When we think of “lost” albums of the 1960s, we tend to think of rock groups. The Beach Boys’ “Smile,” the Who’s “Lifehouse,” Neil Young “Homegrown.” We don’t typically think of the lost works of the great R&B and soul artists of the era. More
BDCWire Staff
Jonathan Donaldson Correspondent
Jonathan Donaldson has written for just about every publication in Boston, including the Athol Imperial Sun. His editors usually find him congenial if not a little ungrounded. He has also written for Dagger, Scram, Pop Culture Press, and other various publications no longer findable via “The Way Back Machine.”
Stories by Jonathan Donaldson
There may be thousands of rock bands out there, but not many of them play good old-fashioned, sha-la-la shaking, retro-fitted pop like the boys in Boston’s Spirit Kid. Let’s put our cynicism aside here. Sure, we’ve been there and done that multiple times—in the actual ‘60s themselves of course, then in follow-on scenes like the Paisley Underground and Elephant 6, etc—but that doesn’t make any of this any less pure or less interesting. It all just comes round again. More
Although she calls the Boston-area home, Marissa Nadler is not an artist that you can expect to see around the area with any regularity. That’s because she’s been busy touring around the country and abroad for the last ten-plus years. Not bad for road-tested 32 year-old songwriter, who brings her new album, “July,” for an intimate performance and Q&A at Cambridge’s Red Star Union this Thursday.
Since the explosion of the rock era, there is no question that female songwriters have had a bigger seat at the pop music table. While many of their contributions have been behind the scene, women in the rock era had a huge hand in penning not just girl-group songs, but some of the biggest hits of the day. On Sunday evening, Berklee College of Music celebrates the achievements of some of these celebrated names and more, as it continues its Great American Songbook series with the program Great Women Songwriters — featuring the music of Aretha Franklin, Dorothy Fields, Bessie Smith, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Billie Holiday, Laura Nyro, Lillian Armstrong, Dianne Warren, Brenda Russell, a Dolly Parton medley, a blues medley, and more. More
This Sunday when you are watching the Grammys to see Lorde and Macklemore lunge out of their seats for a stroll to the stage, look closely at the audience. There might be a Boston guy sitting out there clutching his own statue — one that means a lot. More
When partying with style, you can’t do it all. What you can manage to do, though, you should enjoy with great gusto. Enjoying Boston’s annual First Night celebration is no different. Rescued from the jaws of recession in October (in a last-minute effort led by the city and donors like the Highland Street Foundation), the city’s annual New Year’s Eve celebration was about to be absent from the environs of the Back Bay for the first time this year since 1975. And as part of his swan song campaign, Mayor Thomas Menino announced in a November press conference that this year’s “new day” for Boston’s First Night would be “bigger and better.” More
On Valentine’s Day, Jason Dunn of the Boston band The Luxury broke his ankle while trying to get one of his cats to come in from the cold. In the idle months that followed, he needed something to keep him busy while gimping around the house. So he did what any enterprising musician would do after a Valentine’s Day accident — set up 30 “dates” for 30 bands to play each other’s songs. And so “Boston Does Boston” was born, which is now a double-disc CD compilation of Boston artists covering other Boston artists with three shows this weekend featuring 16 of the 30 acts over three nights (Friday at Brighton Music Hall, Saturday at Great Scott, and a grand finale Sunday at Brighton Music Hall). More
From Christian Marclay’s video loops to Laurie Anderson’s violin-record player, the Institute of Contemporary Art isn’t necessarily the first place to go if you want to hear music that you can hum. That’s because within the contemporary art world, music seeks to be more than just melodies and words. It seeks to be transcendent. That can be said for Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar or nearly everything about the way Michael Jackson danced. It certainly can be said for feminist Russian punk collective Pussy Riot, which is the subject of the new documentary “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer,” screening tonight at 7 p.m. at the ICA (the last film in its series “Art Over Politics,” which has centered on the crucial relationship between contemporary art and politics). More
It’s an old debate: What is Americana music and does it even matter? Do bands accept the label or is it merely a skin to be shed as an artist grows? With genre-bending experimental songwriter Joseph Arthur — who has often been labeled Americana himself — playing Great Scott in Allston Tuesday night, it’s a good time to reevaluate the argument. More
Any exploration into the nature of band names isn’t going to end well. Most sound pretty bad at first. Band names are like baby names; they only sound “right” once you actually get to know the child. The bar was also set quite low at the onset of rock history. The Beatles and the Beach Boys are two of the greatest bands ever — yet both have terrible names. Little would the world know that a mere 50 years later, bands with names like Diarrhea Planet would be soon be lining up for our time’s equivalent of the “Ed Sullivan Show.” More