Polito's provocative argument is that the past 30 years of Bob Dylan's career are every bit as creative and essential as the first 30, challenging the notion that Dylan lost his way in the 1980s.
By the early 1900s, player pianos had evolved to more fully reproduce a human performance, including subtle dynamics like tempo changes and the introduction of a damper pedal. The human role went from deskilled to fully deprecated as electric motors replaced foot-powered bellows. With the Seeburg Lilliputian Model L, the only job left for humans who wanted to play the piano in the 1920s was to put in a coin.
Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old research psychologist and quadriplegic, participated in a brain implant study to contribute to science that aids those with paralysis. The six chips in his brain decode movement intention, allowing him to operate a computer and feel sensations in his fingers again.
I'm resilient. I've been through lots of highs and lows including a health battle with cancer and I'm still here, still standing, still singing.
Now it's become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don't find interesting at all. I think it's a little bit boring for me to write about myself. Even if I've had a really interesting day, I feel like I've already lived that, I don't need to go through it every time I sing this song.
With Portland sextet Abronia, you sort of have to listen past the spectacle. Forget about the overtly Jodorowsky-Morricone vibes, the tenor sax and the pedal steel guitar, the contralto vocals, the gigantic bass drum, the legend of co-founder Eric Crespo's desert vision. What's really going on here?
Maladaptive daydreaming is when you're listening to music, watching a movie, or just staring into space while imagining different scenarios in your head,' she explained in a recent TikTok video. 'It is a form of dissociation where your brain is imagining alternate realities to cope with how scary your actual reality is,' she added. LePera explained that often in these scenarios, people will replay situations where you have the 'perfect response' to a past uncomfortable interaction.
Erving Goffman, the Canadian sociologist, built an entire framework around this in his 1956 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. His argument was elegant and a little unsettling: social life is theatre. We are always performing. Every interaction has a "front stage" where we manage impressions, modulate tone, and curate which parts of ourselves are visible.
The record sits atop the coupling of two core groups that Frisell has worked with over the years: His bandmates here are Jenny Scheinmann (violin), Eyvind Kang (viola), and Hank Roberts (cello)-aka 858 Quartet, the guitarist's go-to string section-and Thomas Morgan (bass) and Rudy Royston (drums). In some sense, In My Dreams is the musical equivalent of a conversation between friends at a birthday party.
This one is for the girls who have a bad habit of deep rumination! I wrote this song about how it feels to question love. You spend so much time with a person and give so much of yourself to them, but can't help but wonder if it's genuinely you that they are in love with, or the feeling of just having someone.
A magazine sent me to the ATP festival at Pontins in Camber Sands to interview the Beastie Boys of noise, Wolf Eyes. The interview fell to pieces when the band, in a state of great psychic refreshment, all wearing Manowar T-shirts, refused to stop watching a Manowar DVD and signalled they would only answer questions if they related to Manowar. The rest of the day was exemplary one of the best ever walking on the beach, visiting record shops.
I've just given a keynote presentation at Lines of Flight: Improvisation, Hope and Refuge, a conference hosted by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. I'd been invited to talk about my performance research with Dálava, a cross-genre project that is influenced by animist, Slavic cosmology and a land-based folk song tradition that has been in my family for generations.
Wooden spoons as microphones, siblings spinning in socks across the floor, a mother laughing as Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" fills the room for the third time in a row-this is love. Long before children understand romance, they learn connection this way, through synchronized movement, shared joy, and the safety of familiar songs. Research on rhythm and social bonding suggests that moving in time together can regulate the nervous system and strengthen feelings of connection.
Designed by Korean up-and-comer Woojin Yang, Everglow is a handheld mini-keyboard that fits into any bag. The "musical sketchbook" of sorts allows artists to quickly jot down ideas when they're not in front of their instruments or computers. The sleekly-designed device comes with a generative AI-based sound system that allows them to iterate and develop a song on the spot, not just transcribe the initial tune.