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  • Lonely: A Memoir

    Lonely: A Memoir by Emily White


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Midweek Music Moment: Hey Jude, Beatles

Granted, it’s a compilation album. And it comes after both Sgt. Pepper’s and Abbey Road. That said, Hey Jude, a/k/a The Beatles Again, was long my favorite Beatles album — and remains among my favorites 40 years after it was released.

Some don’t consider this an “official” Beatles album because it is a compilation. [...]

Midweek Music Moment: I’m still a teenager

I need to get back in the habit of doing this series and thought I would do so with an approach a bit different than before. It is prompted by a statistic I came across in the last couple weeks. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “people tend to most [...]

Midweek Music Moment: Son of Schmilsson, Harry Nilsson

True, Harry Nilsson’s Son of Schmilsson was released in the summer of 1972. But with the cover, on which Nilsson appears as Dracula, and the B-horror movie sound effects between the first and second tracks, it seems an appropriate topic for Halloween week — even though I value the album as a tremendous deconstruction [...]

Midweek Music Moment: Aja, Steely Dan

Pristine. That may be the only way to describe the sound quality of Steely Dan’s Aja. When you consider that the album was released 32 years ago today, it says a lot for what was achieved.

I know Steely Dan gets a lot of disrespect from some quarters. Their music — at least [...]

Midweek Music Moment: Bill Evans

Usually, I try to use album releases and recording sessions as the basis for these features. But something struck we when I realized that September 15 was the anniversary of the death of jazz pianist Bill Evans. When he died in 1980, he was barely 51. That’s what struck me. With [...]

Midweek Music Moment: Rockin’ the Suburbs, Ben Folds

My definition of “old soul” differs slightly from the more common usage. To me, an old soul is someone who, musically or otherwise, grasps and is able to express the ethos of those who are a decade or more older. Any number of the tunes on Rockin’ the Suburbs make it plain Ben [...]

Midweek Music Moment: Hank Wilson’s Back, Leon Russell

Last week, I mentioned that following Led Zeppelin’s 1973 album, my musical interests were changing. I wrote that wholly unaware of the subject of this week’s Midweek Music Moment. By chance, it reveals just how much those interests changed over the course of a couple years.

On August 31, 1973, Leon Russell released Hank [...]

Midweek Music Moment: No Quarter: Jimmy Page & Robert Plant Unledded

I grew up with Led Zeppelin. I even remember standing in a music store in the Twin Cities in about 1970 listening to “Whole Lotta Love” from Led Zeppelin II speed around me on the latest technological breakthrough, quadraphonic stereo. (Who’d a thunk it would take home theater setups before that concept really [...]

Midweek Music Moment: Chicago V, Chicago

Thirty-seven years ago hard-core Chicago fans like me thought the rest of the county had finally caught on. In retrospect, what we were seeing was actually the beginning of a new and different path, one that would lead some of us from the band.

On August 19, 1972, Chicago V became the number one album [...]

Midweek Music Moment: Bill Chase

You have to be of a certain era for the name Bill Chase to mean much. And it actually could mean something to you in two different contexts. Yet both contexts have an untimely limit. Bill Chase died in a plane crash on August 9, 1974, near Jackson, Minn..

One context is a [...]