I have a soft spot for mood music, particularly songs that can be played quietly and help me focus on work instead of on the sounds of two construction projects down the street. Jack Blackfelt, “your generation X-Y JaZz Guy,” has a great early-to-mid 20th century jazz
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we get sick of our colloquial phrases and thus a contest is born: Invent a bon mot for everlasting fame.
Masters of the musical universe who put songs in singers’ mouths, I am just sick about this track—thank you for this artist, this song! My window is open and the neighbors are torturing their cats just to have something else to listen to. As of this scribbling, iTunes reports
Four short memories of youth inspired by music randomly selected from the Hype Machine’s most popular tracks, January 10, 2007: “Black Wave, Bad Vibrations,” the Arcade Fire I left for college determined to be a new person: smarter and more interesting. Behind me I’d leave the corpse of
The holidays are when someone died. Or a grandfather got worse instead of better in the hospital, or a friend drank too much and had a car accident while driving home from a party. The phone call comes on a weeknight. There’s a long silence after the news is
By Christmas Eve, I never feel like I’ve bought enough. The arms race catches up with me, it tugs at my anxiety and my wallet. At some point on the 24th I end up at a stripmall bookstore in Connecticut or North Carolina wondering what I can walk out
Dear writers, I’m so enjoying your love and devotion to Star Jones. I hope your love for her is not ending. Now you posted something insightful regarding people with a vision disability. Do blind people dream in pictures? Thank you for caring and posing such an important question. But
We occasionally invite guests to review the best songs we’ve discovered that week while surfing around the mp3-blog universe. This week, I invited my mother. Ann Baldwin loves music new and old but doesn’t pay much attention to what the PR people are shilling. As she told
To butter or not to butter: That is the question, and gluttons with high cholesterol should know the correct answer. But when friends organize a gastronomic tour of Paris, who am I to say no?
I went to college in central Maine, a small school on a hill overlooking a rusted-over textile town where Richard Russo used to teach (the town’s river and shirt factory popped up on the cover of Empire Falls). The winters were long, the springs were soggy, and there
