Today, I give thanks for self-referentiality; over the course of my life, it has made me very happy. And this week, it enabled me to write the oral history of the oral history of oral histories. Happy Thanksgiving.

posted 24 November 2011 in Outside, Self-reflexive, Tasty Bits. no comments yet

As you may have heard, legendary fantasy writer Anne McCaffrey died this week at age 85. I remember her work fondly; not only did it expand my imagination in junior high school, it provoked the opening paragraph to an article I wrote about Coolio fifteen years ago. To wit: Coolio raps for a living, but […]

posted 23 November 2011 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

It’s been almost three weeks since R.E.M. broke up, and Mike Mills still hasn’t released a solo album.

posted 10 October 2011 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

This past weekend marked the twentieth anniversary of Guns N’ Roses’ messy yet magnificent magnum opus, Use Your Illusion. Honoring that occasion, the excellent Maura Johnston, music editor at the Village Voice, made herself a single-disc edit of the sprawling two-CD album–something I did for my own entertainment five years ago (although any honoring of […]

posted 19 September 2011 in Links, Tasty Bits. 2 comments

Chris’s comments about Madonna’s chart history, and how her incredible run of top-five singles was interrupted by “Oh Father,” got me thinking about how she never actually released “Into the Groove” as an American single, even though it was everybody’s favorite Madonna song circa 1985 and (I feel confident) would have hit #1. Which then […]

posted 11 May 2011 in Tasty Bits. 24 comments

It has to be Steven Tyler adding a whole “Baby, let me follow you down” section to “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” doesn’t it?

posted 3 March 2011 in Tasty Bits. 3 comments

1. Elvis Costello, “Blue Chair” 2. Hoagy Carmichael, “Rockin’ Chair” 3. Neil Diamond, “I Am… I Said” 4. Jeff Buckley, “Musical Chairs” 5. Terence Trent D’Arby, “Dance Little Sister” The Carmichael song has been covered by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Frank Sinatra to Richard Thompson.

posted 1 March 2011 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments

1. Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A. (“Dancing in the Dark”) 2. M.I.A., Kala (“Paper Planes”) 3. Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings and Food (“Take Me to the River”) 4. Derek and the Dominos, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (“Layla”) 5. Green Day, Nimrod (“Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”)

posted 1 February 2011 in Tasty Bits. 6 comments

1. The Kinks, Something Else (“Waterloo Sunset”) 2. Madonna, I’m Breathless (“Vogue”) 3. The Clash, London Calling (“Train in Vain”) 4. The Who, Who’s Next (“Won’t Get Fooled Again”) 5. The Eagles, On the Border (“Best of My Love”) For obvious reasons, I avoided compilations and discs that got reissued with a bonus track. What […]

posted 25 January 2011 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments

Consider the final verse of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” in which mankind trundles onto “silver spaceships” and disembarks for a location more hospitable to human life than planet Earth: Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the Sun The Sun? Really? Not the Moon, or Mars, or even another galaxy? […]

posted 18 January 2011 in Tasty Bits. 3 comments