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If We Were Only One (Eleven Songs for 2011)
Around the time I decided to quit being a music critic (something I do every couple of years for good measure), the content of my “best of the year” playlists changed. They changed from being a record of my insatiable desire to find and consume new things to an attempt to more faithfully curate something smaller, personal, and, usually, thematic. I spent the first half of the year in a kind of self-imposed mental exile....
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Already and Not Yet (10 Songs from 2010)
I buy few new albums these days, and half-heartedly listen to a lot of music while I stare blankly at glowing rectangles, so songs that actually grab hold of me are precious. Here is a list of pop songs released in 2010 which reflect where I’ve been and would like to be. They are mostly by jittery, hipstery white guys with Something to Say. What they’re saying to me has to do with a phrase I’ve been hearing a lot lately, about living in the “already and not yet” of the Kingdom of God....
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How I Accidentally Wrote a Book about Listening to Christian Rock
I tried not to write a book about Christian rock. I tried fiction, but gave up after a teacher couldn’t get me to fix the ending to the story where a seventeen-year-old kid loses his virginity in the freezer at a convenience store. I tried “music journalism,” writing stories nobody read about bands I didn’t care about for a tiny newspaper that hardly paid me anything. I got a couple of college degrees. No matter what I do, though, I can’t escape the fact that pop music and Christianity have made me who I am, and whatever else I try to write, pop music and Christianity is....
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Sufjan Stevens: Impossible Soul
The recorded version of “Seven Swans” on Sufjan Stevens’ album of the same name always seemed a bit too subdued for the apocalyptic revelation it presents. Stevens opened his recent show at the beautiful Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, BC (and all the shows on his recent tour) with that song, alone, spotlighted, scraping timidly at a banjo and murmuring, in his flawless falsetto, about signs in the sky. Behind him, the outline of an ensemble too big to be called a rock band was waiting to burst, and about two minutes in, they did....
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The Inner Ear
I need to be listening to music all the time. Not because I want to, necessarily, but because if I don’t, the sound in my ears will drive me bonkers. Fifteen years of playing the drums, usually without earplugs, is probably not a good idea. I’m pretty sure this is the main reason that I have tinnitus, a more or less permanent ringing in the ears, an ailment which falls someplace between ill-defined stuff like chronic fatigue syndrome or phantom limbs, and verifiable damage to your body, like having a kidney removed or going bald. I first became aware of my tinnitus, back in the halcyon days when I had a full-time job with insurance....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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