March/April 2010

A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs(0)

April 20, 2010

A FINE ROMANCE: JEWISH SONGWRITERS, AMERICAN SONGS By David Lehman (SCHOCKEN) Rating: This compact book is a lucid personal response to a thick and complicated subject; how and why so many standards from the Great American Songbook came from the minds, hearts and pens of Jewish songwriters, from the Gershwins, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin [...]

A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs

American Icons: Laura Nyro

“What if I don’t have anything to say?” she asked, when consenting after many years to an interview. I promised her that wouldn’t happen, but she was genuinely worried, as Laura Nyro hadn’t spoken to the press—or really participated in the machinery of the music industry—for more than a decade. Burned like many of our [...]

On Track: Josh Turner

Josh Turner anticipates the day his log cabin is finished on his 40-acre spread south of Nashville. “It’s pretty secluded and private out here,” he says of the homestead he shares with wife, Jennifer, and their two boys, Hampton, three years old, and Colby, just seven months. The compound is the fruit of a career [...]

Sounding Off: A River Ran Through It

A short while back, Bruce Springsteen did something he’d never done before: he performed The River, in its entirety, in front of a rapturous audience at Madison Square Garden. Released in October of 1980, the ambitious double album helped usher in a decade of economic strife and conflicted foreign policy. Now, hard times had once [...]