80s-music Alt folk Dance Music Indie New Music Roots soul
January 4, 2022

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

In 1967, Sandy Denny, then with the band The Strawbs, asked the question “Who Knows Where the Time Goes? ” Certainly not me. Just in the last year, I recovered from brain surgery and retired from the computer tech world. I then started the podcast “Tunes Past to Present”, with the working title of “New Music for Old Farts.” That project was abandoned a few […]

Country New Music Punk
December 13, 2021

Sarah Shook Goes All WTF

I’ve made no secret of how much I love Sarah Shook and the Disarmers. Sidelong was one of my favorite albums of the late 2010s, Years was an excellent follow up (no sophomore slump here), and her set at the Great Blue Heron Festival was one of the highlights of my entire 2019 summer. So, when she recently started dropping some new tunes I was […]

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 […]

90s Dream Pop New Music podcast
November 19, 2021

Back to the Beach

I’ve been traveling for the past two weeks. Part of that time was spent in a beach house. By that I mean a real house near the beach but also with the new Beach House EP, Once Twice Melody. If this EP is a harbinger of the next Beach House album, then I am happy beyond belief. I’ve never hidden my fondness for Dream Pop. […]

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 […]

80s-music 90s Alternative Dream Pop Goth
October 26, 2021

Kaelan Mikla Under the Cold Icelandic Northern Lights

How does one describe Kaelan Mikla? 80s inspired synth pop? Yep, there’s that. Atmospheric dance music? Certainly. Goth? Very much so. Proving once again that weird but great music comes out of Iceland (remember The Sugarcubes?), Kaelan Mikla, produces an amazing mix of dark, strange, and mysterious music that can best be likened to the most goth elements of Siouxsie and Banshees, Bauhaus, and Nine […]

Country New Music Southern Rock
October 19, 2021

Zac Brown Band Makes Comeback Sort Of

The Zac Brown Band, and its eponymous lead singer, are something of an anomaly in modern country music. Super star country artists tend to fall into two buckets – Americana and country pop. The latter is the successor to the Nashville Sound that proliferated in the 1970s and 80s. Zac Brown is, arguably, not modern country. Much of the band’s output is actually southern rock. […]

80s-music 90s Alternative
September 29, 2021

Remembering Kirsty MacColl

I first heard Kirsty MacColl in the mid-1980s. She had recorded a very synthpop version of Billy Bragg’s “New England” and it was making the rounds of metro New York City clubs as well as the local new music station WLIR. Kirsty’s version was different enough that it was hard to tell if it was the same song. She had a voice that was as, […]

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 […]