Essay

Jason recently asked me if I had any favorite reviews from the 25-year history of The Daily Vault. The funny thing about writing music reviews—for me, at least—is that they are all very much in-the-moment events. As soon as the review was written, it was on to the next disc, the words I just wrote all but forgotten. It's rare that something I wrote will stick with me for years to come, so that when I'm old and decrepit, I'll sit in my rocking chair and think to myself, "Yeah, that review I wrote in 1998? Now THAT was a…

Twenty-five years. A generation. A quarter century. However you choose to measure it, it’s a long stretch of time, long enough for evolutions of all kinds to take place. The world has changed, the music industry has changed, The Daily Vault has changed, and I’ve changed (for proof, just check my hairline). Yet some things have remained the same. I still subscribe to the philosophy laid out in My Heart Sings The Harmony: Twenty Years of Writing About Music: My job is to narrate my experience as a listener, to explain how the work was received on my end, which…

When people talk about rock and roll trailblazers, it’s almost always the white musicians they talk about -- Elvis, Jerry Lee, those guys. But if we want to face the truth—and we do—rock and roll was invented by men and women of color. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the first person to use distortion on an electric guitar, and her gospel stylings were a direct influence on early rock. Chuck Berry created rock and roll as teenage rebellion and celebration, and incidentally created the guitar riff. And then—then there was Richard Wayne Penniman, the man who created rock and roll itself.…

When I was a kid, vinyl was dead and that seemed like a good thing. Outdated sound, very hard to store and very retro. It was all about cassettes and CD’s later when I got older. I loved music from as far back as I could remember and I was about 12 when I started receiving CD’s and I just loved them. I started collecting and listening to whatever I could not long thereafter. I’ve always had an affinity for CD’s, the booklets, the sound, everything. But when I was getting ready to enter college, I decided to start looking…

It’s a mark of respect, this business of obsessively listening to our musical idols’ songs in the days after they pass, but also a ritual of mourning. We listen to remember—mourning the artist through their creations—but also to remind ourselves of the inescapable march of time—mourning not just the loss of the artist’s voice, but of the years that have brought us, too, that many steps closer to the great beyond.Tom Petty was a dozen years older than me, but the gap never seemed wide, maybe because I have a brother born the same year as TP (1950), but also…

When Chris Cornell, legendary singer of Soundgarden, took his own life after a sold-out show in Detroit, MI in May, the music world was stunned. Nobody saw this coming. Some of the signs were there—a shambling performance and slurred speech—but no one expected anything like this. Then, nine weeks later, a week before the start of a North American tour, Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington hung himself in a home he had just purchased a month or so prior. Friends say he’d been drinking again, something he’d struggled with for years, and he was said to have been deeply upset…

In an average week, publicists, labels, and artists send about 800 pitches to the Daily Vault—and we publish somewhere between five and ten reviews.  Let those numbers sink in for a minute. The weekly dive into the pitch pile is an exercise in ruthless culling. There is no spite or malice involved; it’s just basic survival for a site that’s lightly staffed and all-volunteer. Naturally, over the years we’ve identified some patterns and rules observed by successful pitches—which is to say, pitches that make it through the culling process and are referred to the writing staff. There is a limited…

Writers hate clichés, but sometimes only clichés will suffice. That may be one of the reasons I’ve struggled to put words together about the death of Chris Squire, co-founder, bassist and harmony vocalist of the pioneering progressive rock ensemble Yes, a band I’ve been a devoted fan of for more than 40 years. The thing about clichés, though, is that, like stereotypes, they all descend from some original germ of truth. “Larger than life,” “a force of nature,” “a tremendous innovator,” “hugely influential”—beyond a doubt, Christopher Russell Edward Squire was all of these things and more. Another reason I’ve struggled…

Don’t buy music. It’s really that simple. If you don’t pay for the music you listen to, if you copy it or download it from a file-sharing site or do whatever else you do to steal it—and yes, it is stealing, quit trying to rationalize it, you are taking something that belongs to someone else (the artist) without their permission and without compensating them, that’s the definition of THEFT, people—then you will eventually, one day, kill the Daily Vault.                        You probably won’t kill most of the other sites around that claim to deliver music reviews, most of which have already…

It was about eight years ago that I penned an essay for the Vault entitled “What Was An Album?” It was 2005, and the digital music revolution has just become to realize its potential. It made us as consumers consider the question of just how much things were going to change for the industry, and even the art form itself. You can point to a variety of reasons that there was such a radical transformation, but at the core, there is iTunes and the iPod. At the end of April, iTunes celebrated its 10th anniversary and that occasion prompted some…