Blog Post

Barbra Streisand’s long-awaited autobiography is going to be released next month. Fans of Streisand have been waiting for her book for decades. In the 1980s, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, editor at Doubleday, tried to use her celebrity to get Streisand to pen her memoirs, but the diva demurred, waiting for decades before releasing her story, My Name Is Barbra.   A gay icon and showbiz legend for over 60 years, Barbra Streisand is a brilliant singer and a peerless interpreter of the Great American Songbook; she also was one of the biggest pop stars of the 1970s, establishing herself as the…

With the massive success of her latest hit, “Padam Padam,” Kylie Minogue has proven that she has longevity and is still able to do battle on the pop radio with starlets who grew up listening to her music. Like her peers Madonna and Janet Jackson, Minogue has created some of the most indelible and fabulous moments in pop music. She’s a camp pop queen adding a dash of the ridiculous to her music, making her a favorite among gay audiences. Her 2023 album Tension is the latest in a series of late-career triumphs that highlights a talented and gifted artist…

I’ve been writing for the Vault, on and off (mostly on), for 25 years. My 25th anniversary is sometime this month. I wanted to do something to commemorate the occasion, as frankly it was against the odds that I’d even still be here. I considered several ways to celebrate; skywriting was too expensive, a Times Square billboard has been done to death, and I don’t do tattoos. Finally, I decided to take the trope of Desert Island Discs and run with it. Below please find the 25 albums I would take into a fallout shelter, a shipwreck, or hospice. No…

A documentary film, obviously, is meant to tell a story. A good documentary keeps the viewer locked into every moment, and leaves them disappointed when it finally ends. Dio: Dreamers Never Die is not a good documentary. It is a great one. Anyone who has read Ronnie James Dio’s autobiography will probably not find many surprises in this film, but that won’t stop them from taking in every detail, from his birth as Ronnie Padavona and his musical start on the trumpet to his days with Elf, Rainbow, Black Sabbath and his own band. Dio’s voice from numerous interviews interspersed…

The best songwriters are natural storytellers with an intuitive grasp of how to frame and describe an idea or situation in a way that draws the listener in with a handful of carefully chosen words. That holds true whether they are writing about the lives of imaginary characters, real people, or themselves. Beyond that particular skill set and the drive to use it, though, you need one more ingredient: a good story to tell. Jason Isbell has a good story to tell. Isbell was born in Green Hill, Alabama in 1979, a few miles from both the Alabama / Tennessee…

Sinéad O’Connor has died, leaving one of pop music’s most divisive and challenging legacies. An unequivocal talent, O’Connor weaved politics, social critique, and activism into her formidable career, often risking her lofty popularity by embracing issues or putting out statements that would prove to be controversial. Throughout the noise of her confrontational image, O’Connor possessed one of the most beautiful voices in pop music: she had a pure, powerful tone, able to stab listeners with the pain manifested in her preternaturally gorgeous instrument. Like most women in the public eye, she endured reductive, sexist media and press outlets seeking to…

          In the short history of rock and roll memoirs—which for obvious reasons have been a thing for only a few decades now—my favorite has long been So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star by Jacob Slichter. The drummer for Semisonic, the Minneapolis trio that burned brightly across the media heavens circa 1998, Slichter proceeded to pen one of the most piercingly witty and self-aware autobiographies in the genre, cast in the role of the insightful Everyman who thinks—and reveals—all of the thoughts that you or I might have if we suddenly found ourselves thrust into the funhouse-mirror…

On April 14, 2023, Janet Jackson embarked on her tenth concert tour, Janet Jackson: Together Again, celebrating the singer’s 40 years in the music industry. The epic concert includes over 30 of Jackson’s biggest hits while paying tribute to a career that has created some of the most memorable moments in pop music history. Jackson is a song-and-dance woman and a brilliant performer who lights up the stage with her charisma and stage presence. With her longtime collaborators Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, Jackson wrote inspiring and moving songs with perfect pop hooks and indelible melodies. She sang the songs with…

What makes a song great? Objective standards exist that can help you make a judgment like that, but the answer also often involves intuitive leaps that defy logic or explanation; sometimes greatness is entirely subjective, residing in the way one particular line of a song hits you at one specific moment in your life. A great song might feature a brilliant lyric, or a captivating melodic hook, or an amazing solo, or all of the above, or none. But many if not most of them also manifest a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that elevates them by engaging your heart, your mind, your…

In February 2023 the latest batch of nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was announced, and among the group is singer-songwriter Cyndi Lauper. If she is inducted, this honor would be a high point for a strange and remarkable career. Lauper defined MTV ’80s pop with her glittery, sparkly New Wave-inspired dance-pop. She packaged her charming, distinctive talents in a cartoony thrift-store aesthetic that took inspiration from different cultural influences, including the Downtown New York art scene of the late 1970s, early 1980s drag and queer culture, and the dizzyingly creative punk and New Wave scene. She…