Good morning! Yesterday, I blogged in pajamas. Today, sadly, I must wear pants.
Google Buzz! It debuted yesterday! Like Beaujon, I don't quite understand it! And while it's cool that Google's new horse in the microblogging race means I have a couple dozen more followers in Google Reader, I did not appreciate having to confirm them, like, [...]

Sterling Children's Books is pleased as punch to announce the release of Man Gave Names to All the Animals, a children's-book rendering of Bob Dylan's song of the same name. Jim Arnosky, the artist behind the book whose previous titles include Babies in the Bayou and All About Frogs, took his inspiration from the "land [...]

*Bob Dylan paints his masterpiece? Theoretically. El Bard is set to debut some paintings based on his "Drawn Blank" series of sketches from the early '90s. TO WIT: "Man on Bridge" (right; acrylic, 2009).
*Related: The Guardian has a neat little slideshow of Dylan's Nov., 2007 exhibit at the Chemnitz Art Gallery in eastern Germany.
*Not quite [...]

If folk music’s prime currency is authenticity, Langhorne Slim might well earn some crooked eyebrows. Classically trained at the SUNY-Purchase conservatory, Sean Scolnik donned loafers and floppy hat and named himself after his hometown in the tradition of all those rail-hoppin’ ramblers who used to do that. The blogosphere gobbled up this aesthetic and and [...]

To judge by their tightly wound, country-tinged pop songs, Olivia Mancini and the Mates aren't shorting their craft. But even the most polished band needs its R&R, and this local act—featuring two former members of Washington Social Club—loves to curl up with a good book. That's the impression, at least, left by "Graphology," a rollicking gem [...]

Thanks in part to Don DeLillo's 1973 novel Great Jones Street, it didn't take long for the rock-star-toiling-away-in-seclusion narrative to go from the stuff of critical legend to obvious fodder for parody. Nevermind that two years later saw the release and instant canonization of Bob Dylan and the Band's long-buried The Basement Tapes—the inspiration, in fact, for [...]

Because I wrote about Title Tracks' versions of songs by The Flamin' Groovies and The Merseybeats earlier this week, and because Bob Dylan's truly atrocious new disc of Christmas standards leaked yesterday, I've been thinking a lot about covers.
Let's put aside the illustrious history of ill-advised tributes (read: the entire Me First and the Gimme Gimmes oeuvre). A good cover can [...]

When Levon Helm and The Band hosted a five-hour send-off concert in 1976, it was a musical event of mythic proportions. The Band and its guests—among them Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell—were torchbearers of the American folk revival. And though it might be overly dramatic to say the movement “ended” with The Last [...]

Friday

The Footprint in Hip Hop Tour: Method Man & Red Man, Ghostface Killah, Duo Live. 9:30 club. $35. All ages.
Sophia Bass, Ruthi & the Tracers. Bangkok Blues. Call for price.
Jimmy Thackery & the Drivers, Lil’ Ed & the Blues Imperials. Birchmere. $25.
Head Automatica, Cubic Zirconia. Black Cat. $15. All ages.
Carol Bui Butterflies, Impossible Hair, [...]

I’ve come to be untroubled in my seeking
And I’ve come to say that nothing is for naught
I’ve come to reach out blind, to reach forward and behind
For the more I seek, the more I’m sought
These lyrics, from Joe Pug’s “Hymn 101,” might as well be the tagline for Pug’s current year-long tour, which has taken [...]