Glen Hirshberg

RICHARD BUCKNERThe Hill (OvercoatConvent) The Ian Curtis of contemporary singer-songwriters, Townes Van Zandt left behind half a dozen legitimately great songs and a dangerous legacy. Curtis wrote relentlessly -- and well -- about adolescent angst writ monumental; Van Zandt zeroed in on drug addicts, homeless people, the hopeless ”waiting around......

STEW Guest Host (Telegraph) I first heard this the way it should be heard -- in traffic, pinioned between Hollywood and home during the first week of the MTA strike, with the smog haze and Sunset projected across my windshield. Stew, head of L.A.’s joyfully tuneful the Negro Problem, has......

The most passionate music-listening friend I have still harasses me about my review of The Hot Rock, the last Sleater-Kinney album. He says I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic enough. The fact that I called Sleater-Kinney the last great rock band of the century, he says, doesn‘t make up for my equivocation......

LOREN MAZZACANE CONNORS & DARIN GRAY The Lost Mariner (Family Vineyard) LOREN MAZZACANE CONNORS & DARIN GRAY The Lost Mariner (Family Vineyard) Loren Mazzacane Connors has always had collaborators. Even in the ’80s, when his self-released limited-edition records appeared in white cardboard sleeves with photographs pasted to them, he frequently......

This month, the Walkabouts, among the longest-running, most prolific rock acts to emerge from the Pacific Northwest, will reach a career milestone: They will have a CD released in their own country again. That hasn‘t happened for the better part of a decade. Meanwhile, another underground Seattle fixture, Green Pajamas......

photo by Micheal Lavine IN RETROSPECT, THERE'S ALWAYS been something unhealthy about the Mekons myth. By the early '90s, more than 10 years into their vitriolic, anti-capitalist career as capitalist pop-culture performers, they were lionized in many quarters as rock-art vigilantes. They'd recorded one of the most stinging, tuneful albums......

“I’m on a total tirade against rectangles,” Laurie Anderson told me last month. She was talking about her qualms concerning the computer revolution, the way people‘s whole lives “are being sucked into a box,” and not Songs and Stories From Moby Dick, her latest and most ambitious performance piece. But......

Photo by Mike TraisterIN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF COUNTRY, THE worm continues to feed. Elsewhere in the diaspora of fin-de-siècle American pop, the survivors of the grunge apocalypse have begun to gather and hunt. Some huddle together in desperately defined niches (drum 'n' bass, alternative, post-rock), True Believers......