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Liza Minnelli’s recently reissued concert album, Live in New York 1979 (titled initially Live at Carnegie Hall), isn’t merely a concert album. It’s an artifact of 1970s celebrity culture, particularly 1970s New York celebrity culture. Gotham in that decade was a very different place from the gentrified Wonderland it is today. The city faced some of the worst financial stagnation in its history and saw rising crime waves. In a New York Times article, Edmund White wrote that New York the 1970s was “the last period in American culture when the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow still pertained, when writers…

To the casual observer, any individual James Taylor album might feel more or less interchangeable with the others—both because his style has been remarkably consistent over the years, and because the gap in quality between his worst and best albums is pretty narrow. James Taylor has never made a bad album, just a few that have felt somewhat looser, less focused or less inspired, as well as a few that focus on covers rather than his typically powerful originals. This list, then—like all the others, if we’re being realistic—is for the fans, the devotees who’ve gobbled up every bit of…

“So much time to make up Everywhere you turn Time we have wasted on the way…” David Crosby died yesterday. I am not a CSN(Y) fanatic. I like their stuff well enough; I’m not likely to ever turn off the radio when their songs come on. Especially since, being almost 55, I grew up with them. There is a certain specific sadness to watching the musicians you listened to in your youth die. My first gut punch was Neil Peart. I might have actually shed a tear or two, especially when I realized I could never see Rush live. That…

Lisa Marie Presley died on 12 January 2022 at the age of 54. The news was met with shock, given the (relatively) low profile that Presley maintained in the last few years. She interrupted her hiatus with her promotional efforts on behalf of Baz Luhrmann’s film Elvis, the musical biopic about her father, the late/great Elvis Presley. Her final public appearance was at the 80th Golden Globe Awards, which she attended with her mother, actress Priscilla Presley, in solidarity with the film, which was up for several awards that evening.   Presley lived to be 54 years old, gifted over a…

In choosing the band name “Yes” in 1968, five young Brits aimed to personify the positive spirit of the ambitious music they wanted to make—expansive, adventurous, and full of possibility. Over the course of more than five decades since, the band has persevered through myriad lineup changes while releasing somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 songs ranging in length from half a minute to 22, and ranging in style from bleeding-edge progressive rock to mainstream arena rock to mild-mannered adult contemporary. It’s a rich catalog of songs of wildly divergent approaches (and quality) to explore and consider—which is why we’ve…

If the 1960s were a socio-cultural maelstrom, 1967 was the eye of that storm, the whirlwind inside of which a fertile popular music scene, the clash of generations, drugs, racism and political upheaval all collided hard with one another. If it feels like only one or two of those terms would need updating to capture the essence of the last few years in America, that might explain why Richard Fulco ’s new novel We Are All Together feels both very much of its time, and remarkably relevant. New Yorker Fulco’s previous novel There Is No End To This Slope followed…

One of my favorite t-shirts is one I’ve never actually encountered in the wild, though it’s described in Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland. It reads “Introverts unite! We’re here, we’re uncomfortable, and we want to go home.” I can relate to that, and so can Courtney Barnett. Since first gaining notice with her A Sea Of Split Peas double EP in 2013, Barnett has steadily built an audience for her witty, self-deprecating tunes, typically framed by her laconic vocals and dynamic guitar playing. Already something of a unicorn as a left-handed female Australian guitar ace / singer-songwriter, Barnett is also intensely shy.…

Time for a history lesson. Once upon a time nice people with guitars actually wrote songs with literary content. They told stories about specific events, fictional or real, that resonated with the artists. (There was another subgenre of music that involved portraits of people. We’ll get into that later.) Nowadays, I’m not sure we have any pop stars who can spell resonated. But I know, since you are a discerning music fan who is reading the Daily Vault instead of (*gag*) Pitchfork, that you want to broaden your musical horizons. You want to grow. You want to learn. You want…

Pete Mancini pays attention. This is something you would understand even if you never spoke with the Long Island singer-songwriter; it’s right there in every one of his detailed, nuanced, emotionally resonant songs. Like so many of the best creatives, he seems to soak up events around him like a sponge and transmute them into art—in his case, songs that carry on the rich storytelling tradition of Americana, while increasingly infusing it with the melodic pizzazz of power pop. Mancini’s new studio album Killing The Old Ways is his third as a solo artist, along with a live album and…

We all live inside a frame of reference, a body of perceptions and beliefs about how the world works and what our place in it looks like. The moments when that frame is rocked, even splintered, are among the most important along our life’s path; how we react to them determines whether we will continue stubbornly being the person we are today, or adapt and grow. By turns absorbing, insightful, lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny, Songs by Honeybird (Wampus, March 29) is a story that, like its author Peter McDade—son of the South, rock drummer, history professor—contains multitudes.On the surface the…