“We’re not here to change your mind about anything,” Charlie Starr, lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for Blackberry Smoke, announced from the stage at a recent live performance in Chicago. “We’re here to ease your mind about everything.” The infectious […]
Music is more than a jingle, more than a product. To committed composers, players, singers, and listeners, it’s an essential form of transmission for genuine feeling and ideas to the human spirit. For Lizz Wright, a magnificent vocalist whose rich […]
“Blues is like a witness,” Ruthie Foster said with a delicate voice while warming her throat with a cup of tea in a conference room of the Freedom Hall in Park Forest, Illinois. Beyond the way that a masterful blues […]
Stanley Crouch, music critic and political columnist, once credited jazz with existing for people interested in the exploration of “real emotion.” While Crouch is certainly correct, his assessment is too narrow. Jazz is far from the only genre giving ample […]
Any sign of subversion is welcome. The Revivalists, an eight piece band from New Orleans, are advertising in a seductive combination of neon and homemade paint. As music becomes increasingly programmatic, and the robotic algorithm becomes increasingly hegemonic over taste, […]
Brent Smith, the lead singer of Shinedown, has a voice as massive as a helicopter searchlight. It illumines the intricate details of the diverse range of lyrical subject matter his band explores. Fans and critics know him best as the […]
“When American leadership boasts of exporting democracy,” a regal and majestic Jesse Jackson, wearing a three piece suit behind an ornate pulpit declared, “They do not talk of Jeffersonian democracy.” Any system that includes the enslavement of citizens with a […]
James Lee Burke, one of the world’s best novelists, wrote that “the most important battles are often fought in places no one has heard of.” In a paradoxical America that is increasingly fractured and fragmented, and yet productive of a […]
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the “greatest gift is a portion of thyself.” All great artists submit part of themselves into their art, whether it is channeling the frequency of their spirit into song, emptying some part of their heart […]
Wassily Kandinsky, the great abstract painter, offered music as “the best teacher” for aspiring artists in his own book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. “With few exceptions,” he wrote, “music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted […]
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