Henry Carrigan

Does anybody really listen to James Taylor anymore? Like Salinger's Catcher in the Rye – which was an eye-opener at age 15 but a yawning eye-closer at 50 – Taylor's music conjures up a time and a place of youthful love, when the world might have seemed simpler.

In 1977, Rita Coolidge released her version of Jackie Wilson's "(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher" on her album Anytime…Anywhere. Coolidge's sweet mid-tempo version rings as a testimony to the power of a love that transcends the disappointments of the world.

There’s not a more joyful, blissful album that embraces the perils of winter, the vagaries of loss, and the ominous underbelly of looking-back-wistfully than Birds of Chicago’s latest, Real Midnight. Songwriter JT Nero captures the dark underbelly of our happiness, and the ways that the darkness overtakes us

First we must ask, do we need a new book about George Jones? After all, Jones told stories about himself in his 1996 autobiography, written with Tom Carter, I Lived to Tell It All (Villard). His and Tammy Wynette's daughter, Georgette, settled some scores with her father in

If Dan Fogelberg, Neil Young, and Harry Chapin put their musical genes together to create a musician in their image, they would have come up with Garrett Sale. Like his creators, his songs weave to together a straight-ahead purity of heart tangled up by loss, despair, hope, and love, telling

I stopped listening to the Eagles, one of my favorite bands in the early and mid-70s, when Hotel California came out. Maybe it was the loss of Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner and the addition of Joe Walsh—whom I had seen in the early '70s when he opened