2 of my fave podcasts converge: Strong Songs’ Kirk Hamilton hosts an epic Bob Dylan conversation with Know Your Enemy’s Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. So many gems, but I especially want to second Matt’s intuition that STREET-LEGAL presages the Christian records. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...

From Thundercat to Cat Stevens, The Band to La Marisoul, with extra doses of Kimbra and Alabama Shakes, last week's Music Diary is up.

Spent a good part of the weekend basking in the warm, bittersweet glow of this great new Kathleen Edwards record, with its searing honesty and humor, big guitars and delicate flourishes. A masterpiece? I think so. #dailyalbum kathleenedwards.bandcamp.com/album/billio...

This acrid, haunting one-chord Creedence Clearwater Revival jam was Alabama Shakes’s entrance music at Forest Hills Stadium last week, and it feels eerily timely: Widely heard as a song about the fog of the Vietnam War, it was instead inspired by proliferation of gun violence in the U.S. #dailysong

Ditto

Do they… make you uglier?

In Danish, if something was extremely boring you could say det var dødens pølse. It means “that was the sausage of death.”

Little Richard only uncorks his full, glorious wail at a few moments on this otherwise lush, decorous gospel record from 1961. But the man is incapable of singing without conviction, the kind that instills it in others. I’d go to this church. #dailyalbum open.spotify.com/album/5ain8F...

Opened last week’s service at Greenpoint Church with this strong, simple gospel waltz, and found it impossible not to sound like Willie Nelson doing so—his serene, reedy baritone seems inscribed into the rising-falling melody somehow. #dailysong youtu.be/WvkXAZL-jEk

How many songs are crammed into this single track by The Band? Or is it really all just one song, rendered in various tempos and guises and points of view—a folk-blues Rashomon? However you slice it, there’s nothing like it. #dailysonghttps://youtu.be/wbz8WK0wiSw

I grew up thrilling to this Maurice Jarre soundtrack without ever seeing the film. I finally corrected that last night at a screening of a new 70mm print at the Paris Theater, and thrilled anew at its ideal partnership with the film’s stunning visuals. #dailyalbum open.spotify.com/album/5KchOX...

My combined review of SATURDAY CHURCH and THE BROTHERS SIZE for America magazine is here. (I liked them both a lot.) www.americamagazine.org/theater/2025...

My favourite colloquial way of saying “I feel like a fish out of water,” from Rome dialect, is me sento come Batman ar compleanno de li puffi. It means “I feel like Batman at a Smurfs’ birthday party.”

Pria's first piece for us, and I couldn't love it more. Now this is a critical voice.

Revisiting Judee Sill's 1971 debut, I'm struck anew by how much baroque pop filigree it includes alongside her unique blend of folk and country. Forget marching to a different drum—Judee heard and channeled the voices of whole choirs no one else heard. #dailyalbum open.spotify.com/album/2zaIMR...

I find this deep cut by Yusuf/Cat Stevens mildly heartbreaking yet also uplifting. He's mourning a missed opportunity, or possibly a breakup, but also transparently trying to will himself out of grief with the title conditional. And it all turns on a single surprising III chord (at :24). #dailysong

Good lord, Octet (Crow's + Musical Stage + Soulpepper). What an impressive accomplishment – both on its own merit, and for the fact that it couldn't be less similar to Toronto's last romp with Dave Malloy. My Critic's Pick review is online now: www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/arti...

On this solid, eminently replayable 1991 record by Julie Miller, she often sounds to me like Sam Phillips trying to sound like Patti Smith doing Lucinda Williams tunes. After several listens, though, it's clear that Miller has her own distinctive voice. #dailyalbum open.spotify.com/album/4s6JnT...

This new Thundercat/Remi Wolf track is as wild and delightful as you'd expect, with her vocals slicing and skating over and around his falsetto and the whole thing dancing crazily over his and Justin Brown's headlong wrong-foot groove. I'd like to hear a whole album of them together. #dailysong

This R.E.M. cover of a signature Richard & Linda Thompson tune turns it into a sweet, downhome jam, with exceptionally warm harmony singing between Michael Stipe and Mike Mills. The guitar solo is a letdown compared to Thompson’s, but otherwise a worthy effort. #dailysong youtu.be/UuMWS3LsOos

Trans rights are human rights.

Seeing Alabama Shakes at Forest Hills Stadium tonight, so I've spent today with their second record, now 10 years old. I'd remembered its smoky, swampy mood but forgotten its stunning range, from psychedelia to punk and all points between. #dailyalbum alabamashakes.bandcamp.com/album/sound-...

Can a piece of music laugh? I submit this sparkling piece by Louis Moreau Gottschalk as Exhibit A, technically in a minor key but unfailingly, shimmeringly sunny throughout, and made all sweeter here by Richard Burnett's rendition on a historic piano. #dailysong

Tomorrow at 4 pm ET we'll be announcing the coming season's Top 10 Most Produced-Plays and Top 20 Most-Produced Playwrights, then talking live with a few of these most-produced writers. Tune in to find out what and who you'll be seeing all over U.S. stages in 2025-26 www.facebook.com/events/13312...

love this story

A lovely German phrase for describing a place in the middle of nowhere is wo sich Fuchs und Hase gute Nacht sagen. It means “where the fox and hare say goodnight.”

Style lessons from Robert Redford, one of the most stylish men in the last century. 🧵

For decades, Redford had a tortured relationship with acting--one critic described him as behaving like the handsome high school senior who'd grudgingly agreed to star in the class play. Here's some raw transcript from when I asked him about Mike Nichols directing him in Barefoot in the Park. (1/2)

Though it was a major Bowie gateway for me, the live Ziggy Stardust record isn’t one I return to often, with its hollow-sounding arena bombast. This live 1972 bootleg, recorded in Santa Monica, is the perfect antidote: loud but intimate, young and fierce. #dailyalbum open.spotify.com/album/2RgLZn...

Though Elvis Costello wrote and recorded it in English in 1978, this impassioned 6/8 soul ballad was clearly written to be sung in Spanish by a woman who hadn’t even been born then, Marisol Hernández (stage name La Marisoul), who burns it to the ground in this 2021 rendition. #dailysong

The New Yorker's centennial style issue has a fun photo shoot recreating classic covers with the likes of Spike Lee, Julio Torres, Ariana DeBose, Sadie Sink, and Cole Escola. I wrote a lil intro. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I’ve loved so much of the music she’s made since, but Kimbra’s 2011 debut still stands out for its wide range, vocally and otherwise, from Björk-adjacent incantations to sugary pop. The high points are giddy highs and the deep cuts are especially deep. #dailyalbum open.spotify.com/album/6V9rvW...

Put another way: Competence was both the medium and the message

In the early 1970s, David Geffen’s Asylum record label was the place to be – & Judee Sill was the first act he signed. Today in 1971, Sill’s self-titled debut lp was released to significant acclaim. Yet, unhappy with career’s trajectory, her life quickly spun out of control. Sill passed in 1979.

I’ve got a huge soft spot for this late (2010) tune by Elvis Costello—a disarmingly cute old-timey rag that gets nearly baroque in its form and concludes with a whistle solo. A long way from “Pump It Up,” sure, but I for one am impressed at the grace with which he’s gone the distance. #dailysong

From the Pogues to CMAT, Mitski to George Jones, this past week's Music Diary is up.

Candomblé incantation meets a brassy dance band sound on this transfixing 1957 record from Orquestra Afro-Brasileira, led by the indomitable Abigail Moura, proving again, if proof were needed, that devotional music can sound like party. #dailyalbum open.spotify.com/album/68jOup...

Junior Parker went from helping to invent rock ’n’ roll (his recording of “Mystery Train” and its B-side “Love My Baby” inspired Elvis’s version of the former) to covering one of its most outlying efflorescences, this mind-blowing Beatles raga. Music—it is not dying. #dailysong youtu.be/k70IbfAqzGg

Somehow, somewhere along the way, my kids have become convinced that a butter roll from the local deli is the ultimate treat. It’s proven quite useful as a bribe.

For Train My Ear, a post that has been gestating for a while: my anatomization of "young person's old-people songs," from Brecht's "Remembering Marie A." to Jackson Browne's "These Days." trainmyear.blogspot.com/2025/09/so-m...

A pleasant surprise to be quoted in this Times roundup of theater to stream. Butusov's SEAGULL was indeed one for the books www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/t...

One policy solution to Young Men we should be considering is Universal Basic Electric Guitar (UBEG). I'm not joking, by the way. Kids of any gender should get a low-cost starter kit for some hobby of their choosing once they turn 13. A camera, paints, a cheap sampler, etc.

Spent a lot of time yesterday with the new Beths record, which mostly hits hard and hooky as ever, though I kept getting stuck—in the best way—on the simple, searching, forgiving “Mother, Pray for Me.” Amid the bangers, a balm. #dailyalbum thebethsnz.bandcamp.com/album/straig...

Madison Cunningham’s mesmerizing new single sounds like a crossover with Fleet Foxes’ tightly harmonized folk—appropriately enough, as Robin Pecknold guests on vocals. The guitar tracks and vocals evoke a babbling brook leading to a whirlpool, if not a waterfall. #dailysong youtu.be/3lRod0M_9vs

Love these two and love this piece

We encourage you to read the whole column, but here are a few charts, based on data from our season listings, that show the theatre field much closer to gender parity for playwrights than it's ever been. www.americantheatre.org/2025/09/11/g...

Tired: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth Wired: A tooth for an eye www.today.com/health/men-s...

I started a new monthly column at AT. Enjoy!

Who knew? Cole Porter wrote a ballet, a jazzy lampoon of America’s restrictive immigration laws, that premiered in Paris alongside Milhaud’s “La Création du Monde.” And it’s quite good, as heard on this disc from John McGlinn and the London Sinfonietta. #dailyalbum open.spotify.com/album/453quw...

If “Please Please Me” is indeed about a guy asking his girl for reciprocal oral favors, might it be possible that the Beatles got the idea from this Mitch Murray tune (almost their first single), in which the plaint is reversed—i.e., show me how to please you? #dailysong youtu.be/D6RTrNLrrv4