95. Echo & the Bunnymen, Ocean Rain (1984) Echo & the Bunnymen benefited from a change in scenery when they recorded their fourth studio album, Ocean Rain. After setting up an unofficial home base of Rockfield Studios, located in the … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #95 to #93
What Growing Up on a Farm Taught Me About Humility by Sarah Smarsh This typically powerful piece by Sarah Smarsh details a portion of her experience growing up on a family farm in rural Kansas. She effectively maps out the … Continue reading Outside Reading — In the Heart of the Heart Country edition
What can I type? I simply like the idea of starting the new year with a cool groove. Luckily, Debby Friday is ready to oblige with the track “SO HARD TO TELL,” which is intoxicating in it slippery swerving and … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Debby Friday, “SO HARD TO TELL”
All the Women in My Brain and Other Concerns by Betty Gilpin Nonfiction, 2022 My mom played Lincoln’s sister-in-law at Lincoln Center, a fact I presented to to my fellow second graders as a popularity jetpack. I was met with … Continue reading Book Report — All the Women in My Brain and Other Concerns; Dinosaur Beach
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson, 2022). It’s seem a fine idea for Guillermo del Toro to channel his enduring fascinating for grim fairy tales into a stop-motion animation take on the little wooden boy created … Continue reading Then Playing — Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio; Violent Night; The Fabelmans
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. Sometimes I think my first real lessons in the intense power an image can hold came from … Continue reading The Art of the Sell — Close Encounters of the Third Kind movie poster
During my undergraduate years, I spent just about every New Year’s Eve on the air at student-run radio station WWSP-90FM. It was my idea to commit the programming that day to counting down the station’s Top 90 albums of the year … Continue reading Radio Days — Then and Now: January 1, 2023
98. The J. Geils Band, Love Stinks (1980) The career boost sought by the J. Geils Band had worked, more or less. After several years on Atlantic Records, they jumped to EMI based on the promise that they’d get more … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #98 to #96
Saturdays are when I use my little corner of the digital world to excitedly redirect eyes to the recent writing of others. As the year comes to a close, I’ll offer encore hyperlinks to the following six pieces, presented more … Continue reading Outside Reading — Six from 2022
As the curtain falls on 2022, tradition holds that I offer up a few of the songs released during the span of the calendar coming off the wall. Steering away from the artists who were represented in yesterday’s tally of … Continue reading Five Songs from 2022
Coffee for Two 