John Schaefer

Our annual critics week on Soundcheck is always a popular series of shows. Critics weigh in on the best pop, hip hop, classical, jazz, and world music of the year, as well as the worst music of the year, and these always provoke a lot of comments from our listeners, ...

It’s that time of year again, Critics Week here at Soundcheck. We’ve got expert analysis of the year’s best music in various genres, and today, we have Jody Rosen talking about pop and Jake Paine talking about hip-hop. Later this week we’ll look at classical, jazz, world, and ...

Even though I grew up with records, and then CDs, I have to say I love the convenience, the portability, and the space-saving quality of digital music. As a gift, though, it leaves something to be desired. My daughters are ...

Irving Fields Trio, 'Bagels and Bongos' (click for larger)

I have lived in New York City for my whole life – except for 9 months spent working for a commercial classical music radio ...

As I might have mentioned earlier this week (when my jetlag was much, much worse than it is today), I just got back from Australia, where I was hosting a bunch of events at the Adelaide International Guitar Festival. For the second year in a row, I had a chance ...

You people think you’re so funny. So yesterday, English editor/critic Norman Lebrecht came on the show, in his guise as The Record Doctor (treating your classical music ailments, like “which Mahler 3rd should I buy?” or “what’s the best ...

John Schaefer and a cuddly friend in near Adelaide, Australia

I’ve been thinking about insomnia a lot today – mainly because I just got back from Australia, and have got that ...

Mondegreens, or misheard lyrics, happen to us all. It just seems to be a natural byproduct of taking language and setting it to music. No matter how good a singer’s diction is, someone somewhere is going to misunderstand a word or phrase. The first ...

How you respond to the long, long-awaited Guns N Roses album, “Chinese Democracy,” will probably depend on whether you were already a GNR fan. The band has always had a fairly wide fan base, including the hard-rock fans and enough punks, power poppers, and metalheads to fill the country’s ...

Back on November 13, we had the guys from Pitchfork Media in to talk about their list of the 500 greatest songs “from punk to the present.” Now critic and sax player Tom Moon shows up with his list of ...

Dusty Springfield may not have created the subgenre known as “blue-eyed soul,” but she might have been its biggest star in the 60s. Which sounds like a great thing, but it wasn’t necessarily the case. Since Elvis a decade ...

My own experience with marching bands is pretty negligible – see my blog from Nov. 6 for the sad tale. Growing up in New York City, as the rest of the country likes ...

I don’t remember when I first heard Frank Sinatra’s 1965 song "It Was A Very Good Year," mainly because that was grown-up music -- something for old people like my parents, who must’ve been well into their thirties, to listen to. I do remember when I first really listened ...

Poor iTunes. Well, not literally poor… iTunes has become the world’s largest music retailer, selling 50 gazillion songs and bringing in a pile of money a mile high. But everyone seems to hate iTunes. They hate the DRM, or Digital Rights Management, that restricts the devices you can play your ...

The Beatles “White Album” is a mess. Whether it’s a glorious mess or a tedious scavenger hunt for good songs among two LPs worth of filler depends on your point of ...

The term 'Renaissance man' gets thrown around a little too easily these days. If you can sing and you can act, you’re proclaimed a Renaissance man (usually by writers who can do neither). Quincy Jones, though, comes close. One of music’s great arrangers ...

Compiling any sort of “best of” list is a provocative thing to do. Yes, on one level all you’re doing is saying, hey, I like these songs, or these athletes, or whatever the list is about. But on a deeper level, you’re putting the list out there so other people ...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Justin Davidson wrote a review a few years back about the opera “St. Francis of Assisi,” by the ...

I think “Lili Marlene” is a great example of how a song can be appreciated by people for things that were never intended by its author. Liel Liebovitz and Matthew Miller have told the gripping story of how the song spanned two World Wars, and became a kind of unofficial ...

Today’s another installment in our occasional series we call “Who’s On Top – And Who Should Be.” It’s the second part of the title, of course, that’s more interesting. Yeah, AC/DC’s second week at #1 is kind of interesting, if only because of ...