For 25 years Nels Cline dreamed of making the Lovers Album, an orchestrated portrait of the shadings on love’s spectrum from yearning to euphoria to regret. A mix of jazz standards, film music, rock songs and his own compositions. When it was released on Blue Note in 2016 it concluded with “The Bond”, composed for…
Grinderman is the First Great Band of the Anthropocene Epoch
First published on the Huffington Post on 08/17/2010 Grinderman is the first great band of the Anthropocene Epoch. Their music is wild, primal, charming and funky and their lyrics are witty and clear-eyed observations of where we stand as a civilization at this moment in geologic time. “All of a sudden it seems impossible to…
Alexandra Lange and Rosanne Cash, heirs to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton
first published on the Huffington Post on September 9, 2010 In February, Alexandra Lange created a storm with an essay on Design Observer suggesting that the New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, is not good enough: Ouroussoff has an opinion about design, but his reviews offer not much more than that, opinion. His approach —…
The Return of the Laughing Clowns
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds invited the Laughing Clowns to reform to appear at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival they curated staged in Sydney on Cockatoo Island in January, 2009. It had been about twenty five years since their last performance. They were sublime. “I loved that band,” Nick said. All Tomorrow’s Parties looped back to…
