Grant Alden

Near the bottom of my stack of indifferently folded black t-shirts rests a relic from 2003, a wry marker from the career of the late Nashville singer-songwriter David Olney. “David Olney's World Tour of Nashville,” the back reads, listing six performances over six days. Those Music City shows,

Twenty-five years ago Mary Gauthier was a singing chef — a novelty from Baton Rouge, who was trying to find her voice and hold on to her sobriety in deepest Boston — gambling there might be an audience willing to listen to an album of hard-won songs titled Drag Queens In Limousines.

The curse of Linda Thompson is that she is known principally for the exquisite agony of 1982's Shoot Out the Lights, the divorce album she recorded and toured behind with soon-to-be-ex-husband, Richard. And for her voice, no small gift but rendered undependable by a condition called spasmodic dysphonia.

Sometimes — this morning — one is given to suspect that we are little more than aggregations of the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, stories that haunt and inform and seek temporarily to connect or distance us. Those are the best songs, in any event, the true stories, even

A measured portion of boredom remains an essential part of any artist's regular diet. Getting that portion right is tricky. Too much smacks of indolence and indulgence; too little suggests an unseemly devotion to career over craft. Our late sequestration during two years of COVID provided an overabundance

These days, alas, there is no danger of wobbling late Friday night 10 blocks over to Peaches Records and looking for love in the cut-out bins. (Oh, but that Legendary Christine Perfect album.) The habit never entirely leaves, even as it becomes more difficult to justify what sneaks through the