Author Archives: Steve Matteo

My Morning Jacket has been building a following for years and must now be considered one of the few great rock bands with any real visibility on the scene today. While rock seems to continue to wither and die, My Morning Jacket is only growing stronger.

Hailing from Louisville, Kentucky in the late ’90s, the group recorded two albums for the indie Darla label before moving to ATO with It Still Moves in 2003. After three more albums, ATO became part of Capitol, which released the group’s The Waterfall album in 2015. It would be five years before Waterfall II, which was quickly followed the next year by a self-titled album. The group’s main singer and songwriter Jim James also released other albums in that period, including four idiosyncratic and artsy solo albums between 2013 and 2018, with two of them released in 2018.

My Morning Jacket’s music is hard to describe. The group has a somewhat expansive psychedelic sound and an organic and improvisational live-in-the-studio approach that has appeal for lovers of jam bands. Like such old-school American cult faves as the Grateful Dead, R.E.M., and the Flaming Lips, which turned into popular legends by creating their own self-sustaining musical communities, the group is focused on making music on its own terms and slowly building a following. Unlike those groups, it has had a consistently changing lineup, that now includes only two original members, James and Tom Blankenship.

The band’s passionate, idiosyncratic, and heady sound makes for serious listening, but its newest album, its tenth and first in four years, seems like a bid for a larger audience with the production work of Brendan O’Brien. While the group has worked with the likes of John Leckie and Joe Chiccarelli in the past, this seems like their most focused studio effort. There were three singles that preceded the album, which is unusual for the group, and the final ten songs were whittled down from 100 demos. All the songs were written by James.

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We are living in a golden age of reissue and archival vinyl releases. Pop, rock, jazz, R&B, and soul have been the dominant genres. Unfortunately, other than Bob Marley, reggae artists have been somewhat neglected. One recent release may remedy that.

Sufferer Sounds, a collection of music that reggae wunderkind Dennis Bovell was involved with between 1975–1980, was recently released. Bovell was a musician, an engineer, and a producer and is most known for being one of the key exponents of dub reggae, particularly his work with dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. He was also involved in another reggae sub-genre called lover’s rock. In addition, he produced the punk group The Slits, UK post-new wave group Orange Juice, reggae artists Steel Pulse, and African music legend Fela Kuti.

Dub was a sub-genre of reggae that ended up having a huge impact on the second wave of British punk artists, particularly on the Sandinista album and period from The Clash and John Lydon’s (Johnny Rotten) group after the Sex Pistols, Public Image Limited (P.I.L.), which on its first three albums also included Jah Wobble and Keith Levene. That trio on those first three albums was heavily influenced by dub.

The various tracks on this double album represent the many musical hats Bovell wore and how he used these various projects to work with a wide variety of musicians in many different reggae styles with dub most of the time being the primary foundation.

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Along with Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair with their multi-volume Paul McCartney biography books, Luca Perasi is becoming one of the foremost chroniclers of the life and music of Paul McCartney. While Perasi has written some books in Italian, he has also written several books in English. There was Paul McCartney: Recording Sessions 1969-2013 and Paul McCartney Music Is Ideas: The Stories Behind the Songs (Vol. 1) 1970-1989.

In 2024 he came out with two more books: Paul McCartney Music Is Ideas The Stories Behind the Songs (Vol. 2) 1990–2012 and Paul McCartney & Wings: Band On The Run (The Story of a Classic Album), all from L.I.L.Y. Publishing. It was only a matter of time before someone wrote an entire book on the Band on The Run album. It is easily McCartney’s best album and one of the best releases of the ’70s.

Perasi covers the album from every imaginable angle and seeks to set the record straight on some of the contradictory stories about the conception and recording of the album. It’s also a beautiful book filled with rare photos in black and white and color, along with other research information. Perasi gives a detailed account of what Wings were up to before the making of the album right through to the post-release legacy of the album. These short books give a fulsome account of the making of an album not found in career-spanning biographies and this album, with its major importance and page-turning story, was made for this format.

For Paul McCartney Music Is Ideas The Stories Behind the Songs (Vol. 2) 1990-2012, Perasi primarily follows the format that he used for volume one. Every album and single from this volume, Tripping the Live Fantastic! through the Kisses on the Bottom releases are covered here. Each entry features the song listing for an album, recording information, a detailed essay, and sources cited throughout the pages, rather than in a footnote compendium at the end of the book. Each song includes a short essay, a shorter recording information box, and a box on the musicians who contributed to the given track. This is a beautiful, over-sized, hardcover book.

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One of the albums that John Lennon released with Yoko Ono that has become part of his official discography is Live Peace in Toronto, released in December of 1969. The live album recorded in Toronto in September of 1969 when The Beatles were still officially together is one of the few live documents of Lennon outside of his time with The Beatles. It is sometimes overlooked in Lennon’s non-Beatles discography. How the concert came about is a fascinating backstory.

That story and the story of the concert itself are told in entertaining detail in Revival 69: The Concert That Rocked the World. The film tells how an oldies festival concert in Toronto became the unlikely venue for the first-ever live concert by the Plastic Ono Band. The band, the brainchild of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, also featured longtime Beatles inner circle musician and artist Klaus Voormann on bass, Alan White on drums, and guitar god Eric Clapton.

John Brower, one of the concert promoters of the event, is the main narrator of how Lennon and Ono and their band came to play the festival, but there are also new interviews with others who were there such as Voormann, Alice Cooper, Robbie Krieger of The Doors, Geddy Lee of Rush who was there with his friends and was just another young Canadian music fan, Anthony Fawcett, John and Yoko’s assistant at the time, and various behind-the-scenes eyewitnesses. In addition, there are plenty of archival audio and video interviews.

The main performers were a veritable who’s-who of rock ‘n’ roll pioneers, including Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, and Gene Vincent. Lennon and Ono’s participation in the concert came about in the 11th hour. When the promoters were having trouble selling tickets, they enlisted Los Angeles rock scenesters Rodney Bingenheimer and Kim Fowley. While their initial participation yielded few results, Fowley suggested to the promoters to contact Lennon and Ono in London.

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Father John Misty continues to make a case for himself as one of the most important solo musical artists in the world. The musician formerly known as Josh Tillman has taken a long and often circuitous path to the brink of peerless musical artistry. Father John makes much of what’s on the charts these days seem like a laughable and embarrassing exercise in show business branding.

The good father is a true artiste and an eccentric and uncompromising genius. His musical grasp of songwriting and ability to deliver a vocal of such conviction and passion, as well as his tendency to draw from an endless well of musical styles are nothing short of astonishing. Any descriptions or superlatives come up short in effectively conveying his artistry.

One wonders, if only for a brief moment, if the father is such an extraordinary artist, or if today’s popular music fails so spectacularly that it elevates his art. The argument favors the good father when one imagines him being around when true musical gods roamed the earth in the ’60s and ’70s. He would have fit right in and his place would have been just as elevated among solo music artists of that era.

Unlike the overnight sensations that hit the charts and are gone from sight by their third or fourth albums, the good father has been toiling and woodshedding for years to reach his current musical summit. Hailing from Seattle, under his given name, he made eight albums between 2003 and 2010 on a slew of small record labels and two albums with Saxon Shore prior to those solo albums.

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Badfinger was one of the most commercially and critically successful acts that were part of the early days of Apple Records in the late ’60s/early ’70s. The group’s Beatle-esque pure pop was a staple of FM radio at a time that saw the release of such classic albums as No Dice (1970) and Straight Up (1971) with the lineup of Pete Ham, Tom Evans, Mike Gibbins, and Joey Molland. Ass, released in 1973, was the last album from the group on Apple Records, the record label started by The Beatles.

The group that was the earliest incarnation of Badfinger was The Iveys, which included Ron Griffiths but not Joey Molland. Badfinger began with its contribution to the soundtrack albums of the film The Magic Christian (1970), starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, with the Paul McCartney-penned “Come and Get It,” which was a big hit.

Unfortunately, bad management, record company squabbles, changing musical tastes, and for some of the members of the band, personal problems, ended the group’s creative and commercial peak shortly after they left Apple. They then made a handful of albums for Warner Bros. Now, by some miracle, a long-lost album has recently been released and adds another welcome musical chapter to the group’s abbreviated musical career, along with an anthology of demos from The Iveys.

The music on this new Badfinger release would have come out in 1974, with a lineup that included Ham, Evans, Gibbins, and Bob Jackson. While it has come out on CD in the past in demo form, the music on this album is taken directly from the final master tapes. After the album was completed, Warner Bros. rejected it. The group’s manager ran off with their advance and the label dropped them.

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Allen Toussaint holds a special and everlasting place in American music. He was truly a Renaissance man. He was a producer, arranger, songwriter, singer, and instrumentalist and built and co-owned with Marshall Sehorn Sea-Saint Studios, one of the most important New Orleans recording studios in a town that defined American music. He was a man who wore many hats, but also lived many musical lives. He died in Madrid, Spain in 2015 at the age of 77.

For all his accomplishments and singular place in New Orleans music, his influence on and collaborations with a slew of rock artists is incalculable. His work with The Band, Paul McCartney, and Elvis Costello, among many others, alone, is significant. Even with all that, over the years, he has taken time out from his many activities to record solo albums. He recorded eleven studio albums, but they were spread out over nearly a 60-year period.

He recorded four of them during his most prolific solo period, from 1971 through 1978, and they are the ones that are most representative of his heyday. The best of the bunch may be his first for Reprise, Southern Nights, after his first major label album Life, Love and Faith in 1972 on Warner Bros. That Reprise album, Southern Nights, released in 1975, captured the unmistakable mix of styles that was the key to his ubiquitous place in music in that period.

The album has a variety of strains coursing through its musical bloodstream and was somewhat of a concept album in that it brought together all the various musical styles of Toussaint’s Louisiana upbringing. The way short instrumental pieces are intertwined on the album and in some cases repeated as a musical motif or theme contribute greatly to the conceptual or thematic approach. There are of course all the ingredients for a gumbo of New Orleans music, but also funk, soul, pop, and more.

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There are times when pop music artists try their hand at acting. It has been a phenomenon as far back as the jazz age with Al Jolson, continued through the age of the crooner with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, and in the rock era it started with Elvis Presley.

Over the years such musicians have had mixed results as actors. Often less of a transition is when those in the acting profession move into being musical artists. Again, the results can be mixed. There have been some actresses who have recorded albums and even in some cases performed live, who have made some wonderful music lately, including Minnie Driver, Scarlett Johanssen and Maya Hawke.

Even more compelling is how they have, for the most part, eschewed just dabbling in the latest pop sound and made eclectic, timeless music. Perhaps eclipsing all of the above, but not exclusively just as an actress-turned-pop artist is Brit Suki Waterhouse. In one of her most well-known acting roles of the nearly 30 films or TV appearances to her credit, she played a member of the group in the series Daisy Jones and the Six, where her acting abilities and musical chops were both utilized. On only her second release, Waterhouse has made an album that has tremendous commercial pop appeal, but has also shows that she has a depth that marks her as an artist with a tremendous future.

Many British pop artists thankfully have the ability to work in a contemporary pop framework, while often being able to bring a more sophisticated and well-rounded edge to their music. Waterhouse is also creating music utilizing some of the methods that have become nearly extinct in record making for decades. She enlists arrangers to help her shape the vocals and put real care in the musical base.

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Richard Starkey, better known to the world as Ringo Starr, has just had his first number one solo album. He achieved that feat at the age of 84. From this fan of western movies and country music since he was a boy in the Wirral in Liverpool in the North of England way, the music on this smash hit album feels like a horse’s saddle that has been lovingly broken in over a lifetime of dusty rides over oft-trodden trails.

This is not just a collection of well-worn country classics played by anonymous Nashville studio veterans. This well-conceived project was helmed by producer T-Bone Burnett. For decades, Burnett has had an uncanny knack for producing roots music recordings that retain the authenticity of the genre (or genres) in which the artists he produces are working, while capturing a modern edge with freshness and simplicity.

Those recordings and this one are not over-produced saccharine country or today’s bombastic pop country committee creations. First of all, Burnett chose a small cast of roots players to provide a stripped-down welcoming base for Starr to show off his country vocal chops. The songs are heartfelt and fun, and Starr knows just how to sing them with his hang-dog plaintive croon. While the musical backing and songs are just right, it’s the way Starr duets with the various vocalists on this album that makes it more than just a collection of country songs.

The opening track kicks things off with the very accessible “Breathless” featuring the popular Billy Strings, but the tracks that really work the best are his duets with Alison Krauss on “Thankful,” and especially with the duo Lucius on “Come Back,” as well as the two tracks that include Larkin Poe, “Rosetta” (which also includes Strings) and “String Theory” (which also includes Molly Tuttle). Though Krauss has been around for years and has worked similar magic with her albums and tours with Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, it’s the newer young roots artists here that help Starr create something vibrant and new.

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John Hammond holds a unique place in music. He released his self-titled debut album in 1960 just as the roots music revival was gaining steam. Hammond was a blues revivalist and like others who would come along in those hothouse years like Charlie Musslewhite, Paul Butterfield, Bonnie Raitt, Rory Block and even Steve Stills, Hammond was a white American who paid homage and added a new spin to blues music. While most of these artists either played strictly acoustic blues, mixed in electric blues or went electric, they were different than the British blues artists of the period who began playing electric blues in homage to black American blues artists but eventually used the sound to create British rock.

The music on this archival set was recorded 13 years after Hammond’s debut album and long after he not only established himself as a supreme blues interpreter, but recorded albums like Southern Fried (1969) that went beyond acoustic blues, the soundtrack album for the film Little Big Man (1971), and the roots supergroup summit Triumvirate (1973) album with Dr. John and Mike Bloomfield.

These live performances were recorded over two nights of a five-night run in July of 1973 at the famed Boarding House in San Francisco, with Tom Waits opening and John Lee Hooker in the audience on the last night. The club opened in 1971 and then slowly faded away in the early ’80s, but along with being a hotbed for up-and-coming comedians, it was a venerable spot for hip music from underground artists to international superstars. It was there that the iconic Old & In the Way album was recorded in 1975, featuring Jerry Garcia, Peter Rowan, David Grisman, Vassar Clemens, and John Khan.

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Since launching in October of 2020, the various Joni Mitchell archive releases have become among the better series to offer archival and reissue projects from a major artist. Mitchell’s peerless place in music is secure but these releases serve to bolster and enhance her lofty place in the pantheon of pop music from the past nearly 60 years.

The latest release in the Joni Mitchell Archives box set series is the fourth volume. These releases feature mostly previously unreleased material, including primarily live performances and demos. This latest release, available on CD and vinyl, explores perhaps her most experimental period—1976–1980—and focuses for the most part on music from the albums Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, and Mingus, although some of the performances and songs pre-date 1976.

Mitchell’s previous album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, actually signaled the beginning of this rich and fertile period of bold experimentation. Short-sighted critics (many primarily East Coast based male critics that at the time coalesced around the burgeoning New York and London-based punk scenes) were not kind to much of this music when it was first released, but listening to these live versions and demos from the period only reinforces just how extraordinary the music was and how well it has held up.

This is music from an artist with unparalleled compositional prowess and genre-defying musical dexterity. Her musical command is otherworldly. Mitchell operates on a musical plane that other artists couldn’t even imagine. These recordings are based on songs drawn on a wide canvas. And it is Mitchell’s other life as a painter that informs the full breadth of the music.

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Van Morrison had a busy 2023, releasing three albums. The projects included another album of skiffle music, (Moving on Skiffle), one of instrumentals of unreleased material from the 1970s to the present (Beyond Words), and one of covers of rock, R&B, and country (Accentuate the Positive). His new album very much follows in the same vein of these releases.

Rather than a studio album of mostly new compositions, Morrison presents previously unreleased big band arrangements of songs from his catalog and some newer duets recorded between 2014 and 2019. While an instrumental album from one of the greatest singers in rock history seemed a bit odd, revisiting older songs and presenting them in a new way works beautifully for Morrison, given the quality of the songs and the vast singing and musical styles with which he is comfortable.

Also, while it would seem daunting for any living singer to match vocals with Morrison in a duet, the collaborators he chose here—Kurt Elling, Joss Stone, and Willie Nelson—are all up for the challenge and help Morrison draw from various musical styles from his background. This entire affair has a timeless quality and a first-take spontaneity that reminds one of Frank Sinatra at his studio peak, although there are times where Ray Charles seems a closer vocal touchstone. That’s some pretty heady company, but even at 79, Morrison makes it seem effortless and his voice has not lost any of its luster, which is truly remarkable.

Morrison revisits music from every decade of his solo career since the ’70s except the 2020s. From the classic His Band and Street Choir from 1970 he redoes the obscure “I’ll Be Your Lover Too.” From Period of Transition, released in 1977, he remakes “You Gotta Make It Through the World.” The ’80s is represented by “The Master’s Eye” from Sense of Wonder from 1985, and “Someone Like You” from Poetic Champions Compose from 1987.

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George Harrison’s triple album, All Things Must Pass, came out in 1971 and was a monumental release for the former member of The Beatles. After he issued the soundtrack to the film Wonderwall in 1968 and the experimental, electronic release Electronic Sound in 1969, many considered All Things Must Pass to be Harrison’s first true solo album.

Harrison often only had one or two songs he wrote included on an album when he was in The Beatles, with the songs of Lennon and McCartney dominating the albums and singles released by the group. All Things Must Pass included songs from the backlog of unrecorded material he had, collaborations with Bob Dylan (“I’d Have You Anytime”), and one with Bill Martin and Phil Coulter (“It’s Johnny’s Birthday”), and a cover of Dylan’s “If Not For You.” As good as the album was, Harrison did not come up with a follow-up studio album until 1973. The soundtrack to The Concert for Bangla-Desh was released in December of 1971. That next album from 1973 was Living in the Material World.

Given the sheer volume of tracks and the all-star backing musicians on All Things Must Pass, it would appear nearly impossible for anyone to follow up that release. Nonetheless, Living in the Material World was a commercial and critical success and in fact many fans and critics actually thought it was a better album than All Things Must Pass.

The album is a more relaxed affair and given it came out in 1973 it was viewed less as an album by an ex-Beatle and more as a solo album from an artist that had by then fully established himself. There were also some people who simply didn’t like All Things Must Pass due to the heavy-handed production of Phil Spector and, being a triple-album box set, it was very expensive.

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The new movie about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, focuses on the controversy of his going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in July of 1965. Dylan was the darling of the new folk scene in the early ’60s and was heralded as the voice of the generation. His poetic songs of injustice galvanized the anti-war and civil rights movements of the time. When Dylan chose to go electric, many viewed it as heresy for abandoning the purity and non-commercial aspects of folk. What often gets lost in this debatable topic is that the move in fact launched Dylan’s long career as a peerless and dogged performer.

Although acknowledged as one of the most, if not the most, important songwriter of the rock era, Dylan is a road-dog, who has performed and played with countless group configurations. His mid-’60s electric period was marked by controversy, but he and his backing group The Band (formerly the Hawks and comprised of Canadians Robbie Roberston, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, and American Levon Helm) are one of the most successful collaborations between a rock artist and a backing group of musicians.

Although their time together on the road in the 1960s was often met with scorn by the folk crowd (loosely chronicled by Dylan in his songs “Maggie’s Farm” and “Positively Fourth Street,” to name two), they were making exciting music that could fit into Dylan’s description of music that he called that “wild mercury sound.” The difficulty of performing this music night after night in the face of mounting derision caused one of the members of The Band, drummer Levon Helm, to quit by the fall of 1965.

When Dylan had his motorcycle accident in the summer of 1966, it brought a close to that chapter of his career that saw him release three monumental albums in a row (Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965 and Blonde on Blonde in 1966), but also resulted in his getting off the “wild mercury” caravan of raucous music, alcohol and drug abuse, as well as his tendency at this time toward self-doubt and fury.

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Ever since the 1994 Live at the BBC and the 1995 Anthology release of the TV series and VHS box set, and three multiple CD/LP sets, reissues of the music of The Beatles finally seemed to hit their stride.

The ongoing Beatles reissue program hit a high-water mark with the release of the group’s UK albums on vinyl in mono in 2014. Since the 50th anniversary of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album in 2017, reissues of the music of The Beatles and as solo artists have been going through a particularly strong and consistent period. Substantial and well-produced reissue programs that offer various editions of a particular release and archival projects have offered fans a wealth of officially previously unreleased material and bespoke, gift-worthy packaging.

The main releases that have elicited the most interest are those that mark a milestone anniversary of an important album. This has been particularly the case with the 50th anniversary releases of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles (the White Album), Abbey Road, Let It Be, and the Disney series Get Back, but also some of the key solo albums from the members of the group that were released in the 1970s not long after the group broke up. The Live at the Hollywood Bowl was also a welcome release, as was the companion film Eight Days A Week in 2016.

Other more recent welcome releases include The Christmas Albums box in 2017 and The Singles Collection box in 2019. The reissue series for Revolver in 2022 seemed to pick up where Let It Be left off and appeared to set the stage for Rubber Soul to be given the deluxe box edition treatment. Instead, 2023 saw the reissue of the The Beatles: 1962–1966 (Red) and The Beatles: 1962–1966 (Blue) compilation releases, highlighted by the “new” track “Now and Then.”

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