Joel Coen did an interview last week in The New York Times about his and brother Ethan’s much-anticipated—but aren’t all CoBros films “much anticipated”?–film Inside Llewyn Davis. Based very loosely on Dave Van Ronk’s posthumous 2005 memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street (written with Elijah Wald), Inside Llewyn Davis takes a darkly funny, typically ambiguous CoBros look at the pre-Dylan 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene,... 

LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III Older Than My Old Man Now [2nd Story Sound] Wainwright’s latest finds the singer, songwriter and satirist typically wry and reflective, contemplating mortality and musing about life’s tangled trajectory. Mirth and melancholy are present in equal measure, from the humor infused in “My Meds” (“If the side effects don’t kill me, meds might save my life”) and “I Remember Sex” (a brassy duet with the wacky Dame... 

  FOLK FORWARD How a sound born of tradition is thriving in the modern day   By Peter Cooper It’s the other “F” word. And like its more obscene counterpart, it means different things to different people in different contexts. In the 1950s, it was sweater-vested political subversives. Later, it was shape-shifting musical revolutionaries and introspective singer-songwriters. It has been used to describe troubadours who specialize in journalistic... 

MARTIN STRINGS AMBASSADOR: LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III  Read More →