Milwaukee-born Julia Holter bridges musical worlds. She is classically trained and merges avant-garde ideas with electronic sounds and indie chamber pop. Impressively, she played all the instruments and self-produced her early albums. Holter is Influenced by esoteric musicians like Alice…
Swift is such a megastar that even her outtakes top the NZ singles charts. Taylor Swift It’s a little perverse for the randomiser to suggest a Taylor Swift song for this column when she’s just released a new album. But…
Welcome back for another week of quizzing! This week we have yet another collection of greatest hits albums. I scored 5(!) out of 20. I found all the hard rock acts hard to differentiate. Thin Lizzy and Zappa were…
The jangly guitar rock of Ducks Ltd are back for their second record. So is the ultra-sincere Atlanta-born singer-songwriter Katie Pruitt. I was in from the ground floor with both of those acts, but I’m only catching up with Marika…
Before he became Patti Smith’s lead guitarist, Lenny Kaye compiled the 2 album set, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era. Released in 1972, the two-LP set covered American garage rock and psychedelia from the years 1965-1968 and was…
Noone scored 20 in last week’s quiz – congratulations to Tony, EclecticMusicLover, and Rich Kamerman, who all peaked at 19. There’s more of the same this week – can you identify 20 more greatest hits albums. I found the selection…
‘Where Did Our Love Go’ marked the start of The Supremes’ mid-1960s excellence. The Supremes The Supremes were massively successful in the 1960s. They scored twelve #1s on the Billboard charts, the most of any American group. 1964’s ‘Where Did…
In The Shadows’ broke the record for performance royalties earned overseas by a Finnish composition. Composer Jean Sibelius was the previous record holder. In the last column, I covered ABBA’s ‘Fernando‘. This week the randomiser threw up another track from…
It’s that time of the week – identifying more compilations! There are a few compilations in my collection this week. But also some weird, tricky, arty covers that you might find tough even if you know the artist. I…
Karla Bonoff emerged from the same LA scene as musicians like Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and the Eagles. She watched those artists quickly graduate from Monday open mic nights to stars. But Bonoff had to bide her time. It wasn’t…
