It’s challenging to write about Canadian sisters Kate & Anna McGarrigle without discussing their family connections. The nature of this B-side makes it impossible. Kate McGarrigle was married to singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright III, known for songs like ‘Dead Skunk’. The…
General elections are held every three years in New Zealand and they’re due soon. Our electoral system is known as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP for short). Everyone gets two votes – one for a party and one for an electorate…
California’s Tom Waits is effectively the patron saint of this website. My Waits album ranking was the first post from this site to become popular, and it’s still one of its most-visited posts. With recently accounted reissues of Waits’ peak…
Nic Jones emerged in the fertile folk scene of the late 1960s. While contemporaries like Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, and John Martyn ventured into pop and rock music, Jones remained stubbornly traditional. His first two albums, 1970’s Ballads & Songs…
Natalie Merchant recently released her sixth solo album, Keep Your Courage. It seems like a good opportunity to revisit her catalogue. On this countdown, I rank her albums as a solo artist and as the lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs.…
In 1979, The Soft Boys released their debut album, A Can of Bees. By 1985, the members of the now-defunct group were enjoying vastly different fortunes. Guitarist Kimberly Rew was enjoying an international top ten hit with his new group…
Joni Mitchell peaked in the 1970s with a terrific sequence of albums, particularly from 1971’s Blue to 1976’s Hejira. But she also released six studio albums in the 1980s and 1990s. None of these compositions would force their way into…
The members of The Cars were all experienced musicians when they formed. Drummer David Robinson had already played with another famous Boston act, Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers. The band’s two vocalists – bassist Ben Orr and songwriter Ric Ocasek –…
They’re barely known outside New Zealand, but The Dance Exponents were reliable hitmakers in the 1980s. They kept enjoying success through the 1990s after they shortened their name to The Exponents. They weren’t edgy or pretentious, a pop/rock guitar band…
The late Tom Petty was a great singles artist – tracks like ‘The Waiting’, ‘Refugee’, and ‘Free Fallin” sound terrific blasting from cars and on classic rock radio. Petty had so many enjoyable hits through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s…
Genesis formed in the 1960s, when Peter Gabriel, Tony Bank, and Mike Rutherford met at Charterhouse School. By 1971, they’d found their classic quintet of vocalist Peter Gabriel, drummer Phil Collins, keyboardist Tony Banks, bassist Mike Rutherford, and guitarist Steve…
Irish rock band U2 peaked with their 1987 album The Joshua Tree. Their fifth record, it combined Bono’s fervour with a sweeping sound from The Edge’s effect-laden guitar and atmospheric production from Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. It’s also the…
Harry Hosono recruited keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto and drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to record a quickie cover of the 1950s exotica tune ‘Firecracker’. The trio quickly became superstars in Japan, and influential elsewhere. The austere electronica of Kraftwerk was a major influence,…
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe met in a hi-fi shop in Chelsea in 1981. Tennant had bought a Korg synthesizer and the pair bonded over their shared love of electro-pop singles like ‘Souvenir’ by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and…
Moody Glasgow pop band The Blue Nile have such a slim discography that everything they’ve recorded is to be treasured. Starting with 1984’s A Walk Across The Rooftops, they’ve only recorded three further albums, along with a solo record from…
Of the indie guitar bands proffered by Dunedin’s Flying Nun label in the 1980s, Straitjacket Fits were the most likely to break through to a mass audience. The Fits were based around two vocalists and songwriters who were an unlikely…
Manchester post-punk band Joy Division appeared so ordinary – in their music videos they look like four young civil servants playing music in their work clothes. But the music that they created was unique and deeply unsettling. Steven Morris’ drumming…
Aimee Mann scored her only hit single with her first attempt. She fronted Boston new wave band ‘Til Tuesday, whose debut single ‘Voices Carry’ reached #8 on the Billboard charts. Despite the immediate success of ‘Voices Carry’, it took a…
When Ian Curtis committed suicide on the eve of an American tour, it marked the end of Joy Division. Guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook, and drummer Stephen Morris continued making music together as New Order. Sumner took over lead…
In 2007 Blender named Sting as the worst lyricist in pop music, accusing the former Police frontman of “mountainous pomposity (and) cloying spirituality”. I enjoy much of Sting’s music – The Police had a terrific run of singles and Sting…
There are two prominent Sam Phillips in popular music. This list isn’t about the Sun Records producer who worked with Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Rather it’s about the idiosyncratic female singer-songwriter who launched her career in…
Detroit’s Marshall Crenshaw started playing the guitar at age ten. At high school he started the band Astigfa – an acronym for “a splendid time is guaranteed for all”, a lyric from The Beatles’ /Being For The Benefit of Mr…
The dB’s came from the same era as R.E.M., and featured a similarly jangly sound. While R.E.M. became one of the biggest bands in the world, The dB’s remained a fringe act with critical acclaim but few sales. Despite forming…
Great music isn’t always synonymous with great lyrics – early Beach Boys records dressed up Mike Love’s mundane teen dramas with genius harmonies and sophisticated chord changes. Yes adorned Jon Anderson’s cosmic nonsense with their amazing instrumental chops. Perhaps the…
