Anyone who has searched for music beyond the top of the charts has discovered wonderful worlds of talent, including many artists who should have been contenders for greater popularity. The fun in The Best Music is comparing your list of should-have-beens with the author's. Nigel Williamson and collaborators are catholic in taste, searching obscure corners of folk and prog, blues and metal, Americana and psychedelia for forgotten nuggets-at least forgotten by younger generations. Some of the bands scored hits (Laura Nyro, Rotary Connection) and some developed cult followings in their day (Pretty Things, Can); some were respected outside the boundaries of rock (John Fahey, Albert Ayler). The essays are smart and convincing, making you wish you had followed the careers of David Ackles, Dory Previn and a dozen others. (David Luhrssen)
Remember when bands cared about albums as an art form? Instead of
slapping together a dozen tracks because, hey, they'll just end up on
everyone's iPod shuffle anyway, musicians considered how their songs
might congeal as a whole or form some sort of dram
Elvis Costello's frequent collaborator T-Bone Burnett produced Secret, Profane & Sugarcane,
an Americana-inflected album working with country and folk traditions
for images of sawdust floors set to mandolin and fiddle. Costello
intended one s
You wouldn’t expect to find T-bone and sirloin dinners at a place with stool seating and a location next to a shop hawking cell phones and cigarettes. But one of the city’s most evocatively named eateries, ZaZa Steak & Lemonade (4919 W. Capito
The enduring fantasy of older men is that a gorgeous
young woman will fall in love with them, find them sexually arousing
and long to imbibe their wisdom while sitting at their feet. That
fantasy is the spring driving Woody Allen's often-hilarious f
Away We Go, a droll comedy-cum-drama by director Sam Mendes (American Beauty),
perceptively explores the lives of more-or-less ordinary 30-somethings
lost in a world without much meaning. Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Bu
