Photo Credit: Danny Clinch “I’m still alive,” a 26-year-old Eddie Vedder sang on Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten back in 1991. In 2022 – as Vedder turns 58-years-old – that’s still a reality, unlike many of his alternative rock contemporaries who broke through in the lyrically ominous wave of grunge. Vedder has always seemed like one of… Read more
Photo Credit: Dan Martensen Ed Sheeran’s debut album + (Plus) – which boasted four Top 10 hits in the singer-songwriter’s home country of the UK – made him an easy target for critics; who saw him as a banal, guy-next-door writing forgettable by-the-numbers love songs. For the most part, however, Sheeran’s debut album has aged surprisingly well;… Read more
Photo Credit: Gregg Kemp Earlier this year, Elton John and Lil Nas X came together to collaborate on the song “One of Me” (they also came together to record an ad for Uber Eats; a disappointing exercise in corporatism by two stars who’ve become known for subversion, but that’s beside the point). The collaboration –… Read more
Photo Credit: Charlotte Rutherford (Content Warning: this review – through exploration of the song “Sun Goes Down” – and briefly discusses themes of suicide.) After the record-breaking success of “Old Town Road”, Lil Nas X seemed destined to be a one-hit-wonder; the hip hop-country crossover felt unmistakably like a fluke; a gimmick. With each follow-up… Read more
Photo Credit: Collages via Billboard Most people will tell you that the only success that translates financially is “success.” In music, certainly, it’s thought to be almost entirely mathematical: the more records an artist has sold, the more “successful” they are (of course, in recent decades the number of downloads and streams would also have… Read more
Photo Credit: Interscope Records It was in February of this year that Lady Gaga declared, “earth is canceled,” and it’s obvious that earth heard her. Chromatica is Gaga’s sixth album, her about-face back into the slippery and bombastic realm of Stefani Germanotta, the pop star, and her official departure to another planet. This record finds… Read more
Photo Credit: Ilya S. Savenok Other than “Elvis,” there’s probably only one other first name in rock which when spoken by itself is shorthand for not just a musical genre but also an entire subculture. Of course we mean (cue echo and deep voice): “Ooooooooozzzzzzzyyyyyyyy.” At the beginning of the Seventies, Mr. John Michael Osbourne… Read more