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Picking the Green Path: A Conversation with Ansley Simpson
The last few years have been a transformative time for Anishinaabe singer-songwriter Ansley Simpson. Even before the release of her debut album, Breakwall, Simpson had been awarded the...
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I Stop Somewhere Waiting for You
He wears a Greek fisherman’s cap, the kind John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie wore, and though you don’t know him, it suits him. He’s a salt-of-the-earth type entertainer, a people-meeter, friend-maker,...
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Totally and Brutally Honest: Talking with Amanda Petrusich
Amanda Petrusich is the author of Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records. A staff writer for the New Yorker, her writing has appeared many other...
View ArticleSwinging Modern Sounds #92: Perfection
The listing impulse in music criticism is, well, hard to like. Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity, ruined it, perhaps, at a time when it was going to be ruined anyway by reason of overuse. The...
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Swinging Modern Sounds #94: I Think I Might
My guess is that for most people who write or think about music one of the most precious events in a year is the sudden discovery of a musician or performer that one knew nothing about, who raises some...
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An East African Girl and Her White Troubadours
I am black, an East African immigrant daughter, a queer girl who loves music. Most often, I have loved rock music. My teens and twenties were outlined by indie folk, folk rock, pop rock, and baroque...
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Swinging Modern Sounds #97: It’s a Wonder We Can Even Feed Ourselves
The news cycle is such that the world, it seems, has entirely turned over since late autumn, when Bob Dylan released the various anthologies (plural because of multiple formats) entitled More Blood,...
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Swinging Modern Sounds: Observations on the Occasion of a 100th Column
1. Music has changed a lot since I started writing the Swinging Modern Sounds column in 2009. 2. For example, when I started the column I was still primarily listening to music on compact disc. 3. I...
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He’s Funny That Way
The first verse settles in slowly. Bob Dylan’s scratchy croon leads a piano and strings while Peter and I sway in each other’s arms. Our backdrop, a wall of beer barrels, rises above a wood-slatted...
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All the Tired Horses
In the hazy first weeks after my daughter’s birth, the only song I could think to sing was the simplest. At just two lines long and repeated for almost three minutes, it’s the first song on Bob Dylan’s...
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