Aimee and I caught Kathleen Edwards at the Paradise last night, and she put on another great show. We’d seen her there once before, with a significantly smaller audience, after the release of her first album a few years back. This time around, the place was pretty packed (though still no Paradise Guy; I think […]

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These past few days definitely go down as the first great weekend of the spring. My good friend Brent paid a visit to the east coast for the first time since I’ve lived here, and we spent a glorious Saturday exploring Cambridge and Boston like tourists with a stopwatch. After giving a tour of the […]

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I enjoyed a fairly low-key solo show from former Blur guitarist Graham Coxon last night at the Paradise. Theirs is not a relationship in which a former member might bring out an old song from the band to play at his solo show; mercifully, most people knew this and there were precious few shouts of […]

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Last evening, we caught the third installment of Aimee’s birthday present from last year, an evening with The Chieftains at Symphony Hall in Boston. They’ve been around 43 years, they’ve released nearly one album a year over that time (including the one mentioned above), and I think this was my third time seeing them. They […]

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I always seem to pick shows at the Middle East that go on during bad weather, making the trip there and back as interesting as the show itself. Last night that was certainly the case as I trekked across a deserted, wind-blown, snow-drifted Central Square to see Keren Ann. A line had formed by the […]

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I spent my lunch hour today walking in the rain to the Middle East to get tickets for tonight’s Keren Ann show (thanks to Sasha Frere-Jones‘s piece in The New Yorker a few months ago) and for the upcoming M. Ward show in April. I love the fact that I can walk into the Middle […]

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My first concert experience at the Somerville Theater was a fine show by the Finn Brothers Neil and Tim this evening. I thank our own Tim for the heads up on this show; he and Mari and I went to see Neil Finn at the Paradise awhile back, and I caught him again at the […]

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I thought iPod reached critical mass about two years ago, but I think I was wrong. Judging by what I see on my morning commute – the Globe, USA Today, and a half-dozen local free weeklies, it’s still heading up. This morning I spotted USA Today‘s second iPod cover story in less than a week, […]

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Neither David Byrne nor David Bowie were there, but The Arcade Fire put on a terrific show tonight at the Roxy. How strange that the only other time I’d been there (Flaming Lips), there ended up being a parade of some sort marching through the crowd. That’s the way tonight’s show ended, finally, with the […]

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Another great Repartee night at the Symphony. We’d had minor members of the orchestra, star members of the orchestra, but never the composer of the piece as our guest speaker – but that was the case tonight, when Michael Gandolfi joined us for a pre-concert talk, during which time he described the Garden of Cosmic […]

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OK, so it’s very small, but it now exists. I received in the mail today my copy (359 of 2500) of the CD Baby-produced “official bootleg” of the Pixies’ return to Avalon in December of last year. I opened it up (nice job, everyone at Coudal / pixiesdiscs) and lo and behold, there I am, […]

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1. (Tie) The Pixies at Kaplakrika, Hafnarfjorþur, Iceland, May 25, and the Pixies at Avalon, December 9The Pixies’ reunion tour was the musical story of 2004; I was so desperate to see them that I engineered a mini-break to Iceland when the first leg of their tour was announced. Though the venue was a little […]

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There are things I don’t like about Whole Foods, like its prices (Dan’s mom calls it “Whole Paycheck”) and its oft-times wacky customer base who can’t steer their carts and are rude and demanding, but I’ll say one thing for the place: any store that plays the “Magnum, P.I.” theme song on the p.a. system […]

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The week before last, when I celebrated the Pixies’ appearance at UMass and thought about the future, little did I know it would include one final opportunity to see them, as their long-awaited Boston return was announced a few days later. I made a pledge to myself that I wouldn’t try too hard, spend too […]

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Through the use of the TiVo (as George Michael might say, though not this one or this one), I’ve been watching the six-part series Long Way Round on Bravo over the past few months, leading up to the final episode last night. After treacherous roads and impassable rivers across Europe and Asia for five episodes, […]

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