Swinging Modern Sounds #104: Paradise
For me, performance is a conversation with the sacred and timeless, the sublime.
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Posts Tagged: folk music
Everything Is Happening All of the Time: Talking with Sven Ratzke
Sven Ratzke discusses his new show, WHERE ARE WE NOW.
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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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I Stop Somewhere Waiting for You
Your words feel like shapes, like wooden blocks to clear out of the way.
...moreAlbum of the Week: Loma by Loma
“[T]here was an unspoken feeling of urgency, and a sense that a big change was coming for all of us, and I think we all tried to channel that into the work.”
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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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Finishing What You Start: A Conversation with Musician Matt Kivel
Matt Kivel discusses his latest release, Fires on the Plain, the ways in which cinema inspires his music, and how he reads his critics.
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Echoes of Winter: Revisiting Inside Llewyn Davis
The tale of the self-made man is as much a myth as that of a cat having nine lives.
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Sound Takes: Until I Live & Rumpus Video Premiere
Featuring an exclusive video premiere from The National Parks and a review of their latest album Until I Die.
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A Dying Art: Carrie & Lowell and Elegiac Practice
Elegy cannot protect us. It is merely a contained space for us to prowl, and to prowl in a performative manner.
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Sound Takes: Dark Bird is Home
He’s a poet, ambiguous and layered, a lyricist able to make listeners feel something they can’t always explain, what I believe a song worth listening to should do.
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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.
...moreMark Rogers & Mary Byrne Bring Their Sly Soulful Music to WNYU
Prior to leaving on their summer UK tour, Mark Rogers & Mary Byrne appeared on WNYU.org on May 4. Rick Moody wrote about the duo in his piece on “Stillness as Metaphor,” outlining the beautifully massive range their music exhibits in the course of its exploration of a folk sensibility. Their first official music video, […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Cultural Constellations of Agee and Smith
But who said a chronology had to be straightforward?
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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.
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RIP Pete Seeger
Folk-music legend Pete Seeger passed away at 94 yesterday. In his memory, we’d like to highlight Nell Boeschenstein’s Rumpus essay about him, “Pete Seeger: The Voice That Belongs to the Body.” But lately it had become clear that Pete is no relic. This 90-year-old man who was straightening the piles of holiday cards in need […]
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Albums of Our Lives: Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel
The cover was a black and white close-up of a woman, her hair windswept, her name scrawled above her in a font usually reserved for truck stops: Linda Ronstadt. I’d retrieved the album and its torn shell of Columbia Record Club packaging from a stack of unwanted mail on the credenza, and I stood now […]
...moreThe New Young Folk Singer You’re Gonna Want to Hear
It may have taken Jessica Pratt five years to get her debut album released after she recorded it, but judging by the well-deserved welcome mat critics are rolling out for her, it may have been worth the wait. SF Weekly‘s Byard Duncan profiles the folk singer, who performs at the Great American Music Hall in […]
...moreWhat’s behind the Music
In his article “Forgetting the Roots: Does it Matter Who Makes Folk Music?” Taylor Coe explores the importance of history for folk musicians and how their creation stories can influence their effect on listeners. Some prefer a little more Strictly Bluegrass when it comes to Americana music. “Sometimes the music wins—sometimes ‘authenticity’ doesn’t matter. For instance, […]
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