Heather McEntire tried many times to write about her trip to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, but just couldn’t figure out how to translate the experience into song. She made the drive to attend the wedding of her friend’s mother, a romantic occasion marred by the fact that McEntire had just been dumped. Her heart was broken, [...]

This article appears in our March/April issue. Subscribe here. “Clarence White,” a song from The Invisible Way, the latest album by Duluth indie veterans Low, is not about the doomed Byrds guitar player named Clarence White. Or at least Alan Sparhawk didn’t intend it that way. “The name just fell out when that melody arrived,” [...]

Alan Greenberg Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson University of Minnesota Press Rating: 5 stars Arguably the most notorious screenplay to never be filmed, Love in Vain is nearly as mythic as its subject, the doomed bluesman Robert Johnson. Alan Greenberg wrote the script in the 1970s, and at one point Mick Jagger [...]

50. Diamond Rugs, “Christmas In A Chinese Restaurant” John McCauley gets drunk, finds an out-of-tune piano, and sings the loneliest, saddest Christmas carol imaginable, somehow managing to rhyme “how’s the ham?” with “moo goo gai pan.” Best part: a street-corner Santa digs a saxophone out of a dumpster and solos on the bridge. 49. Beach [...]

Jamey Johnson Living For A Song: A Tribute To Hank Cochran (Mercury Nashville) Rating: 3 ½ stars Born in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression, raised in an orphanage in Memphis, and traveling the West as an itinerant worker in his teens, Hank Cochran was an unlikely country music legend. Once he finally settled in [...]

Owl City The Midsummer Station (Universal Republic) Rating: 1 out of 5 stars Pop quiz: Of the four quotes below, which ones are from my high school valedictory speech and which are lyrics from the new Owl City album, The Midsummer Station? 1.) “When the sun goes down and the lights go out, it’s time [...]

David Byrne and St. Vincent Love This Giant (Todo Mundo/4AD) 3 out of 5 stars Ever since he exclaimed that this wasn’t his beautiful house and certainly not his beautiful wife on the Talking Heads hit “Once In A Lifetime,” David Byrne has been fascinated by the casual banality and odd existentialism of American life. [...]

“Oh Marcello,” a standout track on Regina Spektor’s latest album, What We Saw From The Cheap Seats, begins with a simple piano line that sounds like it’s playing on scratched vinyl over busted speakers. Then Spektor comes in singing, putting on a thick Russian accent to portray a woman mid-prayer, worrying that her unborn son [...]

Norah Jones Little Broken Hearts Blue Note Rating: Ten years ago, Norah Jones’ debut prompted an uproar in direct disproportion to the breezy calm of her music. Not quite jazz and not entirely pop but worth an armload of Grammys, Come Away With Me recalled a time in American music history when songcraft and poise [...]

Justin Townes Earle Nothing’s Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now (Bloodshot) Rating: Justin Townes Earle is a ramblin’ man. The son of a hard-touring musician who’s become a hard-touring musician himself, he’s moved from Nashville up to New York, and from there to London, with countless stops and shows in between. But [...]

(PHOTO: Bill Steber) A dapper young African American man stares out from the cover of Lambchop’s new album, Mr. M, his top hat stylishly askew and his face faintly quizzical, as if he expects great fortune to befall him at any moment. He’s a curious fellow, and even though he doesn’t figure directly into these [...]

Magnetic Fields Love at the Bottom of the Sea (Merge) Rating: In Strange Powers, the Magnetic Fields documentary directed by Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara, drummer Claudia Gonson reads from something called The Formulist Manifesto, in which head Field Stephin Merritt outlines some of his more obtuse thoughts on the nature of his chosen field. [...]