I’ll make this quick, for once. I have included both open mics and karaoke gigs here in the Setlist this week, with the obvious elephant of two-plus years of plague looming in the room. I can’t make any decisions for you, thankfully, but I am curious what people think about sharing a common microphone with […]
The Setlist
Our picks for the week’s best live music plus interviews and music news.
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Once More, with Feeling
All right, here we go again. We’ve got a lull in the pandemic wave action and, for better or for worse, live music is being made with a few minor protective caveats. I hope the COVID-19 Joint Information Center shutting its doors on April Fool’s Day is not an augury of human folly, and I […]
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Giving Up the Ghost
Regular readers will remember I enjoy reviewing records in an appropriately intimate, yet dynamic environment — specifically, while driving to somewhere pretty in my truck. This week however, circumstances came together like irksome old gods to prevent that experience. First off, I only have a CD player in my truck and a Bluetooth speaker in […]
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A Little Taste of Royalty
So much has changed in the last two years, it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of every little turn of the screw. In the old days, I used social media, emails to friends and even this column to track the various changes, moods, ideas and events that crossed the boundaries of my orb of conscious […]
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Little Graces
Lately I’ve been focusing on small graces and pleasures: a walk in nature with a loved one, a good meal, seeing a cool bird, or reading something full of brilliance and (maybe a bit too much) hope, like Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent novel The Ministry for the Future. Even a chance meeting with an old […]
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As It Was, So Shall It Be
On Oct. 1 and 2, the Eureka Symphony opened its 30th anniversary season at the Arkley Center for the Performing Arts with a program that was aptly titled “Re-Emergence.” I was there, at my first large indoor concert after the longest break in indoor concerts I have experienced since I can remember. It wasn’t an […]
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Open Your Mind
Last week I asked a very important question about the continued existence of live music in the face of our increasing pandemic spike and its attendant dangers. That question has been answered by a wave of cancelations here and abroad. I wrote about the spike affecting my former home of New Orleans and, to give […]
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Waltzing Mephisto
As I blearily write this, I am up too late, thinking about a last-minute camping trip I’m sneaking away on in the hopes of removing some of the crude nanoparticles that the year’s nonsense has disgorged into my psyche. I had hoped that last week would be the last time I would have to write […]
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Back at it Again?
To mask or not to mask, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer a mild inconvenience to … oh, stop it. It looks like the numbers are climbing and the governor — with a recall election looming that he might want to take a tad more seriously lest we all […]
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Living on a Thin Line
I’m a little confused lately and I’m not the only one. Now that things have opened up again, and I did my civic duty and got the jab, what’s the plan? I find myself oscillating between going maskless and fancy-free until I read something about the Delta variant and go back to covering up for […]
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Don’t Make Me Tap the Sign
I’ll cop to it: I view the world materially and holistically. Things are connected. And I don’t just write about music for a living, I also build things. I come from carpenters and I can recognize designs and patterns. So when live music goes away for more than a year because of a disastrously unprepared […]
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Into The Great Wide Open
As I write this, I am nursing a mild sunburn and what I increasingly suspect is carryover of inebriation from a day of patriotic drinking and grilling. Such is the nature of things but I have to say these are mild wounds compared to the pleasure I had of having people around and feeding them […]