70 Best Singles of 2023

By now, my calling these things “singles” instead of “songs” like everybody else has for years probably just seems obstinate or, what was that word colleagues used to throw at me, oh yeah “contrarian.” (Just this month finally saw my only indexed mention in Steve Waksman’s 2009 book This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict…

150 Best Albums of 2015

To hear some critics keeping tabs at the time tell it, 2015 was the year albums started acting like albums again. And I bet you didn’t even know they’d stopped! Me either. But Carl Wilson in Slate, for instance, detected “something especially significant about the immersive long-form record this year, about ‘muchness’” — an attribute…

3 New Wave Albums, 1981

Inchoate genre roundup from college newspaper, almost definitely of albums I picked for free out of a giveaway box in the newspaper office. Notes: (1) I call Dire Straits and George Thorogood new wave! Unless I was being sarcastic, which is possible. (2) I like that I call Andy Gibb “teen pop,” generations before the…

35 Best Singles of 2021

tend to live in my own bubble, if not on my own planet, when it comes to singles these days. Well, maybe I always did (you might be saying), but at least I used to not go through entire years without writing about any of them, or really talking to anybody about them at all.…

Singles reviews, 1988

A very short-lived (only one installment, if my memory serves me) Creem column. Good variety. Some parts wound up in a couple of my books, but most parts didn’t. The editors carelessly shuffled the order somewhat — I clearly mean to end with the Spagna blurb. Creem, 1988

Tiffany review, 1989

Caution: Faulty predictions ahead. The artist would never chart again. But I’ll still take her debut LP over any album I’ve ever heard by any of the highly respected women gratuitously belittled in the penultimate paragraph. And the cringe-worthy headline was not my doing. (As for the faded lines in the fold: “with no Miami/house/hip-hop…

Teach Your Children Wooly

When I wrote this, I was 29 and Linus a/k/a William was five. Now I’m 60 and he’s closing in on 36, with a son of his own. I hope I was as good a Dad as he seems to be.