Category: Music

Hayes Carll, Lovers and Leavers. It’s always a promising sign when the phrase “Produced by Joe Henry” is on an album. It means the music inside will be deserving of the pinnacle of production that Henry brings to the studio. With Hayes Carll, that would never be in question. He is such a one-of-a-kind singer-songwriter...

The “supergroup” label—which critics and fans first applied to such late 1960s outfits as Cream, Blind Faith, and Crosby, Stills & Nash—has arguably since been overused. But if ever an outfit deserved the supergroup tag, it’s the Traveling Wilburys, whose members’ reputations loom so large that it’s difficult to believe their collaboration actually took place....

Joseph Arthur, The Family. Have mercy. How does someone like Joseph Arthur continually top himself? He’s one of the most free-range rockers the world has seen the past 20 years, and just when you think Arthur can’t take it any farther, wham. There he goes again. Joseph Arthur turns his laser soul on his past...

Eric Clapton, I Still Do. It’s highly likely that if Eric Clapton was only allowed to play one style of music (as if such a thing were ever possible), it would be blues. There is something about his past that makes blues the salve for all that ails him. When he tears relentlessly into songs...

Bob Dylan’s Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), which contain covers of old folk and blues tunes, should have come as no surprise to anyone who’d paid attention to his career. Way back on his eponymous 1962 debut, after all, he had headed pretty much in the same direction....

Though Tusk received generally positive reviews when it appeared in 1979, the prevailing view seems to be that it paled alongside its huge-selling immediate predecessors, 1975’s Fleetwood Mac and 1977’s Rumours. The consensus was that Lindsey Buckingham had taken over the group and buried its shimmering pop under layers of less-accessible experimental music. Fleetwood Mac’s...

Terry Adams, Talk Thelonious. Would anyone in their right mind take on Thelonious Monk for an entire album? Well, “right mind” and Terry Adams sometimes seem mutually exclusive, which is all the better for those committed to hearing great music. This album’s subtitle says it all: “NRBQ + plays Terry Adams arrangements of Thelonious Monk...

Until now, there have arguably been four essential box sets for Sinatra fans: The Song Is You, covering his early work with Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra; The Best of the Columbia Years, which documents his first great period as a soloist from 1943 to 1952; The Capitol Years, which showcases his superb work with...

Sam Butler, Raise Your Hands! Sometimes a new album comes from so far out in left field it doesn’t even show up on incoming radar. It just hits like a full force gale, and doesn’t stop making a stand and raising sand. Sam Butler has been the guitarist in the Blind Boys of Alabama for...

Folksinger Richard Farina recorded three auspicious albums with his wife Mimi (Joan Baez’s sister) in the mid 1960s and, in 1966, issued one much-talked-about novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. At the time, it looked like up for Farina himself—until two days after the book’s publication, when he died in...