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The Director Asked for an Opera: How Basil Poledouris Gave “Conan the Barbarian” the Voice of Ancient Gods
Photo: Kleseus / Wikimedia Commons, CC0 In late November 1981, a thirty-six-year-old composer raised his baton in a recording studio in Rome, Italy. In front of him sat ninety musicians drawn from Santa Cecilia and the RAI, with a twenty-four-voice choir behind them. He had three weeks to record almost two hours of music. The…
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Vic Chesnutt – 62 Years of Quiet Songs That Stood Tall
A Birthday That Is a Remembrance Today, November 12, 2026, Vic Chesnutt would have turned sixty-two. There will be no new album to mark the day, no tour dates announced, no birthday message from the man himself. Chesnutt died on Christmas Day 2009, in Athens, Georgia, at the age of forty-five. So this is not…
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One Sentence on the Telephone: How Rickie Lee Jones Turned a Friend’s Good News Into “Chuck E.’s in Love”
Photo: bagoum / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 The phone rang in a Los Angeles apartment in the fall of 1977. Rickie Lee Jones was in her early twenties, a bar singer with no record deal and no hit. The man who picked up the receiver was Tom Waits, her boyfriend and fellow songwriter. On…
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Remembering Ol’ Dirty Bastard: Nobody Sounded Like Him — Before or Since
Ol’ Dirty Bastard in 1994. Photo: MTV UK, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons The Voice That Arrived Like Weather Some voices enter a room. Others change the weather in it. In the autumn of 1993, when a nine-man crew from Staten Island and Brooklyn released a debut album that sounded as if it had…
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Leonard Cohen – Death of a Ladies’ Man: The Story Behind the Song
Leonard Cohen, 1988. Credit: Gorupdebesanez / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 In November 1977 — forty-nine years ago this month — Leonard Cohen released the strangest record of his career. Death of a Ladies’ Man, his fifth studio album, was produced and co-written by Phil Spector, the man who had invented the Wall of Sound,…
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Five Hundred Instruments and One White Lab Coat: How Lester Bowie’s Art Ensemble of Chicago Conquered Paris
Photo: Michael Hoefner / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 Paris, in the summer of 1969, had never seen a band arrive like this. Four young musicians from the South Side of Chicago arrived with more luggage than a symphony orchestra. There were trumpets and saxophones, of course, but also gongs, bells, whistles, bicycle horns, and…
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Remembering Antal Doráti: The Conductor Who Made the Classics Sound Brand New
Antal Doráti, 1962. Credit: Joop van Bilsen for Anefo, 14 June 1962, Nationaal Archief. Licence: CC0 Opening: A Baton That Refused to Let the Past Grow Dusty Every record collection carries them — the albums pressed before most collectors were born, the orchestras whose tenors now seem to belong to another world. Antal Doráti’s music…