I've just watched Gladys Knight on Jools Holland's show on BBC2 and was in raptures. She's fantastic. To think that it's nearly 50 years since I first heard her sing with the Pips. Doesn't seem possible. Still. it made me think about the great female singers who I've had the pleasure of hearing and, in some cases, seeing over the years. So here is my top 50 female singers (and apologies to any I've...
Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros will be performing tonight at the El Rey Theatre | Photo by Koga for LAist Our Pick: Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros, LA Ladies Choir, Frank Fairfield @ El Rey Theatre Tonight the famed Watkins Family Hour ( LAist Review ) will be taking place at Largo at the Coronet . Vancouver-bred psych-infused rock outfit Pink Mountaintops are poised to take on the Echo...
Andrew Sandoval is the executive producer of the LA Nuggets box set, a project that he says he essentially started working on when he was first hired by Rhino at age 17 (his first gig was writing liner notes to a Monkees reissue). Sandoval is a fount of information on Los Angeles music, and in the wide-ranging interview below, he talks not only Nuggets and Los Angeles rock, but of the reissue and...
CocoRosie will be performing Monday at the Henry Fonda Music Box | Photo by Brian Buchard via CocoRosie's Myspace This week Wisconsin-bred folk singer-songwriter Justin Vernon, otherwise known as Bon Iver ( LAist Review ), will be performing at the Wiltern with none other than Durham's own Megafaun and by himself at Hollywood Forever Cemetery . Local indie rockers Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros...
Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Pt. 2 Like the original, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Pt. 2 sets the stage with the intro, but here it’s some Raekwon history courtesy of Papa Wu. On Pt. 1 it was fictional dialog introducing a loose concept album. Besides the introductory dialog and the album’s look-alike cover [...]
My Gold Mask are a great dark pop duo from here in Chicago. Lush with references to the era of Kate Bush and Siouxsie and the Banshees, My Gold Mask pound, shake, wail and thrash through midnight melodies laced with rock noir. Vocalist Gretta Rochelle is never afraid to deviate from a chamber pop formula, [...]
...is Jackie DeShannon. DeShannon celebrated her birthday this past Friday. She is of course the artist who brought the quintessential Hal David-Burt Bacharach composition "What the World Needs Now" to life (with Bacharach's production, if I'm not mistaken) in 1965. Following the form of a prayer or sermon, the song remains timely these many years later. The form recalls the style of Johnny...
stultify \STUHL-tuh-fahy\, verb: To render useless or ineffectual; cripple. To cause to appear stupid, inconsistent, or ridiculous. Law To allege or prove insane and so not legally responsible. Stultify is from Late Latin stultificre, "to make foolish." bag pipe Screwing a chick in her arm pit. Similar to a titty fuck. Damn I wish she had done a better job of shaving before I bag piped her....
A cover of a cover? Well, yeah, kind of. See, Kim Carnes was, in fact, not the originator of Bette Davis Eyes , and yeah, we knew that, but did you? Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon actually "collabreated" to produce a fine piece of material back in 1974. But 2009 is where the song has new life breathed into it, courtesy of our favorite Chicagoans, My Gold Mask . Pairing the inimitable chants...
Right off the bat, we know that the Kim Carnes version of "Bette Davis Eyes" was itself a cover of the original 1974 song written by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon which DeShannon recorded the tune with her vocals. Now...
So, I decided to put together a new mix (CD/bunchamp3s/whatever) of some of my favorite pop records (with or without the power). There's no theme or rhyme or stanza here, other than pop prefigures in the song structure, somehow or other. I wish I could have included Devo's "Snowball," and anything by Emmitt Rhodes, but I ran out of "space" (80 minutes on iTunes playlist for a theoretical...
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