Musician Mike Mattison and literary historian Ernest Suarez talk about their new book, POETIC SONG VERSE: Blues Based Popular Music and Poetry. They cover such topics as the nature of poetic song verse, the transformative nature of artists like Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Jimi Hendrix, the role of coffee houses in the 50s, and lots more.
Tag: contemporary music
A review of La Di Da Di by Battles
Battles hasn’t been the same without Tyondai Braxton. As much is obvious when you listen to Tyondai’s 2009 Central Market, a haunting homage to Stravinsky’s Ballet Petrushka and the 2008 market crash, beside Battles’ 2011 album, a year after he left, Gloss Drop. Their first album, Mirrored, showed quirkiness that demanded serious attention. More Aubrey Plaza than Zooey Deschanel. Now Battles returns with La Di Da Di, an album as benign as its name, hovering between considerable monotony and death throes.
After Sade’s Soldier of Love comes Lianne La Havas’s Is Your Love Big Enough?
Lianne La Havas, with her song collection Is Your Love Big Enough?, presents a sensibility that is feminine, thoughtful, jazzily soulful, independent and individual. La Havas, a singer and a guitarist, with the participation of multi-instrumentalist Matt Hales, creates a bohemian atmosphere in which the personally sincere and the cosmopolitan are both at home.