Your Heart Out

Richie Havens’ recording of ‘I Can’t Make It Anymore’ is, I believe, one of the wonders of this mad old world.

Some days I consider ‘Shake Some Action’ by the Flamin’ Groovies to be one of the great works of art in pop culture.

Even now, when things on my latest list of the good things in life suddenly seem to connect together naturally, it is such a glorious feeling.

I like old-school flyers.

On any list of the good things in life, those things we hold dear and which help ward off the darkness and evil that threatens to take over the world, I would have to include torch songs and film noirs, which if you think about it too closely seems a litt…

John Sebastian has been very much on my mind.

I am no expert on the work of Lucy Sante, but one of my favourite pieces of music-related writing comes in her Maybe The People Would Be The Times essay collection, which I chanced upon.

I still bumble blindly around on YouTube sporadically, and occasionally take an unexpected turning and strike gold, such as when I discovered a collections of clips of The Feelies performing live at the Peanut Gallery, a bar in their home town of Haledon,…

There’s a lovely line in Chronicles where Bob talks about a three-minute ballad that “made you stand straight up and stay right where you were.

Every once in a while, there is a particular piece of music that has been made specifically for you, and it feels like all roads have led to this point in time.

There can be something oddly pleasant about being discombobulated.

You know, recently, out of the blue, I received a Bandcamp notification to let me know there was a new release from Stacy Epps, her first full-length recording since The Awakening in 2008, a record which was a pivotal and I guess totemic set from the very…

There are some things about 2025 I would be quite happy to forget, events that leave me feeling cold inside, and there are some things from this year that I hope will be with me forever.

Some things are meant to be, it seems.

Dub is in the air, it sometimes seems.

I guess many among us can think of occasions when we have heard or read about a live performance and then let our imagination float free in a way that allows us to picture ourselves in that particular venue on a specific night.

Over the past few years, I have read an absurd amount of John D.

I’ve got to be honest: I do like a bit of incidental whistling in a song.

“Betrayal takes two, who did it to who?”

Dora Morelenbaum performing live at the Jazz Café in November 2024 was one of the highlights of the year.

Discovering Vera Caspary’s fiction has been a highlight of the past few years.

Act One “I put a seashell to my ear, and it all comes back,” said Rod McKuen memorably in his poem The Gypsy Camp, with that beautiful setting by Anita Kerr and the San Sebastien Strings.

Things fall apart.

“It is odd what you remember and what you forget.” – Graham Greene, Getting to Know the General In the bedroom of Frank Pierson, the wealthy young American boy who followed Ripley, in the fourth novel in Patricia Highsmith’s series, “pop singer posters we…

If you are a fellow aficionado of cheap and cheerful Northern Soul compilations you will know one of the downsides is that certain tracks crop up again and again, which is often a price worth paying to get unexpected or lost gems.

You know that thing where your memory starts playing tricks on you?