HERE COMES THE SONG

John Prine was just 24 when his eponymous debut album was released in 1971 and critics were struck by how mature and wise the singer-song…

You don’t need to have seen X Factor or The Voice more than once to have heard a judge unconvincingly assure a fretful contestant after a…

Written by John Sebastian and released by The Lovin’ Spoonful in the mid-1960s, this two-minute pop song is as good a declaration as any of…

Prepare yourselves for the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love and endless eulogies to Sgt Pepper and Swinging London. But the Beatles…

In real time it is just over four minutes long, but Strawberry Fields Forever is not in real time, it’s in dreamtime. Even now when you hear

Disciples and critics have spent the last four decades and more trying to find the right metaphor for Lucinda Williams’ distinctive vocal…

Can a song make you afraid? Can a song move you to tears for a lament that is not yours, but might be? Can a song punch all the air out of…

At the risk of sounding like Donny Hathaway, great pop music has to be something. That something can be almost anything, but it can't be…

February 1979. Britain was gripped by an unprecedented crisis. Bin men, gravediggers and lorry drivers were on strike, unemployment was…

I love Tom Waits. I love August Kleinzahler. I’ve always paired them, songwriter and poet, as artists of the America that lies, north and…

When I Wanna Be Like You (I'm the king of the swingers) finishes in The Jungle Book one of King Louis’s henchmen/monkeys notices that Baloo…

Not content with being the world’s coolest rock star, David Bowie was also the world’s coolest dad – or at least that’s how it seemed to me…

Dan Penn once said he was always striving to write the best cheating song ever. There is stiff competition – Your Cheatin’ Heart and I Heard

When I first heard the low vocal tones of Amber Bain, aka The Japanese House, coming through my computer speakers, I clicked next. Spotify…

The lonely painter who ‘lived in a box of paints’ has turned full circle. Perhaps this is the carousel of time she referred to in The Circle

First, a confession: despite her glowing reputation as the pre-eminent singer-songwriter on the British folk scene, the musical allure of…

I trekked all the way to Walthamstow to see A Little Night Music. As usual when reviewing, I had done no research, preferring to see the…

In 1995 Bruce Springsteen released his understated masterpiece The Ghost of Tom Joad. Springsteen’s best works are his narrative songs and…

By 1979, The Beach Boys were really on their uppers. After more than a decade of darning Brian Wilson's musical socks they had simply run…

The first time I saw La La Land, I didn’t get the songs. Too busy with the beautiful visuals (by cinematographer Linus Sandgren) and the…