Long Pauses

Category: Music

  • Dream to the Rhythm

    Dream to the Rhythm

    A brilliant Grace Jones and David Bowie mashup.

  • Why I don’t read (or write) music reviews

    “It’s music inspired by Disney films.” — Annie Clark on her new album, Actor (recorded as St. Vincent)

  • Blipiography

    Each day in March I’m going to Blip a song. 31 days, 31 songs, ordered sequentially. I’ll update this post throughout the month, and you can also follow this little experiment on Blip.fm and Twitter. Each song will remain available online as long as Blip is able to find them. The blipiography is a fleeting gesture, I guess.

  • 2008 Mix

    2008 Mix

    If the Side A/Side B thing seems pretentious, there’s at least a little method to my (nostalgic) madness. See, ideally, one who listens to this mix will take a short break after Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.” Frankly, I don’t know how anyone could hear that song and not need to stand up, walk around, pour a stiff drink, smoke a cigarette, something.

  • Strange Waters: A Conversation with Bruce Cockburn

    A recent post at Pop Dose devoted to “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” reminded me of this interview I did with Bruce Cockburn nearly four years ago.

  • Riff Raff

    Riff Raff

    I bought Powerage rather than one of the other, more obvious choices because it includes “Riff Raff,” hands-down my favorite AC/DC song. There’s much to love about this song — the opening crescendo, Angus’s riffs, the driving 8th-note bassline, the unimpeachable beauty of a 3-chord song

  • Seeking Suggestions: Great Guitar Songs

    If an alien landed on your doorstep and asked you what a guitar sounds like, what songs would you play?

  • Seven Songs

    Seven Songs

    The Seven Songs “Boots of Spanish Leather” by Bob Dylan “Inside a Boy” by My Brightest Diamond “Spirits (Having Flown)” by Bee Gees “A Letter to Both Sides” by The Fixx “Elegie in C Minor, Op. 24” by Gabriel Faure “Tel Que Tu Es” by Charlotte Gainsbourg “Revolution Earth” by The B-52s Bob Dylan Professor […]

  • Magic and Loss

    Magic and Loss

    How’s this for a strange association? While marveling at Lou Reed’s performance Wednesday night, I kept thinking of Michel Subor.

  • 40 Hours in 18 Images and 3 Songs

    The Duke Spirit, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Sonic Youth, and Last Year at Marienbad.

  • Saturday Night at Church

    Saturday Night at Church

    I was sitting so close I could never get all four performers — Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, and Shawn Colvin — in a single shot. I was sitting so close, in fact, that the only two people in the theater sitting closer to Emmylou were Patty and Buddy (sorry Shawn).

  • 2007 Mix CD

    18 songs from 18 albums I enjoyed this year.

  • In Rainbows

    In Rainbows

    Couldn’t find any official cover art, so I’m going with this.

  • David Byrne Does K-Town

    “At the Holiday Inn in Knoxville, I saw a sign for the historic town center. Thinking it might contain some character and restaurants, we head there in search of dinner. There’s no one on the streets — not metaphorically, but literally not a single soul is out and it’s not even 8 o’clock.”

  • Vermicide

    Vermicide

    “I think it’s Mars Volta. . . . Rush for the new millennium.”

  • Friday Five: Want-To-See Concerts

    What are your Top 5 To-See Concerts?

  • Mix CD: It’s Beautiful Now

    I made this mix for a group of friends, nearly all of whom are about a half-generation older than I am. We all grew up listening to the same music, though. They bought vinyl in the new releases bin; I saw the reunion tours.

  • By the Time It Gets Dark

    By the Time It Gets Dark

    First great show of 2007: Lambchop and Yo La Tengo. Unfortunately, YLT’s last visit to Knoxville was memorable for reasons having little to do with the amazing music that was played that night. But they came back anyway, God bless ’em, and this time they played to a large and rapt audience at the Bijou. […]

  • Mix: Needle Drops

    Mix: Needle Drops

    This mix began with a single iTunes download. My all-time favorite needle drop accompanies my favorite sequence in what also happens to be my favorite film, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror.

  • Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

    Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

    William Wyler’s The Big Country (1958) is one of those westerns about men proving themselves in the unforgiving and sublime conditions of the American southwest.

  • Aimee Mann at the Bijou

    Aimee Mann at the Bijou

    I’d brought along Joanna’s bite-sized Sony Cyber-shot camera in hopes of getting some decent stills, but the light was too low (even from the third row) and, as a result, all of the photos were streaked by motion blurs. So, instead, I experimented with the video capture, and I’m really pleased with the results — especially with the sound.

  • Live Music

    This post is about the years I spent as a broke-ass graduate student, unable to afford to see the shows that came through town.

  • The Origin of Love

    The Origin of Love

    This is the second time “The Origin of Love” has been a Long Pauses Song of the Moment. Again, I was inspired by seeing a live performance of Hedwig and the Angry Inch — this time here in our own “scruffy little city,” Knoxville, Tennessee. K-Town did me proud. The Actors Co-op’s production is funnier, […]

  • Drunken Butterfly

    Drunken Butterfly

    Or, Random Observations Provoked by Seeing Sonic Youth Live for the First Time

  • David Sancious

    About three-and-a-half minutes into “Kitty’s Back,” just after Springsteen’s blaring, horn-backed solo, Sancious steps in with a squirrelly run on his Hammond organ, followed by a slew of percussive figures and arpeggios. Harmonically, it isn’t an especially interesting solo, but it’s exactly the kind of Booker T-inspired playing the song needs.

  • Electrif Lycanthrope

    For years, I’ve heard and read about Electrif Lycanthrope, an unofficial live release from 1974. Original vinyl copies still show up on the market from time to time, though at prohibitively steep prices. But now, thanks to the wonders of the Internet Archive, it’s right there, just waiting to be downloaded for free.

  • Music Hall MMF 2.1

    I have no will power. Barely two weeks after deciding that I’d like to pick up a turntable, I now own a Music Hall MMF 2.1.

  • The Tyranny of “Shuffle”

    There’s no effort required to shuffle. And, even worse, no creativity. Listening becomes a wholly passive act, and the music suffers, dissolving into the atmosphere like so much Muzak.

  • Inner City Blues

    Inner City Blues

    If I’m remembering theory notation correctly, the change for “Inner City Blues” is i-IV. Two chords. It opens with twenty-four straight measures of the minor root before finally changing to the major IV, where it stays for all of four measures before returning to the root. Would have bored me senseless a decade ago; now, I’ll be damned if that change ain’t transcendent. The song is a chant-like, soul-filled lamentation. An angry prayer.

  • A Session of Dance Music

    One of my goals with this latest mix, “A Session of Dance Music,” was to gather some songs that wouldn’t inspire Joanna to take sarcastic jabs at my piss-poor taste. We just got back from a long drive, during which we listened to the entire disc, and her opinion seems to hover somewhere in the “Well, at least it doesn’t suck” range. So mission accomplished, I guess.