I wasn’t much into Saint Etienne before about 1998. I hadn’t yet developed a taste for treacly pop or learned how to forgive bluntly shallow lyrics, and the songs I’d heard of theirs like “He’s On The Phone” were more pop than I could take at the time. I can’t remember why I gave their [...]

Frente!, trailblazers in annoyingly punctuated band names, were best known for their beautiful, fragile cover of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”, and had a lot of chart success in their native Australia and indie success in the US with the album that followed up that single, Marvin The Album. But as much as I loved [...]

Almost exactly 20 years ago, I cut a morning class with my college roommate Scott and my friend Molly, went across the street and bought a copy of Achtung Baby, came back to the dorm, ordered a pizza and took in the album from beginning to end. I was deeply disappointed. The Joshua Tree was [...]

A lot of my “that’s where I heard it first stories” revolve around record stores because, frankly, I used to spend a lot a lot of time in them. This story is no different. The same night I found (with an extraordinary sense of glee that has stuck with me for, what, nearly 20 years [...]

For the last half century or so, the British music press has generally loved two things: music that sounds unmistakably British, and music that sounds unmistakably American. And when I was in London in the fall of 1993, just after Suede’s rise, but before Parklife and Britpop dominance, the English music press loved Grant Lee [...]

It’s kind of tough to write about music when we live in the music-saturated world of the internet. It’s hard to know what’s classic and what isn’t; hard to know if what you’re writing about is something that’s universally known among anyone interested in music history or if it would be a discovery beyond just [...]

Valentine’s day is a test for those of us who are both cynics and romantics. The cynic in us wants nothing to do with the day, knowing that it’s a purely commercial holiday that so many folks feel forced into celebrating. But the romantic in us loves it: it’s a day when you get free [...]

Tribute albums are usually pretty spotty affairs. The vast majority of the songs tend to either try too hard to radically change the song or barely change it at all. The best you can hope for is one or two truly inspired readings surrounded by songs where the covering artists at least seem to actually [...]

Fifteen (!) years ago, there was a question being asked of English music fans that was so pervasive, it even made it into the UK national news: “Who do you like better, Blur or Oasis?” At least, I’m told that this was a question asked a lot. The only personal knowledge I have of it [...]

In the summer of 1995, Pulp was just about to hit their peak. After over a decade of toiling away in obscurity, their previous album His ‘n’ Hers had been a critical smash and a big seller, even if huge stardom eluded them. But their new single “Common People” was riding high in the British [...]