Posts Tagged ‘Rock & Roll’
Serious (Christmas) Business, Baby
There’s a chance I may be getting overly confident in our collective abilities, but we always seem to pull it off. I’ve only been in the studio twice this year, in both cases recording cover songs for compilations albums. In May, the guys and I covered The Nadas’ “Feel Like Home” for the band’s fifteenth…
Read MoreMy Actual 3:51:05* New York City Marathon Playlist
A friend of mine emailed me a page from The New Yorker yesterday. The black-and-white cartoon showed two PacMan-like faces staring at one another. The face on the left’s speech bubble said “Marathon, Marathon, Marathon, Marathon, Marathon.” On the right, it simply said, “Zzzzzzz.” That pretty much sums up the days following any marathon, let…
Read MoreThe 3:51:05 New York City Marathon Playlist
With over 40,000 runners making individual Odysseys across 26.1 rust and wind-swept miles, the New York City Marathon is nothing if not cinematic. Add some stakes (like shattering an eight-year-old personal best) and a throbbing soundtrack, and the race is truly epic. I’ve run to the music of this city for years. The rush of…
Read MoreC’Mon C’Mon, Gather Round
I won’t front; I was nervous. Thursday was a difficult enough right from the start. Rapper Lil Wayne pleaded guilty to gun possession less than an hour after I stepped into the office. For the bulk of the afternoon, then, the news team piled on the story and began crashing a half-hour show. All day…
Read MoreTimes Are Hard (But No One Seems To Care)
Christmas can demand a lot of a man, even in October. I swore up and down to Chris, Jamie and Tony that I’d meet them at Galuminum Foil Studios at exactly nine o’clock. At 8:34, I hailed a cab from West 86th Street to 14th and First. At 8:47, I hopped the L to Lorimer…
Read MoreU2 @ Giants Stadium: Vision Over Visibility
The lights began to dim. The stadium began to rumble. The band’s massive, claw-shaped 360° began to billow smoke. David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” counted down from the outsized speakers: “5… 4… 3… 2…” One by one, Larry, Adam, Edge and Bono took their positions, then launched headlong into a pulse-racing, soul-shaking block of stadium anthems:…
Read MoreThat Dust Cloud Disappears Without A Trace
Yesterday morning at 11:27 I Tweeted, “Noon meeting. Two o’clock flight. Nine o’clock U2 show. Bets, anyone?” At the time, I wouldn’t have wagered even a gentleman’s handshake; the communique derived from Overland Park, Kansas, some 1,201 miles west of Giant’s Stadium. Too many moving parts were in play, not the least of which an…
Read MoreThe Perfect Compliment
When I first moved to New York City, my bets were placed equally between writing for and being on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. The same could have been said of The New York Times, or MTV. Yeah, I probably should have checked the odds. But we’re talking 1995 here. I was 24-years-old. I…
Read MoreThirty-Eight Songs
Sometime after midnight thirty-eight years ago today in a sterile-white, fluorescent-lit University of Iowa hospital room, my parents welcomed me into the world just a few weeks shy of my due date. My mother was studying classical guitar that summer. Moreover, the acoustic balladeer — James Taylor, Carol King, Jim Croce, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Brown,…
Read MoreA State Fair Romance
By my count, I performed six sets in 24 hours of Iowa State Fair this weekend, each more rock ‘n roll than the one prior. That said, I’ve never been one for arithmetic. And anyway, my abilities may not be the best; I am operating on one hour of sleep. And yes, a few beers…
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