Crystal Bowersox: All That Means a Lot

Crystal Bowersox certainly has reason to count her blessings. Only three years after rising to stardom as the American Idol ninth season runner-up, she is set to step onto the Broadway stage this summer as the leading lady in Always… Patsy Cline. Then there’s her superb new album, All That For This, which for the 27-year-old singer/songwriter signals a new-found sense of contentment and, it seems, happiness.

“I really am enjoying the now,” says Bowersox, “that’s really important.”

The album speaks of new beginnings, of making peace with the past and making the best out of what you've got. Through such standout moments as the bluesy, Stax-horns styled “Movin’ On” and the redemptive, countrified title track—“All that I’ve been through is just a stepping stone to where I’m going to,” she sings on the latter—Bowersox reflects the serenity of someone who has contended with some heavy adversity in her life, and at times still does, but has nevertheless come to appreciate her own resilience.

Special Occasion: Smokey Robinson Live in Florida

Smokey Robinson, 4/10/2013, Mahaffey Theater (photo: Donald Gibson)

Smokey Robinson may very well be the smoothest, most sensual singer/songwriter ever. The man oozes intimacy. Not sex explicitly, but rather the rush of attraction and togetherness, a bit of sweet talk whispered between sweethearts in the dark. Marvin wanted to get it on. Smokey wants you, baby, to come close.

At 73 Robinson still exudes a singular passion and, with his falsetto in fine form this past Wednesday night in St. Petersburg, he seduced a sold-out Mahaffey Theater audience for two solid hours. 

After opening with a trio of expected but nonetheless exhilarating oldies—“Going to a Go-Go,” “I Second That Emotion,” “You Really Got A Hold On Me”—Robinson led his nine-piece band into “Quiet Storm,” establishing the mood of the music to come.

Indeed it was a feast for love-song lovers, “grown-folks’” music it’s sometimes called, and Robinson obliged with highlights (“Being With You,” “Ooo Baby Baby,” “The Tracks of My Tears”) from virtually every phase of his career. 

Music Journalist Jeff Burger on Editing New Springsteen Interview Anthology

“Talking about music is like talking about sex,” Bruce Springsteen has been known to say. “It’s better when demonstrated.” 

Despite whatever skepticism he may have in regard to the former proposition, however, Springsteen has increasingly proven himself to be a fascinating subject in both conversation and commentary, providing insights to his creative process as well as to the seminal influences that have resonated throughout his work.

In editing Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches and Encounters, veteran music journalist Jeff Burger has produced an indispensable anthology of such moments. With the pieces sequenced chronologically, Burger notes, “you see great changes in him over 40 years. So I’ve got pieces that capture the way he was in the 1970s and the changes that happened after that.”

That arc that emerges of Springsteen's perceptions of his own image and of his legend as he’s gotten older is striking. As I'm sure you remember, after Born In The U.S.A., for instance, he began to resist his public persona—“I’m like Santa Claus at the North Pole,” he’d say about him living in New Jersey—but in more recent years he’s seemed to have grown more comfortable in his own skin.

That’s right, and there was a lot of changing from the beginning to the Born In The U.S.A. days. In the very earliest interviews in this book he’s complaining frequently about the fact that he can’t pay his bills. He’s making $75 a week. He also said, in a 1974 interview, that “we won’t play anyplace over 3,000 seats, and even that’s too big.” He didn’t want to talk about music when I interviewed him in ’74. He told me, “That would be messing with the magic.” He didn’t want to take partisan political positions. He said he didn’t see why people get married and bring up kids. “That’s not for me,” [he said]. Quite a lot of changes.

Fleetwood Mac's Rumours Still Strong After 35 Years

Of course they’ve scored plenty of hits over the years, but the prime catalyst of Fleetwood Mac’s legend, why they still generate a buzz and draw arena-sized audiences whenever they re-team for a tour—the band begins a new one next Thursday night in Columbus, Ohio—is Rumours.

For as much as been said and written about the 1977 album’s often-tumultuous creation, of infamous tales of band members feuding and fucking and shoveling through insane quantities of cocaine, its songs collectively remain the band's crowning achievement. Recently released by Warner Music, Rumours (35th Anniversary Expanded Edition) illustrates over three discs just how driven these musicians were to have something to show for the soap opera their personal lives had become.

Touré Discusses New Book on Prince

In his new book, I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became An Icon, journalist and author Touré suggests and explains certain fundamental reasons why the legendary musician has transcended the context of his craft to ultimately achieve a far more profound cultural distinction.

"It’s one thing to be a star or a superstar, and quite another to be an icon," Touré maintains. "To become an icon you’ve got to have something more than talent. It’s not just talent that will propel you to that higher level. It’s a deeper connection with the generation that is really buying the music at that point."

In the book you write about how Prince has explored both spiritual and sexual themes in his music. For a while now, though, I'd say since Emancipation was released [in 1996], he’s seemed to have trouble reconciling the two. What’s your take on that?

That’s a classic sort-of Black music trope. You see a lot of artists playing with the spiritual and the profane either in a career or in a song or in an album—Ray Charles, Al Green, R. Kelly, Toni Braxton, Whitney Houston, on and on and on. Prince wrestled with that—trying to do both, trying to combine both—within a life, within an album, within a song a lot of the time. The period you’re talking about, if memory serves, he had become a Jehovah’s Witness at that point and bringing a very overt spirituality back into his life made it a little trickier to reconcile his past wildness. There has always been a push and pull and a desire to have both. And there’s a sort-of pre-Christian understanding that you can worship God through sex. It doesn’t have to be two separate things, like you have to hide your bedroom from God or something like that. It can be all wrapped in one. And he was really pushing for that.