Category: 70s

70s Classic Rock Pop Reggae soul
January 11, 2023

Remembering 1973… Sort of.

We are in one of those yearly interregnum periods with music. Starting in about October, there are fewer and fewer new releases. Unless you were Ryan Adams that is. He pushed out six albums in 2022, roughly 10 years output for most artists, with several coming at the end of the year. The upshot is that there have been too few new albums to choose […]

70s 80s-music Dream Pop Indie New Music Pop retro
December 2, 2022

Weyes Blood Makes My Heart Glow

Weyes Blood (a.k.a. Natalie Mering) is hard to categorize. The closest I can come is 70s soft rock, like Bread, but without the schlock. Perhaps, she can be compared to 70s and 80s singer-songwriters. She certainly structures her songs like Aimee Man or Jenny Lewis might; Or is she more like Sandy Denny? I sit here listening to her latest album, And in The Darkness, […]

70s 80s-music 90s Dance Music Indie Modern Rock New Music
May 16, 2022

White, Lizard, Fire, and the Bastille

The idea behind Tunes Past to Present is to talk about new music that might appeal to us, well, older folks. After you reach a certain age, it’s easy to exist in a music echo chamber. You listen to the tunes that you are most familiar with as do your friends. After a while it becomes easy to miss great bands that you would certainly […]

70s Lana Del Rey New Music soul Trip Hop
November 22, 2021

Adele Bares Her Soul while Lana Puts Us to Sleep

It will probably surprise some of my audience that I like Adele. While I’ve shared a variety of musical styles with you all, British soul has not been one of them. I had, however, acquired my taste for it back in the 1980s with the likes of Allison Moyet and, to some degree, Kirsty McColl. Both women wove soul into the pop and dance music […]

70s New Music retro
October 29, 2021

New My Morning Jacket is Retro Lazy

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I often say that some music is “retro but fresh”. What I mean by that is that while it hearkens back to earlier styles, the artists have found something new to say, or incorporated elements of modern style into the album. The latest album by My Morning Jacket, lazily labeled […]

60s 70s 80s-music Blondie Dream Pop garage New Music New Wave Power pop Shoegazer
September 27, 2021

The Shivas Make Me Feel So Good.

Back in the early 1970s, the rock music writer Lenny Kaye was asked to put together a compilation of lesser-known songs from the 60s. The result was Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era. The album featured raw, DIY music from bands practically no one had heard of, or at least heard from in a long while. This music, later tagged garage or psychedelic […]

70s 80s-music 90s Dance Music New Music
August 17, 2021

I’m Loving Jungle’s Loving in Stereo

Back in the 1970s, I would have hated Jungle’s new album Loving in Stereo. In fact, I would have hated all of Jungle’s music. That’s because they are unabashedly retro but more specifically disco and danceable R&B. At that time, I was all about progressive rock and then punk and new wave. I even had a “Disco Sucks” t-shirt. Now, I’ve grown. I’m still not […]

70s Dance Music jazz New Music
August 9, 2021

New Billie Eilish Does Not Make Me Happier Than Ever

I listened to the new Billie Eilish Album, Happier Than Ever, took notes, and promptly went on vacation. In the intervening week, reviews of the album have come out from professional critics. As I read these reviews I kept wondering if we had listened to the same album. A lot of them were very positive and, like the album, repetitive at times. It made me […]

60s 70s 90s Alt folk Classic Rock Country Modern Rock New Music Prog rock
July 16, 2021

The Heartless Bastards Are Back with Three New Songs

It’s been a while since we heard from the Heartless Bastards. Their last album was in 2015, which is far enough in the past to assume they were defunct. Then, out of nowhere, in 2020 came a new single “Revolution”. Another one came out in early 2021 and now a brand-new single just this week. The new song “Photograph” came packaged with the other two […]