Seemingly unrelated anecdote: A boy on my daughter’s 5- and 6-year-old soccer team last spring fancied himself quite the ladies man and smooth operator. A girl named Bryanna, one of at least three female teammates that this young Romeo considered to be his girlfriend, missed a couple practices and games in a row. When she finally returned to the fold, he glided up to her and asked, smoothness in full bloom, “Hey, Bry. Where you been, girl?” Needless to say, “Hey,…

It’s a fun tradition, and one that I’m sure I share with a number of folks in this community. At the conclusion of every year, I put together three or four CDs that contain my favorite songs from that year. The results are part snapshot and part soundtrack (trademarks pending on the terms “snaptrack” and “soundshot”). It’s always entertaining and enlightening to revisit the year-end CDs five or ten years down the road, not to mention revisiting year-end cassettes from fifteen or twenty years…

Two losses in the music world within the last week hit especially hard.

The music of Howard Tate, who died last Friday at the age of 72, entered my world about a dozen years ago. And it did so in the same way that a lot of the work of veteran soul artists has found its way to me: via another singer. In the middle of a show at Chapel Hill’s lovingly frayed Local 506, Kelly Hogan knocked me over (for, oh, the third or fourth time that evening) with a sly, syncopated soul…

First, by way of introduction to Australian songwriter and singer Paul Kelly for those in need of one, are the words of Jimmy Guterman from Guterman’s book The Best Rock and Roll Records of All Time (Kelly’s 1985 release Post was number 97 on Guterman’s top 100 list): “Kelly sometimes seems like a rock-critic-invented mixture of Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Graham Parker, Bruce Springsteen, and a half-dozen other significant white male rockers.” Not half-bad…

Yes, the suits were a factor. There were those who turned out for the semi-novelty of it all and to check out the sharp-dressed men. Even the floor plan was well thought out. The band’s two vocalizing songwriters, Scott Miller and Mic (Mike, in the early days when vowels were flourishing) Harrison, were positioned stage right and left respectively, flanking bassist/young-Andy-Garcia lookalike Paxton Sellers. It was a straight line of navy blue, with bedrock drummer Jeff Bills behind and…