There’s no shortage of terrible covers out there, and the vast majority of them usually fall into one of two categories: Overly faithful and vastly inferior to the original and totally pointless, making you just want to hear the original Overly experimental, wrecking the original, and just as pointless as the first kind of bad [...]

Weeding through something unremarkable to find the one little gem to turn over and over again is kind of a talent. Lots of people try to do it, of course, but it takes a special artistic mind to spot one tiny glint on a huge ocean and head towards it. Blah blah blah metaphors. “So [...]

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 [...]

In the spring of 2002, I went with some friends to Lisner Auditorium here in DC to see David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell do tag-team readings. They started out on the serious side, but slowly moved into their funnier material, and by the end, we were doubled-over laughing. At the center of it all was [...]

Quiet music, mostly with acoustic guitars. A frail-voiced singer. Very strong Christian themes and subjects. Songs peppered with the words joy, celebration and love. The ingredients of The Innocence Mission are ones that should add up to something unbearably precious, and I don’t doubt for a second that there are people that couldn’t distinguish between [...]

It is May 2000. The Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco. The fledgling indie-pop band with whom I play is in the midst of a brief west coast jaunt. We are killing time after load in with our Oakland, CA tourmate, who goes by the wonderful moniker From Bubblegum To Sky. Four young women from [...]

My feelings about Belle & Sebastian circa 1997 could pretty accurately be described as obsession, bordering on sickness. I once yelled at Stuart Murdoch and Isobel Campbell out a car window in Athens, Georgia. True story! ANYway, one of the things that I loved about them in the late 90′s was the quality of their [...]

STACKS HQ is still very much buzzing from Wilco’s performance last week at the Music Center at Strathmore in Maryland. If you’re a fan of the band and have the opportunity, this current tour is the ideal time to catch them. The band has been performing extended sets, averaging 3 hours in length and featuring [...]

The audio’s been removed, but there’s plenty more where that came from coming up. Subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Hype Machine, or follow us on Twitter. 100-81 | 80-61 | 60-41 | 40-21 | 20-1 20. Sufjan Stevens, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” (2002) As much as we all want to [...]

The audio’s been removed, but there’s plenty more where that came from coming up. Subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Hype Machine, or follow us on Twitter. 100-81 | 80-61 | 60-41 | 40-21 | 20-1 40. TV On The Radio, “Halfway Home” (2008) This song feels so deliberately and fussily constructed that [...]