
My birthday is on January 6th, and I rarely have a big birthday party, I think largely because everyone, including myself, tends to be kind of partied out after the holidays and New Year's Eve. But I'm turning 30 this time around, so the weekend of my birthday, on Saturday, January 7th, 2012, I will be having a big old birthday bash at one of my favorite clubs in Baltimore, The Windup Space . There will be music from two great Baltimore acts, the hip hop band Soul Cannon and the instrumental duo The Water , [...]

It's Spring, and that means rebirth: when the earth reemerges from the earth, covered in last year's leaves. When the morning is filled with brave still-chilled birds, proffering a soundtrack for our triumphant return. It's also school vacation, and that means our annual trip down to North Carolina's Outer Banks, where we join up with family members more typically spread far and wide across the country, enough to spill into two adjacent houses. In past years, as with most of our excursions to various and sundry parts of the world, [...]

After 25 Grammy Awards and just about as many albums, Stevie Wonder needs little introduction. Signed to Motown Records at the tender age of 11 after being discovered by Ronnie White of the Miracles, the blind-from-infancy multi-instrumentalist's first two albums didn't make much of a splash - his sophomore outing, a tribute to the songs of Ray Charles, is notorious for the poor match it makes between "Uncle Ray's" world-weary lyricism and "Little" Stevie Wonder's sunny, high-pitched innocence - but his subsequent work as a composer, singer-songwriter, and arranger is legendary. [...]

It's a conceit of modern music critics and bloggers to approach songs and albums as objects, and songwriters and performers as producers of those objects. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Nominally, at least, our purpose is to provoke fandom and sales; from a critical perspective, the act of listening is best done as a focused activity, the better to isolate and describe those elements which make a particular song, album, performer or performance worthy of our limited attention, and our purchasing power. But the coverfolk approach goes deeper by [...]