The Boston Phoenix (1973-2013), once home to many great music critics, is now available online, full issues intact, and it includes a search engine. (Navigation, as with 99% of archival stuff you find on the web, is a little less than intuitive, but hey.) Continue reading Boston Phoenix archives
To kick off our year in this/that/and whatever posts, Howard Druckman posts his favourite songs of the past 12 months. (Pictured above: Snotty Nose Rez Kids.) It’s actually 14 songs, because for Mustafa and Donovan Woods, it was impossible to choose the best out of two songs. So for each of them, it’s two-songs-per instead of one. Needless to say, the pandemic figures heavily in … Continue reading Top 12 Songs of 2021 (Howard Druckman)
I discovered how many songs I love, and how hard it is to narrow it down to just 50. Looking through themed discs I had created over the years for a series of music-sharing meetups with a couple of friends, I came up with an initial list of about 250. Trimming to 50 seemed impossible at first. The first cut got me to around 100 … Continue reading Top 50 Favourite Songs: Paul Woods
My friend Isabel Cole explained to me that in horoscope-speak your “moon” is the secret Spotify playlist that you’d make to soundtrack your inner life. She also reminded me that astrology is fake, which is why it’s good—it’s like an improvisational prompt with arbitrary parameters to ensure it’s not just an act of confirmation bias. Something seems like it doesn’t fit, but then you make … Continue reading Top 50 Favourite Songs: David Cooper Moore
Been reading everybody’s lists. Obviously a lot of you people are a lot younger than me. Lucky you in some regards. But apparently you missed some really great music. I come from the Classic Rock era. Some of this stuff I bought 6-7 times—45s, albums, 8-tracks, cassettes, then CDs, box sets, re-masters. Record company execs had nerve getting upset when I could download stuff for … Continue reading Top 50 Favourite Songs: Jim Esposito
Nelson George remembers Greg Tate, who died yesterday at age 64. Encountering Tate’s work in the Voice during the ’80s—encountering his voice—was an excursion into new modes of thinking, writing, and listening. So much beautiful, mind-bending wordplay (which, trust me, is not faint praise; it’s the door to the building). In George’s words, Tate “understood rhythm, metaphor and hyperbole like a master musician does harmony, … Continue reading Greg Tate , 1957-2021
(Originally posted in 2005) By Steven Ward Matt Resnicoff crossed a line. The former Musician Senior Editor and Guitar Player and Guitar World writer is now a professional guitarist and record producer. During the e-mail interview below, Resnicoff talks about working for Musician (a magazine he once described as “The New Yorker of music magazines”), and the good and not-so-good aspects of interviewing and writing about musicians. Although he doesn’t miss his music-writing past, … Continue reading From the Archives: Interview with Matt Resnicoff (2005)
I could have done another fifty, but I’m sure everybody says that. These aren’t in order of preference as much as the order I remembered them; I did a similar list when I turned 50 so this cannibalizes that a bit. As my friend Chris Buck said about his list, the period when I really, intensely connected to music lasted roughly from the ‘70s till … Continue reading Top 50 Favourite Songs: Rick McGinnis
This is not a very Rock Critic list of Favourite Songs. No Dylan, Stones, Joni, Clash, Prince, Husker Du/Sonic Youth, Beefheart, Bowie or Bubble Puppy (or even my friends Skinny Puppy). No Puppies. But on reflection I always thought my role was more of an editor/organizer than a cutting edge music scribe, even though NME / Sounds / CREEM / Trouser Press got me into … Continue reading Top 50 Favourite Songs: Dave “Rave” MacIntosh
I thought of numerous ways to attack this. One included a single track from every genre or sub- genre I could think of. Another was three tracks from every four year period to sort of evenly cover 1955-2021. Tried to be eclectic. Thought of including jazz and classical. But it just all got too hard (at least for now), and in the end decided to … Continue reading Top 50 Favourite Songs: Mark Fichera
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