The typical music journalist finds it necessary to play several roles, or try to, anyway; reporter, evangelist, psychologist, preacher and prophet – each needs its food. Some bands provide enough nourishment to feed each of these personas, and some leave leftovers for months. The Fiery Furnaces...

Last year, Donald Miller played a song for me, a solo acoustic song by a gentleman by the name of Alex Dupree. Don had met Alex in Austin, and asked him to close a reading he was conducting during Rez Week. The song itself was arresting, a catchy track by the name of “Guaranteed Wintertime Blues”...

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh! Mates of State are soooo cute! Their playful banter on stage at last summer’s Siren Festival, where they gave the audience a taste of what would be on their latest album, was as sweet as the cotton candy on the Coney Island boardwalk. At last, Bring It Back was released...

I have to admit that I wasn’t always sold on the existence of global warming. At times it seemed like just another political issue that exists for the convenience of choosing a side. If you were a liberal Democrat you thought that global warming was a big problem; if you were a conservative Republican...

Revelation 3:17: “You say, ‘I am rich. I have everything I want. I don’t need a thing!’ And you don’t realize that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.” Pictured: Maggie Newton Van Cott, the first woman licensed to preach in the Methodist...

Summer: 1995. I am 15 years old with a cassette copy of Parklife on my Panasonic personal stereo; the beginnings of a love affair with indie rock and roll stirring in my subconscious. Oasis have just declared war on Blur, Pulp would soon struggle to the surface with the wonder that was/is Different...

US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, has repeatedly referred to those held at Guantanamo as “hard core, well-trained terrorists”, and “among the most dangerous, best-trained vicious killers on the face of the earth,” linking them directly to the attacks of September 11th....

Every band has its influences, and these influences have become a critical litmus test for determining a band’s value. Like marketing, the first musician to a genre becomes its standard. As much as we might like to pretend that Ryan Adams or Conor Oberst are the new Bob Dylan, we remain comforted...

The narrator of Benjamin Kunkel’s first – and ultimately unsuccessful – book is Dwight Wilmerding: 28-years old, a “cum nada” graduate of Eureka Valley College in California with a degree in philosophy, and recently fired from his $26,000 a year job doing tech support for...

After months of confinement to an office cubicle, I took my first ever paid vacation: a cross-country road trip. Somewhere between the mouth of Yellowstone and the profile of Mount Rushmore, I got the “trip-of-a-lifetime” experience I was seeking. It was great catching up with my belly-dancing...