1. I rarely remember my dreams, but the music of Brian Wilson figured in one of the few I retained.By the mid-1980s my Beach Boys fandom had reached a peak. I had embraced early deep tracks like “The Lonely Sea” and “Kiss Me, Baby.” I fully bought into the strange glories of 1977’s Love You (which, as the great …
Thank you, citizens of East Portland. I received your good wishes as I was driving from Corning to Williamstown, whilst listening to the Cubs until the rain delay. As I rose up into the Berkshires—hills still coated in snow, forests rich with birches, stunning vistas everywhere—up on shuffle popped “Fox on the Run.” As good …
RIP Burt Bacharach. The 95 year old songwriter passed away Thursday. My favorite Bacharach deep cut is “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself.” There are many fine recordings of this tune, (such as this stunning one by Marcia Hines) but Tommy Hunt’s was produced by Burt himself. Burt was one of the …
[Editor’s note: Below you will find a review of Beck’s Midnight Vultures written by Tom Fredrickson on December 6, 1999 for Pandemonium Online. Upon recent listens, the author has found that Midnight Vultures “holds up and sounds better than ever on the sound system mine has grown into.” Thus, to celebrate one of Beck’s finer …
Buddy the Cat. Male longhair tan and black tabby Maine coon cat with a beautiful heart-shaped face and emerald-green eyes. Any information concerning his whereabouts appreciated. Contact us at BuddyTheCat.com. Please do not chase! As an outdoor cat, Buddy has acquired necessary survival skills. If cornered, he has been known to leap, claws-first, at a …
I’ve been slipping on my Sinatra surveillance. Turns out a remixed version of Nice ‘n’ Easy came out this spring. If you are mercifully unafflicted by audiophile disease this won’t matter, but for me this is a great improvement. (The original had too much reverb, among other problems.) Hear “You go To My Head”—surely one …
The Joseph of the Nativity story is a cipher: one of those New Testament characters whose very blankness seems to invite us to step into their sandals and ask what we would do if we were witness to such strange events. It wasn’t until I became an adoptive father that I suddenly (if narcissistically) saw …
You need to see this: Frida! Bjorn’s Ovation Breadwinner! Frida’s satin hot pants and charmingly awkward dancing and blithe overconfidence! That video was discovered in an Internet breadcrumb trail—there needs to be a word for that experience (start with site A, which takes you to video B, which leads to chatroom C, etc.); maybe wormholing?—with …