Author: Rick Levin

America’s Greatest Rock Band, via Chicago

Wilco bassist discusses touring, playing and recording its best album yet

ArchiveMusic

With R.E.M. having disbanded last year, it would appear that Wilco now stands pretty well unchallenged as the greatest American rock band. Since rising from the ashes of seminal post-punk country/folk/rock pioneers Uncle Tupelo in 1994, this Chicago-based band has released a series of albums that continues, with each successive drop, to challenge, confound, frustrate, mystify and amuse its fans. Continue reading →

A Certain Sense of Weightlessness

A talk with The Jayhawks’ Mark Olson

ArchiveMusic

Like that one ramshackle, half-collapsed barn you pass on the highway year after year, the music created by veteran Minneapolis band The Jayhawks is timeless — in a fragile, verdigised, sepia-toned, windblown, authentically American melancholia sort of way. Their sweetly bittersweet sound, all honeyed harmonies and landlocked blues and melodic rustic reverie, is like a soundtrack caught gorgeously between a hymn to our better selves and an elegy to how we’ve fallen short. Continue reading →

Welcome to the Slaughterhouse

Kurt Vonnegut biography reads like a nasty tweet

Books

Behind every great writer hides an asshole. Dostoyevsky was a religious freak with a gambling problem. William Burroughs plinked a slug through his wife’s forehead. Faulkner guzzled a half-gallon of rye every day before noon. Shakespeare only willed his wife the spare bed. I’m far from a great writer, but I sure can be an asshole sometimes. It’s true. Maybe you should stop reading this. Continue reading →