Category: Music
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Top ten albums of 2022
In our household albums are always 100% unstreamed, played from start to finish, never shuffled, and usually played from manufactured CDs or from purchased digital files that are burned to CDs. In alphabetical order by artist: Cat Power – Covers Jorge Drexler – Tinta y Tiempo Eliane Elias – Quietude Melody Gardot & Philippe Powell […]
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Top ten albums of 2021
In our household albums are always 100% unstreamed, played from start to finish, never shuffled, and usually played from manufactured CDs or from purchased digital files that are burned to CDs. In alphabetical order by artist: Elbow – Flying Dream 1 Kurt Elling – SuperBlue Márcio Faraco – L’électricien de la ville lumière Fleet Foxes […]
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Books read in 2017
Books! Best to worst. Too many music books, as usual, but hey. Sam Lipsyte, The Fun Parts Wack. Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music Six extraordinary conversations about music with Seiji Ozawa. Steve Turner, Beatles, ’66: The Revolutionary Year How a boy band became a zeitgeist. Robert Irwin, The Alhambra The story of “The Red” — the only Muslim palace […]
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Books read in 2016
Books! Best to worst. Paul Beatty, The Sellout Extraordinary, hilarious, brilliant. Racial stereotypes dancing in front of a funhouse mirror of satire, through a knowing lens of American literature and culture (both African- and Anglo-). More great comic one-liners per page than any other fancy hardbound book I’ve ever read. Jon Meachum, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power […]
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Books read in 2015
Obviously I read far too few books this year. From the best to the least best: Ben Yagoda, The B-side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song A very interesting history of the evolution of popular American music, particularly with its insights in the twenty years following World War II. Tom […]
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Books about popular music
For whatever reason in the past couple of years I’ve been doing a lot of reading about popular music. Here are a few report cards, in ascending order: This must be the place: the adventures of Talking Heads in the 20th century : David Bowman C– I’ll sleep when I’m dead: the dirty life and […]