At one point while waiting for a venue to open during the 2025 Big Ears Festival, a man approached the line with a sign indicating that he was selling two tickets for the rock band Heart, who would be playing in Boston next month. Everyone who saw the sign laughed since he was trying toContinue reading “2025 Big Ears Festival, March 27-30, 2025”
Tag Archives: Yo La Tengo
2025 Big Ears Preview
The season for obsessively checking and double-checking performance times, mapping venue locations, evaluating walking distances, and weighing multiple musical scenarios has returned. That’s right, it’s time to for the 2025 Big Ears Festival! Building off of Recliner Notes’ coverage of 2024 Big Ears and simply having another year of festival experience has made my prepContinue reading “2025 Big Ears Preview”
Some Other Dimensions In Yo La Tengo
In researching my Yo La Tengo’s Guitar Sculptures piece for Aquarium Drunkard, I came across a previously unknown project to me while reading Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock by Jesse Jarnow. Between 1999 and 2003, there was a series of collaborations between Yo La Tengo and the freeContinue reading “Some Other Dimensions In Yo La Tengo”
Universal Applicant
Apocalypse, Bill Callahan’s 2011 album, begins with two songs, “Drover” and “Baby’s Breath” (explored previously on Recliner Notes), that can’t help be read as extended metaphors about the founding and settling of the American West. Those two songs are followed by “America!”, a hilarious accounting of reasons why to love the United States. The humor,Continue reading “Universal Applicant”
Teenage Spaceship
In the year 1999, the singer, songwriter, and guitar player Bill Callahan had released six full-length albums and a number of cassettes and EPs under the name Smog. Smog was not an actual band, but rather Callahan with an as-needed rotating cast of musicians. Smog’s earliest releases were abrasive and jarring, mixing noise experiments withContinue reading “Teenage Spaceship”
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry
Arguably the best song title in Bob Dylan’s catalog, “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” off of 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited tells about the back and forth of sexual frustration between a couple. The narrator starts things off: Well, I ride on a mailtrain, babyCan’t buy a thrill TheContinue reading “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”
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