Category Music

Dedicated to Mario Caldato Jr., the co-producer of the Beastie Boys’ “Check Your Head”, this track is at once one of their most enduring and one of the most difficult to classify. It sounds like a live groove – the…

Ba-di-ya! I feel like this tune belongs to the southern hemisphere more than the north – it may be about reminiscence, but its groove is full of spring. Is there any tune more ecstatic, any jingling guitar and nimble bass…

To me this track is a Rosetta Stone for the work of Tim Buckley overall. There are clear pathways back to the folk stylings of the earlier Buckley – earlier extant versions of this song sound wan by comparison, less…

Three years after the first recorded version of Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” in 1966, Fairport Convention’s “Unhalfbricking” album is released and the song finds its most exquisite form. To me it’s a Sunday afternoon in autumn…

“The floor will have its way, it seems”, begins Joe Henry on this 1996 gem, “it fights me like a trampoline”. The groove has a sprightly bounce, but it’s not fully warm, fully organic; there’s an edge there – as…

I think I first heard this track as part of the absolutely stellar Rhino Records six-disc compilation “In Yo’ Face! The History Of Funk”, which was an education and a half to this pasty-faced white boy from Greensborough. Graham Central…

It begins with a simple drum fill from Mark Meyer, and slides into an almost impossibly measured groove – 65bpm, barely troubling the scorers. Musicians will tell you how hard it is to play a feel this slowly – to…