Night So Long by HAIM

I’ve already discussed HAIM recently on this blog, and I still find their sunny harmonies like musical comfort food, but I had a startling epiphany about them during the week that I wanted to share. Here’s the cover of the…
I’ve already discussed HAIM recently on this blog, and I still find their sunny harmonies like musical comfort food, but I had a startling epiphany about them during the week that I wanted to share. Here’s the cover of the…
We’ve recently been away on a family road trip. My six year old is tolerant of different music, only once politely remarking that Steve Reich was “a bit boring”. But my three year old is fixated on children’s music and…
Over the last fortnight, while on holiday, I’ve been reading an oral history of Rough Trade Records, who boasted acts like The Smiths, The Fall, The Strokes, and The Libertines. While on holiday, I also heard of the passing of…
As an eager young music fan, I was perhaps an archetypal rockist. I wasn’t necessarily sexist, but 19 year old me dismissed Madonna as too pop, not playing an instrument, and in the case of this song, not writing her…
One of my favourite books is The Rolling Stone Rock ‘n’ Roll Reader, a collection of Rolling Stone articles and interviews from the late 1960s and early 1970s. It captures a point when the magazine, and rock music as a…
It sucks to be me, but I’ve just spent most of the last week at a work conference at a Thailand beach resort. This week’s selection is from Neil Young’s 1974 album On The Beach, while it’s also a commentary…
One of my favourite musical discoveries of 2017 has been the solo catalogue of Jimmy Webb. While his 1970s albums are a little scattershot, there are plenty of examples of his harmonically complex but accessible songs. Along with his contemporaries…
I spent my time at University working in a supermarket part time, and it only served to deepen my apathy to Christmas pop songs. The supermarket played music on a four hour cycle, with the songs in the same order…
I haven’t spent a lot of time with Janelle Monáe yet, but she’s impressive; able to enjoy popularity despite an uncompromising approach. While there are clear antecedents to her use of science fiction concepts in the R&B genre, with Parliament in…
Tommy Keene passed away unexpectedly in his sleep this week at the age of 59. The critically acclaimed power pop musician had recorded an album with Robert Pollard, and collaborated with The Goo Goo Dolls, Paul Westerberg, and recently with…
Mark Kozelek has steadily released a handful of brilliant songs on most of his albums, ever since the Red House Painters’ 1992 sad sack, slo-core debut Down Colorful Hill. His songs are usually coloured by his own nylon string or…
As a piano playing singer and song writer, North Carolina’s Ben Folds is almost inevitably going to draw comparisons to Elton John, the godfather of piano pop. But the first single from Folds’ second solo album, 2005’s Songs For Silverman,…
Melbourne’s Hunters & Collectors started as an arty new-wave band, but ‘Holy Grail’, released in 1992, is slice of Australian pub rock. There’s plenty to critique; it’s based around the straightforward I – IV – VI – V chord progression,…
Brooklyn indie band TV on the Radio were formed in 2001. They’re effectively a rock band, but their music is overlaid with loops and samples, and topped off by the vocals of Tunde Adebimpe. The R&B in his voice tops off…
California’s Judee Sill had a troubled childhood, losing her father to pneumonia at eight years old. Her mother’s second marriage was often violent, and as a teenager Sill spent time in reform school after committing armed robbery. At reform school…
Paul Kelly’s a respected songwriter in Australia, with a solo career that began in 1981. He’s the type of figure who receives songwriting awards and inclusions on great song lists, without necessarily breaking through to public consciousness. He’s little known…
There are a substantial number of songs by the late Tom Petty that I love and that I could have chosen to feature this week. I could have chosen a ubiquitous hit like ‘Refugee’, ‘Free Fallin”, ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’,…
I’m publishing this blog entry in advance, and this song gives an indication, better than any other piece of pop music than I can think of, of what I’ll be doing this Sunday morning (although of course my circumstances won’t…
When my wife and I bought our first house, it was a small two-bedroom doer upper. It needed plenty of work, but the most memorable was the asbestos removal. Obviously asbestos has a dangerous reputation, but at the same time,…
I don’t want my weekly song post to turn into an obituary thread, but the world of popular music lost another significant member this week with the passing of Hüsker Dü drummer and song-writer Grant Hart. Like a lot of…
We’re reaching peak rock star death era – many of the musicians active during rock music’s formative years are reaching their seventies. This week we lost Walter Becker of Steely Dan, who was an integral part of one of the…
Not content with merely creating some of the greatest albums ever made (and winning a bucket-load of Grammy Awards) during the 1970s, Stevie Wonder also produced a couple of albums for his ex-wife Syreeta Wright. He wrote most of the…
Whether he’s recording as the guitarist and co-leader of Hüsker Dü, as a solo artist, or as the leader of Sugar, you generally know what you’re going to get from Bob Mould. I understand that he’s diversified somewhat on some…
The Carpenters, from Downey California, released some transcendent songs in the early 1970s. Karen Carpenter’s beautiful voice showcased beautiful melodies with dark undertows, on songs like ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’ and ‘Superstar’. But the brother and sister duo’s career was…
Don McGlashan is up with Dave Dobbyn and the Finn brothers as New Zealand’s best mainstream guitar-rock writers. He’s best-known for his work in 1990s rock band The Mutton Birds, but they were the third group he recorded with. His…
When my wife and I bought our own first house, we lived next door to a young man with mental health issues. I quickly earned his dislike by calling the police on the first day after we moved in –…
The New Pornographers are a Canadian power pop super-group – the members were drawn together from other projects. Notable alumni include leader A.C. Newman, previously of Zumpano, alt-country vocalist Neko Case, and Dan Bejar, who records as Destroyer. The group…
Dusty Springfield began her career in a folk-pop trio The Springfields with her brother Tom. When The Springfields broke up, she went on to solo success in the early 1960s with ‘I Only Wanna Be With You’ and ‘I Don’t…
The small city of Dunedin, in the south of New Zealand, produced a lot of great music in the 1980s – The Flying Nun record label distributed acclaimed albums by acts like The Chills, The Clean, The Bats, and Chris…
I’ve been very impressed by Jason Isbell’s last two albums; 2013’s Southeastern and 2015’s Something More Than Free. After sobering up, he’s fulfilling his potential as a great songwriter. After two albums of heartfelt, acoustic country, Isbell plugged his electric…
Germany’s Can were too ahead of their time, and too weird, to enjoy a hit record, but they were hugely influential; for instance, when Radiohead ditched guitar rock in favour of more experimental work, Can were one of the bands…
For some reason I never found Aretha Franklin’s original studio albums in second-hand bins, and for years the only album I owned from her was a double disc retrospective. The second disc dabbles in her 1980s work, with star power…
Vigilantes of Love took their name from the New Order song ‘Love Vigilantes’. The band hailed from Athens, Georgia, a city with rich pop music heritage; in all honesty they’d probably struggle to break onto a list of greatest musical…
Formed by a group of Auckland students in 1972, Split Enz is an iconic New Zealand band. They had a distinctive visual image – percussionist Noel Crombie designed their costumes and album covers. Their career had two distinct phases. In…
New Zealand’s Bic Runga has only released four albums of original material, starting with her 1997 debut Drive. But despite her limited output, she reigns supreme as the queen of New Zealand pop music. Runga comes from a unique cultural…
Prominent popular music from New Zealand in the late 20th century was often Caucasian. Most internationally recognised musicians came from the Flying Nun stable of twisted guitar pop or the mainstream pop of the Finn Brothers. The early 21st century…