Jason Crawford

It's getting tough to keep up with all of the days' best vinyl records. I'd planned to look at a couple of MoFi's most recent releases this month along with a couple of the Music Matters Jazz titles in celebration of Blue Note's 75th Anniversary. But the Black Friday edition of Record Store Day kinda...

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. The program I had planned before the Beatles took over my life with their cuckoo mono recordings. I've also allowed my life to be taken over at different times by the musicians...

It wasn't too long ago that I could scarcely find five records in a month that I felt like buying, let alone reviewing. That bird has flown. It's getting hard to keep up. Listeners who are willing to go through the extra steps of finding records, cleaning records...

Seems to me that Sturgill Simpson is this year's Alabama Shakes. His popularity appears to be swelling up from the grass beneath our very feet. The proverbial "grassroots" route to fame. His record is called Metamodern Sounds In Country Music...

August, 2014

A while back, we took a look at Blue Train as done by Music Matters as part of Blue Note's 75th Anniversary celebration. Twelve titles are being released in 2014 as part of the observance, and the world gets a little brighter with every new issue. Based on the strength of the Coltrane record...

Rolling Stone magazine did a cover feature on Big Jack White recently that seemed to leave a nasty taste in his spitfire mouth. He responded to what he obviously considered the bad press publicly. Somewhere in there, it seems they referred to him as "the Willy Wonka of Rock and Roll." Or something like that. I don't think that's what got him riled up...

Well, it doesn't look like those boys in the Black Keys are going anywhere any time soon, huh? My Guy in Nashville got to see them play a small club show last week as part of their promotions for Turn Blue. He forwarded me a review of the show that let me know that the record is Number One...

I almost thought about maybe trying to give up on Record Store Day after a less than stellar outing on Black Friday 2013 when I got my hands on a few records that sounded like ass. Some were scratchy, some flimsy, and it didn't seem like anyone...

I've been reading a lot about habits recently. How to develop new ones and change old ones into better ones. All of the conventional wisdom shows that you start small. Really small, then you build up in miniature increments over the course of a reasonable amount of time...

I'm famously late. I was late to Nirvana because I was too cool to listen to the radio when I was 17. I was late to the Queens of the Stone Age because I was too lazy to follow up on their hit radio song that I actually enjoyed in the early 2000's. I've loved Led Zeppelin for as long as I can remember...

I've lamented the premature decline of the Black Crowes at this site before. They're like the Mike Tyson of Rock and Roll. Started out like a house on fire, and then flamed out way before their time in a haze of bloated musicality and dysfunction. We still have those first three records...

I thought it might be fun to do things a little differently this month. Mother, as they say, is the necessity of invention. There's not much happening in the World of Rock that interests me presently so I decided to take a look at some Jazz titles that have been reissued by separate...

Record Store Day's Black Friday event came and went with a whimper this holiday season.  There weren't a ton of compelling releases on the docket and this might have been reflected in the length of the line outside Amoeba Records in San Francisco yesterday morning.  I was fifth through the door...

I'm a Jazz fan. I'm no expert, but I love the genre enough to capitalize the "J" when I'm writing about it. I started out making purchasing decisions based on serious scientific data like "how cool is the album cover?" At some point...

I had preconceived notions about what Trent Reznor was doing as a musician all of these years.  He hit it big with that "Animal" song when I was still in early high school, and I let that pretty much color my thoughts...