A couple of years ago I sat in a New York news channel’s green room for an hour and a half waiting for Mavericks front man Raul Malo to finish soundchecking for a three-minute on-air live slot he was scheduled to perform in support of his majorly slept-on 2001 solo…

If I were Britney Spears’ mom, Lynne, I’d be…very rich! But I’d also be confused: The routine deluge of self-promotion that’s accompanied the release of Spears’ fourth album, In the Zone, has included a fair amount of anguished why-won’t-the-media-leave-me-alone?, dropped purposefully into network-news interviews, VH1 specials and any number of…

There are four reasons it’s safe to tell people you’re going to KISS FM’s Jingle Ball at Next Stage on Wednesday night: 1) All your friends are going, and you’ve all decided to wear the same red-and-green-striped leg warmers. 2) You’re pumped to see Hilary Duff in the flesh, since…

Two weeks ago in these pages I called “Shh,” the unlisted closing track of Minneapolis hip-hop duo Atmosphere’s new Seven’s Travels, one of the year’s best songs about tiny-town living (or at least midsize-town living that includes drinkable tap water and syringe-free playgrounds). That’s true (I wrote it!), but what’s…

Texan rabble-rouser Charlie Robison’s hell-raising has been outshined lately by that of his freedom-fighting wife, Dixie Chick Emily Erwin; pissing off George W., though not hard, isn’t easy to follow. Still, Robison’s boisterous recent live album, Live, is not without its rough edges: In his brother Bruce’s “You’re Not the…

L.A. power-popsters Phantom Planet and Australian guitar-strummer Ben Lee both know the value of friends in glitzy places: Until recently, PP counted as its drummer actor (and Coppola kin) Jason Schwartzman, hero to brainy misfits everywhere for his portrayal of Rushmore’s Max Fischer and most assuredly the reason the band…

As one of the 17 people who loved Sinéad O’Connor’s Am I Not Your Girl?, the Irish oddball’s much-reviled 1992 collection of big-band interpretations, I can’t in good faith begrudge teen-pop moppet Mandy Moore the opportunity to confound whatever expectations people have of Mandy Moore by releasing Coverage, a new…

“Tiny Town,” from native Texan Tracy Byrd’s recent The Truth About Men, is the third-best tiny-town tune I’ve heard this year, behind “Nowhere,” the Bubba Sparxxx/Kiley Dean duet from Bubba’s Deliverance, and “Shh,” the unlisted closer from Atmosphere’s Seven’s Travels, in which MC Slug big-ups his home of Minneapolis, which…

What I like about you, Harry Connick Jr.: Your soundtrack for When Harry Met Sally proves how ahead of the times you were in 1989; since then, lots of folks have adopted your do-a-bunch-of-songs-for-a-movie idea, including Badly Drawn Boy and Will Oldham, but not Simon and Garfunkel, who did it…

Jeremy Enigk is much shorter than he sounds. On the string of records he made as the leader of the mythmaking (and now defunct) Seattle outfit Sunny Day Real Estate, the singer-guitarist used his distinctive singing voice–a high, reedy croon that can swivel from angelic to tortured on a single…

Sheryl Crow left Las Vegas, but have the ’90s given us a better recidivist than her? The singer’s new, surprisingly great Greatest Hits is a virtual treatise on shining up shit–on turning the shallow and tawdry and questionably legal into little three-minute packets of abandon I’d pump my quarters into…

Though I might conceivably covet his major-label record deal, his apple-cheeked cross-campus fan base and perhaps most of all his well-stocked backstage deli trays, I don’t envy 22-year-old Maine native Howie Day’s place in the pop-musical landscape. As only the latest in an incredibly long line of sensitive-guy singer-songwriters to…

This summer the Warped Tour featured an onstage man-to-woman ratio of approximately 876-to-2 (unless I’m wildly overestimating the female presence, a definite possibility). So the tour’s founders have hatched the Girlz Garage as a way to tip the scales back to something approaching balance, which is wise and welcome and…

Bubba Sparxxx might not have hit it big if Eminem hadn’t done it before him, since Eminem’s mainstream legitimization of the blue-collar white person as a viable hip-hop persona certainly eased the acceptance of a portly Georgian partial to rolling around in the mud. Obie Trice definitely wouldn’t have, since…

I’ve always considered agonized Boston alt-metallers Godsmack the poor man’s Staind: bellowed vocals, no rapping, depressive guitar chug, moody sleeve art. (I suspect the band sees itself as the poor man’s System of a Down, if the ham-handed rhythmic sophistication of current album Faceless’ 12 shades of gray is to…

As problematic musical responses to September 11 go, I’ll take Alan Jackson’s disarmingly honest “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” over Lynyrd Skynyrd’s probably truth-stretching “Red White and Blue” any day of the week, since Jackson doesn’t shut the door in anybody’s face and opts for down-home sentimentality…

Like its more hirsute sister Southern rock, Southern rap is in the middle of an exceptionally high tide: Recent albums by Bubba Sparxxx, the Nappy Roots and OutKast have held it down for regional rustics while simultaneously meeting the form’s demand for universal themes and high-tech production exotica. Chicken-N-Beer, the…

As an adulthood-long vegetarian, I don’t much care for meat. But potatoes I love: boiled, broiled, roasted, baked, freedom fried, whatever. This means I’m digging about half of The Long Road, the new one by stout Canadian hard-rockers Nickelback and the follow-up to 2001’s mega-selling Silver Side Up, the home…

I look forward to the day when this corporate branding of rock-and-roll tours gets truly out of hand: Captain D’s Under the Sea Spectacular (featuring Primus, the Vulgar Boatmen and Phish), the Kmart Blue Light Special (Q-Tip and the Dixie Cups), Pfizer’s Don’t Stop Believing Roadshow (D12, Medicine and guest…

It might be the deal to beat in 2003: two eccentric, slightly hair-raising singer-songwriters appearing together for the price of…well, two, I suppose, since neither is playing in the parking lot for free. Papa M should be worth the bucks, since with the recent dissolution of Zwan (in which he…

The guys in Chicago’s Califone look at Americana from the inside out, taking stock of the form’s parts (rootsy acoustic strumming, wagon-wheel drumming, cigarette-smoke vocalizing) and seeing what’s not there (warped keyboard whine, laptop clicks, lyrics about “sugar hands” and “amputated years”). On Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, their latest, they fit all of…

Achtung, baby: I’m one of those soulless cranks who likes Liz Phair’s new record. A few weeks ago I argued elsewhere that the album’s four Matrix-produced songs “demonstrate how much room there is inside radio-pop sheen for actual emotional content”–particularly with regard to “the everyday compromises of single-momhood.” And I…