When was the last time you heard a band credit their breakthrough to PureVolume? It almost feels as if that site was a phase, something you love in high school and then grow out of. Nowadays we’ve got oodles of options like Spotify, Pandora, and MoonPlayer to help us find new music and Bandcamp, SoundCloud,…
I was very lucky to be offered a lovely piece of property to build a career on. I started building a house on it, but it wasn’t necessarily a house I would want to live in. So I ripped down that house, and I worked with these great lumberjacks to build a really cool cabin…
That Matt Nathanson has hips that take no breaks. And he completely won me over last night. From the broad perspective I’d gained by hearing “Come on Get Higher” on the radio a few times, I was sure he was a pretty boy with a guitar in the vein of, let’s say, Rob Thomas in…
“I know what I’m needing And I don’t want to waste more time I’m in a New York state of mind” -Billy Joel, New York State of Mind Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5) There’s a beautiful scene near the end of the 2009 movie Adventureland in which Jesse Eisenberg takes a bus-ride to New York City,…
Rating: ★★★ (out of five) Piano Man is such a satisfying album in part because it’s so obviously a full-hearted, emotionally-draining effort. That makes it less surprising — though no less disappointing — that Streetlife Serenade sounds exhausted and depleted. Streetlife Serenade crystallizes the faint western hints on Piano Man and ends up with a…
Rating: ★★★★½ (out of 5) The first minute and a half of Billy Joel’s sophomore album is tremendously revealing, and also a little bit deceiving. The most obvious development in that opening minute and a half is Joel’s tremendously colorful sound provided by a diverse instrumentation. Where Cold Spring Harbor relied almost entirely on piano…
Rating: *** (out of five) Billy Joel’s solo debut, which he released at the age of 22 after taking part in a few failed bands, is something of a mixed bag. Compositionally, this is a 4-star album, showcasing a young songwriter coming into his own emotionally and poetically. Performance-wise, this is a 2-star album, with…
Billy Joel is my favorite musical artist of all time. I’ve enjoyed his music literally longer than I can remember, and I still do. There’s a Billy Joel CD in my car’s CD player. That’s not to say he’s always been my “current favorite” — I’ve fallen in love with plenty of other bands and…
Due to my summer-heavy work cycle drastically opening up, I’ll have a lot more free time during September than I have in many months. One way I plan to take advantage of this (along with quite a bit of doing nothing, reading, and catching up on TV shows) is to write a bit more for…
Suck It and See: 4 stars (out of 5) One of these days, Alex Turner and the Arctic Monkeys will release a bad album. At least, that’s what history and convention would tell us. One might have predicted that the mediocrity would have come with Favourite Worst Nightmare, the follow-up to their debut monster Whatever…