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It’s funny the things you notice when you’re out in the audience at a rock show.I saw the Greg Kihn Band no less than nine times in their 1980-83 heyday, rising with them from small clubs to opening slots in college auditoriums and then headlining those same venues. Though the band consistently delivered its Buddy Holly-inspired power pop with abundant energy, it was apparent from the first show I caught that one of these things was not like the others. Frontman Kihn, Steve Wright (bass / harmony vocals), Dave Carpender (guitar), and Gary Phillips (keyboards / guitar) played hard and…

 Part of the magic of music is the way it can create a profound sense of connection with someone you’ve never met.The fact that I never met David Longdon, the late singer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter for Big Big Train, was more or less a technicality born of proximity. The band is known for being accessible at gigs and if I lived less than 5000 miles from their home base in the south of England, we would likely have met years ago. As things stood, I had high hopes of seeing the band live for the first time when they made…

  A decade ago, South Carolina-born singer-songwriter Ben Bostick set his compass west like a pioneer, albeit one who found the crowds thronging the Santa Monica pier liked his mix of covers and original songs so well that he could actually make a living busking. It was the beginning of a journey he’s still on today, full of highs and lows and tales that only he could tell.Bostick’s initial oceanside success bankrolled his 2015 EP My Country, a collection of alternately playful and poignant outsider-country tunes in the tradition of Waylon Jennings and Chris Stapleton. His self-titled 2017 debut full-length…

 Becky Warren the singer-songwriter is a whip-smart, take-no-prisoners, reflexively charismatic performer with a novelist’s eye and a rock and roller’s heart. Her music, whether you cast it as Americana or alt-country or “catchy, guitar-driven rock” (her words), is filled with memorable characters and addictive hooks, penetrating lyrics and self-deprecating humor.Becky Warren the person is both very much the same and completely different. Genuinely modest about her prodigious talents, she is also speaking publicly for the first time this year about a personal struggle with depression that has now lasted more than half her life. After a pair of albums fronting…

 Jean-Paul Vest (Photo credit: Dustin Finn)The Sand Reckoner is the fifth studio album (plus one EP) from Last Charge Of The Light Horse, the vehicle for the music of songwriter Jean-Paul Vest. A native Texan long since transplanted to Long Island, New York, Vest’s painstakingly crafted songs combine the poetic intensity of Richard Thompson, the melodic intuition of George Harrison, the fearless complexity of XTC, and the willful experimentalism of Radiohead. Influences aside, though, Vest’s work is thoroughly original, each song a thoughtfully constructed statement, often both visceral and evocative.The new album is Vest’s fourth collaboration with Grammy-winning Los Angeles…

“Big Big Train is the antithesis of an overnight success story.”– BBT Manager Nick Shilton, January 2020 Being a music writer of a certain age means having an established set of tastes and expectations and artists whose work pushes one’s buttons. That history and context makes it that much tougher for anyone to storm the gates of the high-walled keep known as “My Favorite Artists.” Progressive rock collective Big Big Train made it inside those walls in 2009 after first coming to my attention in 2007, a decade and a half into the band’s existence, at a time when I’d…

A list of favorite songs can never be more than a snapshot of a particular moment in your life. Tomorrow a song that you barely paid attention to before may hit home in a whole new way. The day after that, a song that meant so much may feel trite or overblown or somehow insufficient to the moment you’re now inhabiting. Songs are friends you keep for years, fading in and out of touch, mostly connecting and reconnecting, but sometimes disappearing into memory. This is my list today. Next month it will look different, and six months from now it…