All of which is to say that I loved Billy Joel because I loved my dad. I loved that he’d moved 300 miles away from Farmingdale to some little rural town (the Hudson River line would only take you part of the way) to raise his family, to raise me. And I loved the glimpse into his native Long Island, mythical and vanished in his telling, an expanse of aircraft factories and potato fields when he was growing up.

I was thinking the other day about Spring Breakers, and went looking for the piece I wrote about seeing it in a nearly-empty Indiana theater, only to find that the site has been stricken from the internet. Rereading it, I see some interesting parallels with my other writing on pop,

For a brief and spectacular moment two decades years ago, it seemed like every band could be the Fiery Furnaces. Every band could make music bursting with ideas, suffused with charm, willing to try almost anything to give its listeners a thrill. Blueberry Boat, released 20 years ago this Saturday, was a double album whose signature tracks stretched past seven minutes in multi-part suites — not a rock opera (though it was fun to pretend that it was) so much as a masterful short story collection about the burning, globalized world. Today it stands as a pinnacle of indie’s artistic ambition, and a dense universe still open to exploration and discovery.

Around the time the last Scissor Sisters album, Ta-Dah, came out, I was in Maryland for a funeral. Some funerals feel sad like like a drizzle increasing to a steady rain, and some funerals feel sad…

High-volume sound engineering may finally be falling out of fashion

<b>Just imagine a world in which Carly Rae Jepsen’s song wasn’t a huge hit.</b> OK, now imagine if it were a folk song about Jesus.

In November of 1984, Band Aid, an impromptu UK super-group organized by former Boomtown Rat Bob Geldof and pop mercenary Midge Ure, released “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The charity single…

The many ways to appreciate The Flaming Lips’ epic new track, Andy Warhol’s 8-hour film, and a 10-hour YouTube clip of Justin Bieber

Back in 2004, I was a 25-year-old finance and legal assistant at a record label, and instead of entering 200 individual paper invoices for shipping 2 promo CDs of Sugarcult from Nashville to Albuquerque, like I was being paid to do, I would blog. At first it was politics, about

We love Robyn (and you should too).