
Swinging Modern Sounds #58: Crowdsourcing
Music-obsessive activity, in general, appears to be about music. You could, on the surface, mistake it for being about music. But in fact what it is about is memory and love.