I have enough invested in the idea of perfect artistic finality that occasionally I can drift into the mental parlor game of selecting the best last album for an individual artist. This doesn’t necessarily mean identifying their very best work under the theory that everyone should go out at their absolute peak. Instead, it’s about finding those releases that feel just right as a sort of summation, a proper closing statement of artistic identity and intent. To shift the topic to movies for a useful illustration, Robert Altman probably made at least a dozen movies that I consider plainly better … Continue reading One for Friday: Lyle Lovett, “Step Inside This House”

Like a lot of college radio kids, I was a fairly dedicated concertgoer for a time. I wasn’t one of those who jumped at nearly every opportunity, nor was I especially adventurous, hitting the clubs to hear bands I wasn’t all that familiar with (I will regret to the end of my days that I didn’t see Sleater-Kinney with the White Stripes opening up at a dinky club in Madison way back when). But I had a respectable number of torn tickets shoved into CD cases and record sleeves. That’s waned enough in the past several years that the first … Continue reading One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock, “One Long Pair of Eyes (Live at Cat’s Cradle Back Room)”

Though it may seem quaint now that we exist in an era where it’s widely understood that bands and performers toiling on the lower rungs of the fame ladder should exploit every revenue possibility that comes their way, there was a time when it was surprising to hear a song from a favored artist at our station used in a more commercial venture. Now actual commercials didn’t happen too often, but John Hughes had spent much of the nineteen-eighties teaching his fellow filmmakers to look to the left end of the radio dial to find low-cost options to fill out … Continue reading One for Friday: Paul Kelly and the Messengers, “Dumb Things”