http://www.themillions.com Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:46:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I. I’m obsessed with music. There has rarely been a time in my life when this hasn’t been the case. Listening to music is one of the great pleasures of my life, seeing Leonard Cohen live in concert is my version of a religious experience, and discovering a new artist whose ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/the-music-in-my-head.html On The Sexist, Amanda Hess lists the Top 5 Pseudo-Feminist Anthems, and as an introduction to these questionable songs, she declares, "Empowerment has been a convenient posture for pop music to assume."   This is often true, but I took umbrage with a couple of the songs included on her list, ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/12/all-the-single-ladies-the-problem-with-feminist-anthems.html If I told you that the single greatest Christmas album ever made was created by a murderer, you might think I was talking about the plot of some holiday horror b-movie like Silent Night, Deadly Night. But no, the album I’m referring to is none other than the 1963 ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/11/phil-spector-guilty-of-creating-the-greatest-christmas-album-ever.html I’m not sure what made me so certain I wanted to see Michael Jackson’s This Is It.  It wasn’t the reviews, I hadn’t read any.  In fact, I knew absolutely nothing about it, except for the trailer that came on in the middle of the baseball game and made my ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/11/this-is-michael-jackson.html I like to be delighted and watching Brooklyn duo Matt & Kim (Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino) at the El Rey Theatre in downtown Los Angeles last week, I was. If you enjoy anything half as much as these two enjoy performing, count yourself among the blessed. And their pleasure ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/08/matt-kim-beat-beckett.html Jonathan Richman, along with his long-time drummer Tommy Larkins, took the stage, strummed his acoustic guitar and began to sing. Nothing. The mikes weren't working. Where other performers, and indeed lesser legends, might have turned diva, Jonathan simply announced - loudly, to make up for the microphone - that he ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/07/torch-ballads-jukebox-music-4-serenaded_24.html Oh, to be so winsome as The Pains of Being Pure at Heart! All aspects of the unwieldily named indie pop quartet are uniformly captivating - their music, their lyrics, their persons, their demeanor on stage and in interviews - and newspapers and blogs from their home city (New York) ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/07/what-not-to-like-pains-of-being-pure-at_23.html Practically from the moment that Jeff Tweedy murmured the words "I am an American aquarium drinker," the opening lyric of 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an album that re-imagined what a rock album could be, Wilco has enjoyed a position of high prominence in the panoply of American bands. Yankee was ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/07/from-wilco-with-love_10.html Some books just demand a soundtrack - they either are about music and musicians or music is threaded through the book like a character. Pandora, one of several sites where you can create your own radio stations, has long been a daily musical companion of mine, but recently I've ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/04/musical-exercise-creating-literary_27.html This isn't the music post I'd planned on writing today. I was going to tell you all about the time a certain British guitar legend from the 60s shouted at me and a friend (yes, at us - specifically at us) across a packed hall in Greenwich Village eleven years ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/04/torch-ballads-jukebox-music-3-sidelined_06.html