“I’ve always been a write-what-you-know kind of guy,” Bob Mould says on what he describes as a rainy San Francisco morning. “So this time, I was trying to consciously create a little bit of a different world to work in.” He ended up changing his world in two ways. On …
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You go around the world in roots and melodrama on these three albums, all from experienced specialists in forensic romanticism and all at new peaks in their searching. Murray A. Lightburn, Hear Me Out (Dangerbird) With his plaintive, swooning voice and the luxuriant sweep of his records with the Canadian …
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If anyone told you this time last year that Ariana Grande would drop a song that simultaneously samplesThe Sound of Music and jacks Soulja Boy’s “Pretty Boy Swag,” would you have believed it? We’ve come a long way from the bubblegum-R&B of her early years. “7 Rings” is a sexy, …
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This story was originally published on June 26, 2015 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, musical artists like Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, Steely Dan, Toto, Hall and Oates, and dozens of others regularly popped up on each other’s records, creating a golden era of smooth-music collaboration. And on June …
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