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The Kintsugi Art of Sara Bareilles

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    Sara Bareilles' new album  Good Grief arrives at the end of a very hard year, at the end of a very hard week and on a very hard day. And I couldn't start a Broken Record blog post about grief without mentioning the world's grief at losing the singer-songwriter-turned-humanitarian Dolly Parton this week. But I have a post in the works on punk music and ideas of disruption and I have decided to save my words for Dolly Parton as a counterpoint to that. This piece is the convergence of many random things. First of all, obviously, my own continued experience of personal grief (not just my mother passing the first few days of this year but other deaths and family griefs), all for which this album seemed so movingly timely for me personally but also our national grief in the United States, the World's grief in seeing the consequences of American malfeasance, our collective professional grief over the consequences of technology and communal grief at the lost of our gene...
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The Cowboy Playlist

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I talk to my Dad a lot on the phone these days since my Mom has passed. He most likes to talk about music and food. Last week he brought up the song "I Ride an Old Paint" (The Weavers version). He wanted me to look up the lyrics on my phone while we were talking because he wanted to explain to me what all the cowboy jargon meant, particularly in this verse: I'll ride the old paint, lead the old Dan go to Montana to throw the hoolian, I'll feed 'em in the coulees, water in the draw Tails are all matted, their backs are all raw.   He talked about the term hoolian (catching horse rope, as opposed to the lasso and the lariat and quite frankly, I'm still confused about the differences), the word coulee versus the word  draw (apparently a matter of depth, ravines or ditches full of water). On the mesa near Roy and Solano there were mostly only draws and he told me a story about being 11 years old and ha...
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Four Powerhouse Women Artists

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I read somewhere recently that most people become hardened into their musical tastes by the time they turn 30 years old; and those people rarely explore new music after that. Which is a shame because, as I've mentioned here before, discovering new music is actually good for your brain. So it's just as interesting to me how I find new music as it is what those new favorite songs turn out to be. For example, I found Cloud Cult on a Tidal indie feed. I found Sara Bareilles from YouTube algorithms putting her songs in front of me. Boyfriends turned me onto things like The Eels and David Gray. Here are four amazing women artists who came to me in meandering ways over the last few decades. They are as top-notch as any male artists out there but somehow find themselves left out of many, many important lists.  One of these artists I came across after the age of 35. The other three I discovered after I was 40. Paloma Faith Paloma Faith isn't known in the U.S. (I know because I kee...
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