Tag Archives: music

January 27, 2012

The 10 Best Jimmy Buffett Songs He Probably Won’t Play On Tour

By Jeff Vrabel

Florida Times-Union — Jimmy Buffett has scored unimaginable bank as king of an empire that encompasses music, restaurants, apparel, shrimp, tequila, casinos and whatever industry puts blowup pools in the back of pickup trucks.

But before he was able to convince untold thousands of concertgoers in suburban amphitheaters and basketball arenas they were actually watching the sun drop in someplace like Tahiti, Buffett really was a struggling, easygoing and fairly well-lubricated storyteller from the Gulf Coast, a guy who came up in the early ’70s singer-songwriter golden age of John Prine, James Taylor, Steve Goodman and countless others.

It’s tougher to find that side of Buffett onstage after decades of sold-out cheeseburger parties, but it’s not impossible: For decades he’s ended his beach blanket blowouts with a solo acoustic number (we call it the Let’s Get The Hell Out Of Here Before These People Get In Their Cars song), his best chance to retune his guitar, rummage around in the song trunk and revisit some of the softer, simpler corners of the catalog. If you’ve gotten your fill of the songs you know by heart, here are a few lost treasures worth digging up.

Read more at Jacksonville.com.

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3 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Florida Times-Union, Music Reviews, Music Writing

January 26, 2012

Interview — Mac McAnally: Buffett’s sideman has some stories he could tell

By Jeff Vrabel

Island Packet — Mick Jagger has Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen had Clarence Clemons. Jimmy Buffett’s onstage foil/sidekick has for decades been a very large, congenial ginger named Mac McAnally.

With a massive helmet of Hagar the Horrible-thick hair, dry-rubbed Southern wit and considerable tallness, McAnally does not exactly fit into the Caribbean-escapist vibe conjured up by Buffett’s beach blanket blowouts.

But since the 1990s, the Mississippi native has served as Buffett’s onstage counterpoint, guitarist and producing and writing partner. (He also has, during performances of “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere,” served as Alan Jackson.)

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2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Interviews, Music Writing

December 1, 2011

Top 9 Reasons Giving Birth At A Concert Would Very Much Suck

By Jeff Vrabel

NickMom — 6. Coldplay may make great baby-making music but Chris Martin gets all weird when you start screaming during contractions.

Rest of list, featuring no more Coldplay references I PROMISE, is here.

2 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Dad Stories / Parenting, Humor Columns, NickMom

July 12, 2011

Interview: Gillian Welch on perfectionism, fireworks and why even metalheads think she’s dark

By Jeff Vrabel

Metromix — Gillian Welch is a band, one that features Gillian Welch on vocals and guitar and partner Dave Rawlings on guitar, and that is how Gillian Welch has worked for years.

It’s the honey voice of Welch that usually first pulls listeners into the duo’s spare, warm songs. But nearly two decades into a friendship forged at the Berklee College of Music over a shared love of very old music, Welch and Rawlings have evolved into an extraordinary duet machine, one that blends crackling acoustic music, Appalachian folk traditions and bluegrass into an effortlessly rich rural sound.

Such synergy is hard to maintain in real life and harder to maintain in music (we’re still not entirely sure if Simon and Garfunkel like each other). But part of Welch and Rawlings’ persistence as a duo comes their perfectionism and pragmatism. “We’re perfectionists of a certain stripe,” she says. “We’ll take all kinds of haphazard and accidental things in recording, but with the songwriting I feel like we inhabit this really sparse, almost puritanical world, and there just isn’t very much that fits in that world.”

Read more at Metromix.

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Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Interviews, Metromix, Music Writing

April 6, 2011

10 Hip-Hop Artists You Didn’t Know Were Still Active, or, “Wait, Young MC has eight albums?”

By Jeff Vrabel

Step off, I'm doing the Hump.

Metromix — “You won’t be around next year,” growled Craig Mack in one of hip-hop’s best-ever boasts. While the history of hip-hop is littered with abandoned careers, failed promise and like three separate attempted comebacks by Ma$e, it turns out hip-hop artists, despite their apocalyptic imagery and crushing self-importance, are as susceptible to the whims of the marketplace (and their creditors) as anyone. Here’s a list of 10 hip-hop acts who, though you may not be aware of it, are currently quite active, and may even be around next year. Read the full piece at Metromix.

 

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House of Pain – Back From The Dead

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Digital Underground – The Return of the Crazy One

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Young MC – I Come Off

2 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Humor Columns, Metromix, Music Writing

April 1, 2011

Who Is Andy D: Probably the best story I’ve ever written about a guy who raps shirtless in a Viking helmet and white shorts

By Jeff Vrabel

(Michelle Pemberton/Metromix)

Metromix Indianapolis — In an online video for “Ragnarock (Viking Lover),” Andy D is shirtless, wearing a vest, plastic Viking headgear and a fanny pack. He’s rapping, dancing, singing and jumping. Mostly, he’s sweating.

Around him are two men who have given greater attention to their abdominal area than he. Without too much effort, it’s also possible to find photos of Andy D wielding a sword and riding a horse that’s wearing a party hat. There are also a lot of jorts.

“The white cutoffs have been with me since day one,” he said.

Further investigation reveals that in songs like “Party Nite,” “2 Inches from Crazytown” and “Dirty Boyfriend,” Andy D — real name Andy Duncan — is concerned with the following things, in order: party-starting, love-making, party-maintaining, and then, farther on down the line, eating, sleeping and respiration. A typical line: “I like my movies like I like my women / short, low-budget and independent.”

His best-known track is called “God Loves Drunk Chicks.”

But there’s one final thing about Andy D that seems to keep coming up over and over again: Not everyone is into Andy D, but those who are go all in.

Read more at Metromix Indianapolis.

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Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Indianapolis Star, Interviews, Music Writing

September 2, 2010

Interview: John Mellencamp’s new testament

By Jeff Vrabel

Hilton Head Monthly — A few weeks ago, John Mellencamp wandered through a large and shiny mall in Indianapolis in a futile, climate-controlled and probably Cinnabon-smelling hunt for the record store.

This was, of course, a terrible idea, in part because you can imagine what happens when John Mellencamp wanders unannounced through a mall in Indianapolis, but also because he’d have had about as much luck finding a reliable VCR repairman or some MySpace gear; who knows the last time the mall had a record store. So he abandoned the search and did the only logical thing he could — went over to the Apple store. “The place was packed,” Mellencamp said. “Packed. People swarming in line, the way the record store was when we were kids.”

That was, needless to say, some time ago; these days when you accidentally stumble across a record store it feels weird, like an abandoned mining town or an undervisited museum. It looks passed over and it feels old-fashioned, but that makes sense, says Mellencamp, because so is rock ‘n’ roll.

“It’s done. It’s over. We killed it,” he says, pausing for effect between each little eulogy. “There’s nothing that’s going to revive it, or give us that extra little goose, like punk or grunge did. We ruined it. We outgrew it. So I’m kind of excited to see what’s next.”

Read the full story at Hilton Head Monthly.

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3 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Hilton Head Monthly, Interviews, Music Writing

June 16, 2010

Billboard’s Top 10 Bonnaroo Moments, feat. Coco, Jay-Z and, it goes without saying, Daryl Hall

By Jeff Vrabel

Billboard — Trying to boil down three days and four nights of relentless music, comedy, distant bass thumping, a unrelenting jerk of a sun that made you sort of wish you had never been born, heat-based insomnia, unstable baked-mud terrain, fried foods in paper trays, sympathy-inducing sunburns and displeasing olfactory combinations into an Internet-friendly list is an absolutely impossible job; a team of a dozen working the festival at all times would be inadequate.

But nonetheless, our small but intrepid team fearlessly managed to put together Billboard’s Best Moments of Bonnaroo 2010, in no particular order, and issued with the caveat that when these moments were happening, dozens more were happening elsewhere, but we were probably in the press area, where we found a little air-conditioned spot. Read the full list, with plentiful videos, here.

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Billboard, Bonnaroo, Music Writing

June 10, 2010

Billboard @ Bonnaroo 2010: Dispatches from the RIDICULOUS SOUL-SCORCHING HOT

By Jeff Vrabel

Pictured: Snoop Dogg, somewhere

Billboard — In flagrant defiance of the Weather Channel’s subtle forecast for central Tennessee this weekend — EXTREME CAUTION ADVISED FOR HEAT AND HUMIDITY THIS WEEKEND… BE PREPARED FOR HEAT STRESS says their delightful-sounding SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT — I’ll be covering Bonnaroo this weekend with the highly skilled and personable Troy Carpenter (and attempting to keep up with the equally skilled and bearded Tyson Wheatley at CNN), on the official Billboard site right here. Daily recaps, interviews, blogs, one-man mobile uplink units, etc. etc. Also we might die of heatstroke, so if the stories stop, that’s what probably happened.

We’ll also be tweeting, so point your personal World Wide Internet reading machine device to twitter.com/billboarddotcom and enjoy our slow descent into humidity-induced madness, or the almost-certain ankle injuries that happen when you stumble in the dark over passed-out twentysomethings lying upside down in dirt. Follow!

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1 comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Billboard, Bonnaroo, Music Writing

March 11, 2010

There’s A Fred Durst To See You, Sir: Run-DMC and the “Crown Royal” Fiasco

By Jeff Vrabel

Despite his prominent placement on this cover, DMC, sadly, appears on this record approximately as much as I do

PopDose — Let it first be proclaimed that talking the smack about Run-DMC pains me on a very deep and contemplative level; it feels much like punching my grandfather, or making fun of my son’s hair when he stumbles up in the morning (to be fair, though, he looks totally drunk, and it’s kind of hilarious).

But Raising Hell was the first real cassette I ever high-speed dubbed (though I made sure to awkwardly snip out the super-bad words), and my entry into not only hip-hop but the greater world in general, as at the time I was living in a one-stoplight whistle-stop called Upland, Ind., where it was generally accepted that the music world basically began and ended with Amy Grant. My devotion lasted through for years, too, through Tougher Than Leather, through Down with the King, and through the first seven seconds of Crown Royal, which immediately thereafter turned into a pretty shocking platter of comprehensive suck.

The complete deconstruction is over at PopDose.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Back Home Again In Indiana, Humor Columns, Music Writing, PopDose

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