Chuck Prophet - The beating heart
On Chuck Prophet's gripping 2000 album The Hurting Business, one track stood out from the rest. On "Dyin' All Young", amidst a soulful but depressed groove, Prophet sang of a mother's anguish upon discovering her son's fatal drug overdose. "Something
Kelly Willis - Nothing to fear
Kelly Willis is out of control. And she loves it that way.
"Life is really easy when you just let things go out of control," she says. "You have to lose control to have control. That's sort of a theme of my life right now.
Beth Orton - No more an orphan girl
Beth Orton is the most genial kind of diffident interview subject: She dislikes the process, but entertains every question, and will readily cop to that fact that, even when the subject is herself, she doesn't have all the answers.
"I feel people's disappointment is palpable
Amy Rigby - 18 Again: An Anthology
Whatever the medium -- literature, film, music -- it's rare enough for an artist to forge a truly distinct, expansive voice, a personal style at once immediately recognizable and endlessly flexible. Rarer still, to discover this gift in one's late 30s, a period viewed all too typically by
Fred Neil - Bleecker & Macdougal
He's the answer to the question, "Who wrote for Buddy Holly, was backed up live by Bob Dylan, and recorded with Gram Parsons?" The late Fred Neil was a unique figure, associated, as the title of this reissued 1965 Elektra LP suggests, with the '60s
International Submarine Band - Safe At Home
Gram Parsons imagined a countercultural fusion of country, soul and rock 'n' roll he called Cosmic American Music, but ultimately his approach to making records was too haphazard and intuitive for a vision as grand and calculated as all that. Wedding the vulnerability of "Dark End Of