From way back in ’80s Philadelphia, Elizabeth Isadora Gold remembers her first writing teacher, the mail art artist/lyricist Stu Horn.

On Syd Barrett’s time with Pink Floyd and making an album with household objects and found sounds.

Remembering the woman who outsang Ray Charles.

A professor embarks on a six-month binge of celebrity-led online courses.

What if the Olympic Games never come back?

Generations of musicians got their start busking the streets of the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas, Texas. After a decade of ‘hobo-ing’ around cities like New Orleans, Paris, and New York, Charley Crockett discovered it was his turn.

“I’m working on a book about Arctic explorers, and that means swimming in a sea of sorrow.”

Although the sound of the music has changed, country’s themes have endured.

Captain Scott took jars to the Antarctic with him, and Edmund Hillary took one up Everest. Marmalade is part of the British national myth. Livvy Potts wants to know why.

Created in New Orleans and played around the world, the music we call jazz is filled with genius, legend, and tragedy.

Lockets simultaneously display and hide. But does squirreling our love and grief away in a piece of jewelry keep the memories and emotions present for us, or minimize them?

Classical music is more than dead Europeans in wigs, starched collars, and stuffy concert halls.
What classical music is, where it’s going, and what it still can be.

“You may start off with Professor X but Magneto got a fucking point.”

Sometimes it’s not who you work with, but who you work for.

“Five dollar now five gidibid five dollar now ten gidibid ten, ten now fifteen digibigit now fifteen now fifteen gidibid, now twenty?”

Few musicians have generated as much music and as much study as this Nobel Prize winning singer-songwriter. Dylanology will last hundreds of years.

“First, you exclude black people from the festivals. Then write them out by not recording them. And pretty soon, ‘you have this manufactured image of country music being white and being poor.'”

Stories of hip-hop’s genius, influence, struggle, and endurance.

The remaining residents face isolation, and the challenges of preserving their history while enduring the present.

“I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.”

Although people will always travel and write about their experiences, it remains unclear how the travel writing form will look after Covid-19.

What will England be like with fewer music magazines?

An incomplete portrait of a nation emerges from a stash of old print magazines.

My favorite director, Lynn Shelton, died suddenly this month at the age of 54. Did the spirit of indie filmmaking go with her?

“It turns out that when I’m performing, I have only half the available light; the audience has the other half.”

Edging, or extending the time leading up to an orgasm, is almost a character of its own in Normal People, Run, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It also has a lot to teach us about sexuality and consent.

For a bunch of rock ‘n’ rollers creating the horror punk genre, the Misfits sure were sensitive.

Those of us who live for musical performances must find other ways to temporarily live without them.

There are miracles everywhere if you know where to look. And know how to listen: A wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom!

This week critics have looked to Huysmans, Camus and Jean-Philippe Toussaint for COVID-era inspiration.