Blog: Things I'd Rather Be Doing

I can't even pretend to offer a comprehensive list anymore. When I was a newspaper music critic, I tried to keep up with most everything. But life gets in the way, and these days I find myself much less willing to give things a chance. Hook me immediately or be ...

As I have read through Howard Sounes' excellent Bob Dylan biography, Down the Highway, I have found myself compelled to listen to and explore all facets of Dylan's catalog. Easy enough (and pleasant enough) to do with the canon, and certainly so with his more recent work, but what about ...

I've always admired Tim Finn's music, usually more than I've actually wanted to listen to it. Loved his work with Split Enz, thought his contributions to Crowded House gave the band a needed shot of variety at the right time, and his work with Neil in the Finn Brothers is ...

It was two weeks ago today that I saw a show by the reunited Sebadoh. I really enjoyed the show and fully expected to post something the next day. Alas, two weeks later, I realize the show was kind of a singular moment. I expected it to fuel a renewed ...

Talking with a friend about the new Jayhawks album, Mockingbird Time, we lamented that while it sounded good - and certainly like a Jayhawks record should - the songs weren't memorable. It has surface appeal, but it lacked the depth that would make either of us pull it off the ...

I'm not sure why I didn't pay attention to Two Times Intro the first time around. At the time I was a huge R.E.M. fan, had been for 15 years by the time this came out in 1998. And I had finally discovered Patti Smith by that point, her comeback ...

It long has been fashionable among rock snobs to declare that R.E.M.'s period of relevance ended somewhere around 19872s Document; a charitable few give the band a few more years, declaring it was Bill Berry's departure in 1996. Anyone who compares the five albums the band made after his exit with ...

Note: To read an interview with Lawrence Block about his first original book for Hard Case Crime, Getting Off, visit our sister site, GriftMagazine.com. For those of us who have become rabid fans of Hard Case Crime books, the past year has been a long one. The series left its previous ...

I don't remember what tipped the scales and made me pick up my first Ray Banks novel. I do recall that there was a lot of buzz around his first Cal Innes book, Saturday's Child, and that buzz was justified. Innes, just out of prison, takes work as an unlicensed ...

So this all started innocently enough. Most every day I post a "song of the day" on Blip.fm, and broadcast it to Twitter and Facebook. A couple of weeks ago, I posted a great live version of Matthew Ryan's "Guilty," the lead track on his first album. I wrote this: "SOTD: ...

The previous meeting of these two camps was billed as a fight: Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp. Perhaps that was a statement about the times, though by that point jazz and hip hop already had met, circled each other warily and eventually shaken hands. Or, more likely, it was marketing; check ...

At the rate things are going, I won't be able to add many qualifiers when people ask me what I like to read. At one time, when asked what I read, I'd say something like, "pretty much anything... except science fiction, horror and Westerns." But the more I read, the more ...

listening to the 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M.'s Lifes Rich Pageant didn't spark the kind of nostalgia I perhaps expected, and if I think about it, that's not a surprise. Nostalgia comes from remembering the past. But with Lifes Rich Pageant, I've never allowed it to gather dust, to fall out ...

Today my story "2383 was published on the great crime fiction site A Twist of Noir. The story has been kicking around for a while, and I was glad that Chris Grant at ATON was excited about it. Some other editors have praised it, but (perhaps wisely) chose not to ...

Some of the best fiction takes things that haven't happened and makes them so plausible that for one horrifying second you wonder if you maybe missed the news for a couple of weeks. Such is the case with Timothy Taylor's third novel, The Blue Light Project. Set in the "not-too-distant ...

I have been meaning to do a wrap-up of some recent ebook short story collections, but have postponed a couple of times because I keep coming across new titles. With most of the denting the pocketbook at a very reasonable 99 cents, it's hard to say no. With a handful of ...

CONTEST: I have two copies of Everyone Loves You When You're Dead to give away. To enter, leave a comment with the name of your favorite rock writer or favorite profile of an artist, and let us know why. I'll draw two names at random on July 8. Before reading Everyone ...

R. Stevie Moore, who has recorded and released a reported 400 albums on his own and through very small, boutique labels, had never toured before the current schedule of dates that took him across the U.S. this summer. Knowing little more than Moore's name and that he was a quirky artist ...

Pablo D'Stair's novella this letter to Norman Court, which was serialized across several blogs over the past few weeks (including this one) wrapped up today with the 22nd and final installment over at David Cranmer's blog, Education of a Pulp Writer. Thus wraps up one of the more interesting crime ...

It's funny; the term "singer-songwriter" is casually tossed around to indicate a certain sound, as if a guy singing his own songs sounds just like another doing the same thing. I've been guilty as much as anyone, falling back on the shorthand when searching for a way to describe something. ...