Short books about albums. Published by Bloomsbury
Read posts related to folk music and the best-loved artists in the genre.
Joanna McNaney Stein reveals how k.d. lang’s Ingénue went from life-changing album to the topic of her 33 1/3 volume, out November 2nd 2023. She talks about how she came to pitch her 33 1/3 idea to us, as well as the experience of writing about an album that had such a significant impact on her.
Santi Elijah Holley on the story behind Nick Cave and PJ Harvey’s ballad duet For young Americans living under the specter of the Cold War and imminent nuclear annihilation, where the ideological divide between younger and older generations was growing wider and wider, an obscure collection of bluegrass, country, folk, blues, and gospel music was a surprising choice as a countercultural “bible.” But that’s exactly what Greenwich Village folksinger Dave Van Ronk called the Anthology of American Folk Music, the six-LP collection of eighty-four songs that had originally been recorded…
Who better to celebrate on #womancrushwednesday than Joni Mitchell? An emblem of female empowerment, Mitchell has always retained publishing rights to her music and has produced, often solely, her own albums. Though primarily considered a pop artist, the songs she wrote carried a signature folk rock sound with a jazz influence. Mitchell’s success as a solo songwriter and singer in the 1970s music scene certainly gets us going. Sean Nelson’s Court and Spark (2006) looks at the 1974 album, Mitchell’s sixth, as a concentrated effort for a hit record. This…
Today, in honor of Tom Petty’s Southern Accents‘s publication date, Michael drafts up what he thinks Southern Accents should have looked like… It’s a bit of a parlor game amongst hardcore Heartbreakers fans to talk about the Southern Accents that could have been. Although I think that there would still be some significant problems with the record even if the most potent and powerful sequence of songs had been included, it’s fun to speculate, to try to make one’s own Southern Accents. Which is what I’m going to do here,…
Day 2 of Michael Washburn’s blog takeover! Today, he talks about how the Southern Accents recording sessions “were a bit of a quagmire,” and unravels the riddle of why “The Image of Me” was never included in this album. I mentioned yesterday that Southern Accents is broken backed—it’s almost a couple of different records slammed together. This so puzzling if you look at some of the songs that were cut for the album but then sat aside. For my money many of those songs are better written—and sound better—than many…