Author: Bill Bentley

For music lovers, it’s always a kick to pick the favorite albums of the year. So much so that it’s twice as fun to do it twice—once at the end of June and now in mid-December. All the music mentioned below is an exhilarating and often educational ride on the sonic highway, guaranteed to get...

Time to clear the decks with a year-end round-up of albums and a novel released in 2014 that made it through the deluge. Each and every one of these 40 titles is worthy of interested ears and open eyes. And don’t forget to pay respect to Father Time on December 13 (12/13/14). It’s the last...

Pieta Brown, Paradise Outlaw. Is there a way to capture true musical transcendence in words? If so, let it happen for Pieta Brown, one of America’s treasures, someone who is still moving towards finding a fitting audience. Fortunately, Brown’s new album, co-produced by stealth partner Bo Ramsey, is the kind of creation where no explanation...

Paul Butterfield’s Better Days, Live at Winterland Ballroom. “Without Paul I don’t know if a lot of us would be here tonight…” That’s the way Bill Graham introduced Butterfield and his then-new band Better Days at this 1973 concert in San Francisco. Truer words were never spoken. When the Paul Butterfield Blues Band first burst...

Beck, Morning Phase. From the Silver Lake street boy wandering through Los Angeles on the city buses to worldwide conqueror of all things musical, Beck is one of the great enigmas of the past quarter century. At first he was like Woody Guthrie’s illegitimate son, except he specialized in a boom box instead of an...

Eden Brent, Jigsaw Heart. There are times in an artist’s life where they’re in exactly the right place at the right time. It doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but when it does the music they make takes flight. This Mississippi woman, who mixes blues, jazz and a lot of other styles into...

Garland Jeffreys, Truth Serum. When it is time to find the rock singers who started in the ’60s, stayed the course and never lost sight of the spark that first ignited their soul and still, to this day, live in that world of glowing inspiration, Garland Jeffreys is right there on top. On his new...

This week’s column celebrates the second anniversary of Bentley’s Bandstand. It’s still amazing to see how much moving music is being released, in all different kinds of categories. As the record business continues to shift and splinter, it seems like musicians themselves are becoming more and more dedicated to finding a way to share their...

Dawes, Stories Don’t End. Stealthlike, Dawes has become the new American band possessed by true greatness. The Southern Californians have two previous albums which pointed this way, but on Stories Don’t End they’ve headed off on a striking path to putting their names in the history books and inspiring gererations of music fans for a...

Paul McCartney, Kisses on the Bottom. When you get older the Bucket List gets to be much more luminous. Whatever it is you’ve been putting off in life, it’s best time to get to it. No doubt Paul McCartney has had these songs running around his expansive mind since his parents used to do them...