Musical Essays

I remember reading about Grant McLennan’s death in Rolling Stone. “Grant’s first love was words, but his true genius was with a tune.” (Robert Vickers, 2006) Having read the British music press a lot in my late teens (1980s/90s), I was aware of so many bands and knew so much about a great many of them, without ever really knowing anything about them. That was because much of the stuff being written about would not be played on daytime (or even early evening) mainstream radio

30 April 2022. An auspicious day in musical history for sure. It marked the passing of country star Naomi Judd, not to mention Mac DeMarco's 32nd birthday. But wait - what else happened that day? Well, this labour of love for me, Dreaming of Birds That Are Blue, published its very first post on that very day! So, why don't we celebrate these last four years. As many of you know, it has never really been about the numbers - it is all about music being a safe and happy space fo

I.R.S. is a record label that has interested me for a long time; well since I started to get into R.E.M. in the late 80s and saw that until recently, they had been on that label. The name interested me - I knew enough about the USA to know that there was some government association with this initialism. Before we dive a little bit into the labels history and some of the key bands that were a part of it (we will focus on the original version of it, rather than the time since 2

I have focused on here before on some of my favourite guitarists , bassists and drummers , perhaps thinking that singers get enough of the limelight as it is. But there is one particular group of singers that has intrigued me for a while. When I think of the great singing voices of the last sixty years or so, the really great ones I mean, there are some clusters across the years. There was a high volume of supreme singers coming out of the high-end jazz of the 1950s/60s (Ell

Thirty years ago - 26 March 1996 - an album was released to very little attention. Except if you were one of a small band of devoted lo-fi fans dotted around the world who knew. Well, at the time, that fan group didn't include me, as it was another two years before I heard this, and was introduced into the world of... Guided By Voices (or GBV for short). This is the point when my wife can stop reading this and go do something more productive - she is definitely not in the lo-