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…
Welcome to the teens! The aughties have reached their end and all of us who smugly ignored 2000 and celebrated the new millennium as 2001 rolled in are psyched about the new decade. Why? Because a new decade means that it’s prime time for retrospectives on the last decade! So, just in time for the…
When I was first invited to submit content to Earn This, I saw it as an opportunity to express some of my worldview and to attack personal hotbutton issues in the context of discussions about arts and entertainment, specifically music. My eagerness led me to kick things off with two didactic soapbox stands in a…
Goodness knows there are more active musical artists today than there were thirty years ago – or five years ago, or yesterday. Just like the global population, the “band population” has a birth rate that exceeds its mortality rate. (Don’t ask for an analogue for shifting line-ups or new group formation – it gets gruesome.)…
Americans today don’t give a hoot about progressive rock. Our parents grew up on Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd; the lucky ones collected vinyl from Kansas, ELP, and King Crimson. Those heirlooms have clearly not trickled down yet here the way they have in experimental music havens scattered around Japan and Northern and Western Europe.…
Last night, the Goo Goo Dolls played the NorVa, a music club in downtown Norfolk, VA. I’ve grown up listening to the band on the radio, but never knew anything more about them. That is the perspective from which I will review their show. Names of band members have been fabricated based solely on…
Common courtesy! Here I’ve been yammering for months before properly introducing myself. Without a handshake or a how’s-your-father, I would have soapboxed myself to sleep while you smiled kindly. Please pardon me, good fellows and fellowesses. This site’s authors have set a precedent of revealing their bias to their readers up front. I have not…
Well I guess it began towards the end of 1996 when I received a call from [head of Magna Carta Records] Pete Morticelli and [head of Shrapnel Records] Mike Varney who wanted to put together a couple of “Super Groups” (for lack of a better term!). One turned into the Black Light Syndrome project with…