Shane MacGowan died last week. He was the main singer, songwriter, and creative force behind the Pogues, and given his reckless abandon towards his own health, it’s a miracle he made it to the age of 65. I put together a playlist for The New York Times compiling ten of his greatest tracks, with and […]

posted 4 December 2023 in Articles. no comments yet

River Phoenix died thirty years ago today, on a Hollywood sidewalk outside the Viper Room, in the early hours of Halloween. Costumed partygoers stepped around his body as he thrashed on the concrete and his younger siblings tried to keep him alive. If River were alive today, he would be 53 years old. I still […]

posted 31 October 2023 in Articles. no comments yet

I recently had my first byline in The Wall Street Journal: a review of Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s by Alan Paul. Which I enjoyed, even though I don’t think the album lives up to the subtitle. If you want to read […]

posted 2 October 2023 in Articles. no comments yet

In the spirit of being thorough if somewhat tardy: a few months back, the legendary guitarist (and songwriter and singer and poet and producer) Tom Verlaine died, and I wrote (with Peter Keepnews) an obituary of the Television leader for The New York Times. Various peers and collaborators, including Lenny Kaye, Richard Lloyd, and Richard […]

posted 16 April 2023 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

Some months back, my pal Greg LaCour, who edits Charlotte magazine, sent me an email that included the photo you see above, and asked if I’d be interested in writing about the crazy two-week period in April 1972 when the Charlotte Coliseum hosted Billy Graham, pro wrestling, Elvis, and a minor-league ice-hockey championship series. My […]

posted 4 October 2022 in Articles. no comments yet

Coolio died this week—just 59, way too young. Back in 1996, I spent a week traveling around the world with him for a magazine cover story: a live show in DC, multiple appearances on MTV in New York City, and memorably, a visit to a bookstore in London. The opening paragraph of the article: Coolio […]

posted 1 October 2022 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

The first obituary I ever wrote for The New York Times was back in 2017: the subject was Charlie Watts, the quietly indispensable drummer for the Rolling Stones. (To the best of my knowledge, he never missed a gig in over 50 years, although there are [bizarrely] a few Stones tracks he doesn’t drum on, […]

posted 13 September 2021 in Articles. no comments yet

I recently wrote two obituaries in The New York Times on two amazing musicians with very different sensibilities: Johnny Ventura and Nanci Griffith. Johnny Ventura was a mainstay of modern merengue, while Nanci Griffith was one of the great folk-music voices of recent decades. They were both grounded by their homes–the Dominican Republic and Texas, […]

posted 16 August 2021 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

In the latest issue of Our State, I wrote about public art in Charlotte, specifically Metalmorphosis by by David Cerny and the Firebird by Niki de Saint Phalle. I also got to quote my awesome wife Dr. Jen Sudul Edwards and my awesome friend Beth Troutman (although the magazine removed the part where she called […]

posted 16 April 2021 in Articles. no comments yet

Back in 2006, I went to Northampton to visit the greatest living Englishman, comics writer Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and From Hell. We had a fascinating three-hour conversation, on subjects including magic, Finnegans Wake, and pornography (his latest book at that moment was the erotic fantasia Lost Girls)–but when Rolling Stone bumped the article […]

posted 20 November 2020 in Articles. no comments yet