swinging modern sounds
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Swinging Modern Sounds #43: Formative Experiences
Often, I find, the musical experiences that have had the most lasting impact on me were not immediately apparent to me at the time.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead
They Might Be Giants had that quality, the glorious-about-human-life quality on December 30th
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Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
Bands, those funny little plans, that never go quite right, is a line from a really great song by Mercury Rev (“Holes,” from Deserter’s Songs), a song that rightly probes the mixed feelings that you might have about bands had…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #40: A Miscellany of Musical Thoughts That Will Not Otherwise Appear
From June through December of 2012, I kept a diary of musical impressions that didn’t develop into longer pieces.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #39: Interview within an Interview
In this piece, we are not at any time meant to use the word greatness to refer to a band from Boston, Big Dipper, best known during the late eighties, for the three fine studio albums, the last of which,…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #38: Dinner at Martha’s House
If you did not come of age as a listener to the popular song between 1975 and 1979, you cannot entirely understand the revolution that took place among women.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #37: The Age of Fine Arrangements
Cuddle Magic, in my opinion, is the band most likely to succeed, these days, if by succeed you mean getting a leg up, surpassing the modest touring-all-the-time-not-making-very-much-money-hustling-constantly model of the thing.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #36: This Is Bob Dylan to Me
The Rumpus has made it possible for me to talk to a lot of musicians I might not otherwise have met, but meeting Mike Watt, founding member of The Minutmen, fIREHOSE, Dos, etc., has to be the most memorable encounter…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #35: The Location of the Soul
Since 2005, Larkin Grimm has made four albums, the first of which are unvarnished howls from the world of psychedelic folk.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #34: Excesses of Penis
The early, formative period of rock and roll criticism produced three great and indelible voices, three voices that have gone on to influence every writer who has written about popular music in the years since. Those three voices belong to…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #33: The Sweet Spot
For an entire decade, between 1975 and 1985, Brian Eno could do no wrong. In fact, even for the four or five years before 1975 he could do no wrong.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #32: An Interview with Mike Doughty
Mike Doughty is a singer-songwriter of a particularly urban sort, whose compositions, though guitar-based and often not terribly far from the ideal of the busker, are, nonetheless, cross-pollinated by just about everything audible in New York City…