What’s behind the Music
In his article “Forgetting the Roots: Does it Matter Who Makes Folk Music?” Taylor Coe explores the importance of history for folk musicians and how their creation stories can influence their effect on...
View ArticleThe New Young Folk Singer You’re Gonna Want to Hear
It may have taken Jessica Pratt five years to get her debut album released after she recorded it, but judging by the well-deserved welcome mat critics are rolling out for her, it may have been worth...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel
The cover was a black and white close-up of a woman, her hair windswept, her name scrawled above her in a font usually reserved for truck stops: Linda Ronstadt. I’d retrieved the album and its torn...
View ArticleRIP Pete Seeger
Folk-music legend Pete Seeger passed away at 94 yesterday.In his memory, we’d like to highlight Nell Boeschenstein’s Rumpus essay about him, “Pete Seeger: The Voice That Belongs to the Body.”But lately...
View ArticleBoyfriends: Achilles
Achilles was a 17 year old who lived in a shed surrounded by Celtic crosses and ancient milestones in the corner of his parents’ lawn. His father was an archaeologist who collected chipped bowls and...
View ArticleSwinging Modern Sounds #59: Not a Folk Singer
By now the Vashti Bunyan story is well-known: A recording artist from forty years ago, who made only one full-length album (Just Another Diamond Day, 1970) and sold very few copies of it, was suddenly...
View ArticleThe Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Cultural Constellations of Agee and Smith
A chronology assembled out of facts and events is not quite a lie, but a limited or misleading truth.A chronology abhors context: it cannot adequately represent the messy and intertwining complexity of...
View ArticleMark Rogers & Mary Byrne Bring Their Sly Soulful Music to WNYU
Prior to leaving on their summer UK tour, Mark Rogers & Mary Byrne appeared on WNYU.org on May 4. Rick Moody wrote about the duo in his piece on “Stillness as Metaphor,” outlining the beautifully...
View ArticleSwinging Modern Sounds #68: A Way of Life
Souled American, the Chicago-based indie-roots band from the 90s, was famous for obscurity. The people who loved them loved them fervently, and I was one, but there was no overstating the obscurity,...
View ArticleSound Takes: Dark Bird is Home
The Tallest Man on EarthDark Bird is Home (Dead Oceans)There’s a spot on The Tallest Man on Earth’s 2012 KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic session where he—Swedish folk songwriter Kristian Matsson—makes a...
View ArticleA Dying Art: Carrie & Lowell and Elegiac Practice
Grief doesn’t only disturb life; it disturbs the way we talk about life. As myriad aspects of our existence are questioned and reexamined in the wake of a death, so too is our relationship with the...
View ArticleSound Takes: Until I Live & Rumpus Video Premiere
The National ParksUntil I LiveAt a certain point, around the end of the ’00s, interest arose around certain new bands who were giving folk music a new shape and vitality. While alternative acts like...
View ArticleEchoes of Winter: Revisiting Inside Llewyn Davis
See that crow up in the sky? / He don’t walk, he just fly / He don’t walk, he don’t run / Keep on flapping to the sun It was my first winter. Well, not if you consider a ten-degree seemingly lazy...
View ArticleFinishing What You Start: A Conversation with Musician Matt Kivel
I was introduced to Matt Kivel in April 2014 at a literary reading at KGB Bar in Manhattan’s East Village. In between readings, Matt and I bonded over our appreciation for Hamilton Leithauser, The...
View ArticleSwinging Modern Sounds #82: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark: A Symposium
There have been only a very few albums of music in my life whose impact on me has been because the album sounded like nothing else I had heard before, and because I was unprepared for the novelty and...
View ArticleAlbum of the Week: Loma by Loma
Jonathan Meiburg, from Shearwater, and Cross Records’s Dan Duszynski and Emily Cross were first introduced through their music, with a mutual friend gifting each the other’s albums. It was a match made...
View ArticleI Stop Somewhere Waiting for You
He wears a Greek fisherman’s cap, the kind John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie wore, and though you don’t know him, it suits him. He’s a salt-of-the-earth type entertainer, a people-meeter, friend-maker,...
View ArticleSwinging Modern Sounds #96: Voices of Displacement
A-Wa is a vocal ensemble, a band, a dream, an elegy, a small mobile collective of rhapsodes, three sisters of Yemenite Jewish origin, singing primarily in Arabic. The sisters are Tair Haim, who is the...
View ArticleEverything Is Happening All of the Time: Talking with Sven Ratzke
Cabaret superstar Sven Ratzke has performed all around the world, including Lincoln Center, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble in Berlin, the Sydney Opera House, and Arts...
View ArticleSwinging Modern Sounds #104: Paradise
Mia Doi Todd’s music is work of subtlety and immense power, gentle at first glance and then, upon exploration, remarkably strong, expansive, even insistent and, more often than not, emotionally...
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