As often tends to happen, the trend of posting late year-end wrap-ups continues…..and this year it is even more belated. In looking at my 2019 post of the best albums, published to the site on the flagrantly delinquent date of...
Not that I have made any great forays into the research, but I am assuming a fair number of us grew up with a pet bird in the house. Some friends had a parrot, others a cockatiel, maybe something else...
I’m definitely paraphrasing when discussing an interesting quote in Lizzy Goodman’s oral history compilation Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011. This quote stood out for being both blunt as well as...
Tomorrow is the release date for an album that has been absolutely teased to the brink of delirium. Tom Misch and Yussef Dayes, two British producers and Jazz instrumentalists, will give us a look at the final product of a...
It was going to be a real task to make a better mix than Modern Soulness Vol. IX. That mix just accidentally came together once I took a bunch of Hiatus Kayote’s short interlude clips from their fantastic albums Tawk...
That first video from Surfaces, “Keep It Gold”, sums up a lot of feelings out there: we all have a thirst for adventure right about now, even if it’s just getting out our front door. Whether...
The word given to me for this week’s “Quarantine Album Pick of the Week” was a bit tougher, especially within the current context of life. The word was “soaring”. Ah, how we would all love to wake up and open...
Okay, I get it …. it’s almost April and I’m trying to do a recap of 2019. The audacity! Here’s the excuse: early 2020 was a very busy time. It would appear I overextended myself with extracurriculars… and also the...
Don’t these milky-white British boys just ooze “sexy”? Well, hold on a minute…. What this album feels like is a group of your friends, who have all tested negative for the coronavirus, inviting you up to a really understated house...
Preamble In 2009, I thought my listening habits would just continue to stroll into the 2010’s in the same manner. I was neck deep in a world of Indie Rock, with a peppering of classic Blues, Jazz, and R&B albums...
A medium-sized tangent to start things off (before the main topic of Labi Siffre): There are those who listen to the music before the lyrics, and then there are those who need serviceable lyrics before they jump on-board with...
It seems even at the slight age of 21, Steve Lacy has already come into his own. Remarkably, he doesn’t share the same popular esteem in R&B as peers like Frank Ocean, SZA, or The Weeknd- an aspect that confounds...
How did we get to this point? In 2019 the derivations of R&B spread like a great sycamore tree. However, the prominence and preeminence of R&B is nothing new, nevertheless, the character of it in today’s day and...
I was laser-focused on navigating through as many albums from 2018 as physically possible. It was a willful endeavor to pour over the dozens of albums mentioned on some list or other, as well as scroll through all the...
The typical 12-inch vinyl record you will find at the record store can hold roughly 22 minutes of sound per side….if pressed at the typical 33 revolutions per minute (rpm). When Columbia Records introduced the microgroove technology in 1948, it...
Listening to Omar Apollo’s very promising EP Stereo (2018) had me in a certain state of mind I can only describe as an uneasiness with the sensation of standing on shaky ground. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the album and became excited...
The rich heritage of sampling in Hip-Hop has given many artists second and third lives. Quite appropriately, it’s often the obscure and/or forgotten artists who either get their first day in the sun or receive a nostalgic dousing of warmth...
The one hard-and-fast rule of the Modern Soulness mixes is they must all be under 80 minutes. If you’ll notice, that’s the typical length of audio that can be written onto a CD-ROM. This was once how I did all...
Venturing into the endless tunnel that is music sampling only makes you a better music aficionado. I learned that on my recent journey into the unknown, sparked by a friend giving me one song: Betty Wright’s phenomenal “Clean Up Woman”,...
Why a period before Paak? What is the reason, what is the cause? There is a lot of intrigue surrounding the artist Anderson .Paak, who is undoubtedly making a rocket-fired ascent into stardom ever since 2016 brought us the album...
Once upon a time there was a great wellspring of new Rock music in the world running ragged down a glorious mountainside. It wasn’t too long ago either, like a monsoon rain coming down overnight that people awoke to the...
Yes, there are nine of these things, but this is the first one I have posted. These mixes, all falling under the umbrella theme of “Modern Soulness” have been some of my favorite to make lately because the world of...
Like a slow tide moving in, we’ve watched as the world of Rock n’ Roll has made an immense shift from the beginning of this decade. By the time 2017 came around, it was clear that a majority of the...
One way of describing 2017 is it was a remarkable year in the barest sense – meaning that despite all of the darkness, bigotry, abuse, and scandal, it was nonetheless still a year worth many remarks. Hey, that’s better than...
2017 was a year that confirmed what many of us already knew: Rock music is losing ground in the world of pop music relevancy. We saw it happening in 2016 as the Knowles sisters dominated the “best album” polls and...
Greetings all, it’s a new year and time for the first ever guest playlist! That’s right, I Johnny Lobo, am here to present a curated playlist created to showcase the songs I discovered throughout 2017. Bear in mind, not all...
This edition of Memory Crusades deals with an unusual type of memory that should never be treated as nostalgia, yet can’t help but be treated as such. The subject is remembering pain fondly, or in other words, embracing the memories...
These are the days of odd shapes and acute angles. It’s not summery bliss anymore, now it’s wonder and melancholy. We wear our knit sweaters and drink steaming beverages, watching the air form from our breath with mild curiosity. The...
How many cars can I buy till I run out of drive? How much drive can I have, until I run out of road? How much road can they pave, until I run out of land? How much land can...
“Lady Daydream” by Mr Twin Sister. “Just because I’m losing, doesn’t make me a loser” When life hits us with the good, it happens a couple times over. That’s why people often say, “good things come in pairs”. Yet we...
I’ve got a pretty extensive playlist on my IPod aptly labeled “Jogging”. It contains 314 songs clocking in at 20 hours and 38 minutes. That means I could jog for an extended period of time without hearing the same song...
There are a few movies out there where I had my Shazam on standby at all times – it was just one great track after another. I remember just holding my phone in my hand the whole time, my finger...
One of these days I will make a Top 10 list for “Favorite Albums from College”, and it will be a lovely stroll down memory lane indeed. For the time being we will just say that Peter Bjorn & John’s...
They use to say that rap was divided between the East Coast and the West Coast. The styles were different, the influences split, and the feuds between the coastal camps all too real. The East was defined by jazz samples...
The best Lyft rides are the ones where I get to my destination….obviously…. but also the ones where the driver is playing really good music. In Denver we have this amazing radio show on 102.3 FM called OpenAir, which my...
The clip at the top is from the classic movie The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). It is one of my favorite films, and I believe, a fine example of when music and the motion of a movie have been “threaded” together. In fact,...
Ever since the release of Danny Brown’s XXX (2011), he has been recognized as one of the most unique and pioneering voices in hip-hop. Some may say he’s carried the baton Lil’ Wayne held for so long as the most...
Why do we hold onto nursery rhymes? Why do we remember the fables of our childhood, or absorb the parables of old, or embrace the old wives tales that we somehow take at face value? I believe we embrace them because they are ultimately...
Sometimes our memories pick odd items to hold onto. A seemingly innocuous moment from our life is given over to the past, and is somehow framed with far greater importance than we believe it deserves. Nevertheless, it takes hold...
As I said in my previous post, this is another uncanny real life story that simply could not have been written as fiction. The Drafthouse Films documentary about the band Death also came out in 2012, the same year the Oscar-winning documentary...
You just can’t write a story like this. It seems the charming unpredictability of real life is forced to make some of our greatest stories, and provide us with our greatest sources of inspiration. Take the true story of Sixto Rodriguez, a.k.a....
POSTER UNVEILED!!! My very thoughtful and talented friend John Wolf sent me this awesome poster he created to commemorate my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2015. The graphical simplicity belies the fact that the composition is nearly flawless. Supernova...
To Pimp A Butterfly (2015) was a seminal recording. It ventured farther from the gangster and street survival tropes of Good Kid, Maad City (2012) both with it’s lyrics, themes, and sonic backdrop. There was jazz, soul, funk, and even a...
