It’s true. “All Too Well” has long been a staple for diehard Swifties. I’ve been singing all the lyrics to that song since before I even fully understood what it meant. (The “Red” album came out when I was in elementary school.) Even today, my roommate and I sing (scream...
Songwriting great Harlan Howard — the man who defined country music as “three chords and the truth” — masterfully straddles the line “sympathetic” and “kind of patronizing” in this sharp appraisal of how a history of heartbreak left a woman “cold and bitter.” Little Jimmy Dickens rec...
“I just made chords out of what strings I had left. It’s unorthodox, but it works for us.” After his predilection for uppers got him ousted from that band, he developed his own gritty style. “Lemmy was an influence on me in the way he uses distortion — that was different, new...
Yeah, it maybe sounded cool when your friend was banging it out on the music-room piano in the eighth grade, but put it next to the gnarly chords of some actual ragtime, and you quickly realize that a rag built mostly on a C-major triad is pretty weak sauce. 116.“Worse Comes to ...
Well because of that specific fact that it is very accessible. For a tried and true Zappa fan, always looking to up the ante with complexity of the music and the genius of the lyrics, this is just too easy of an album. Same thing as Over-Nite Sensation, pretty much. Don't get me...
Cohen was only entering the third year of his singer-songwriter career but, after two successful albums, his selections were instantly recognizable to concertgoers; the opening chords of "Bird on a Wire," "Suzanne," "The Stranger Son" or "Goodbye Marianne" were greeted with anticipatory ...