John Schaefer

Ever find yourself listening to a song on the radio and thinking, “who decided those would be good words to sing?” It is, naturally, a matter of taste, but sometimes it seems like the songwriters aren’t even trying anymore. (Pussycat Dolls’ “Buttons,” anyone?) So maybe it’s time for you to ...

David Bowie’s “Fame” is a pretty good take on the elusive nature of stardom (“Could it be the best, could it be? Really? Really?”), but music is full of cautionary tales – and occasionally heartwarming ones – of fame. If you listened to rock music in the 1990s, you knew ...

When I was 10, my parents bought me a guitar for my birthday. Or maybe it was Christmas – the two are really close together and I wasn’t always clear on which event was being celebrated. Anyway, it ...

By a fluke of scheduling, we have Lila Downs, the Mexican-American singer, on today’s show, and Joan Baez, an earlier generation’s Mexican-American singer, on tomorrow’s program. Both have made their reputations as singers who refuse to shy away from hot-button topics. Forty years ago, Baez’s songs were a highly visible ...

Like many Americans who didn’t actually live there, I always thought of Minneapolis and St. Paul as the land of Mary Tyler Moore, snow, and the Vikings (whose games always seemed to be played in the snow – which was football the way God intended it to be. Moving that ...

McCarren Park Pool is closing. Well, not closing forever, but when it reopens, it will be as a pool. For the past 3 summers, McCarren has been one of the hottest music venues in New York – a place to watch the most ...

Well before I ever started writing liner notes, I was a big fan of them. And by liner notes I mean all of the printed matter that came with an LP or a CD – production credits, lyrics, and occasionally some sort of explanatory or laudatory prose. I always felt ...

At the end of next week, all the major league baseball teams will call up their promising minor leaguers for September games. This annual roster expansion gives everyone a chance to see who has the next potential MVP.

Also at the end of next week, the horse racing season ...

When I started listening to classical music, after spending the first 18 years of my life basically immersed in rock, I found that I was really drawn to early music – the earlier the better. And of course to modern music, especially the so-called Minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve ...

The world’s most famous guitarist. The girlfriend who wanted to be his wife. The famous rock singer. The rock singer’s wife who wanted to be the guitarist’s girlfriend. The guitarist’s manager, who mysteriously “misplaced” a fair amount of money. The manager’s associates, both of them angling to take over as ...

Daniel Levitin’s best-seller, This Is Your Brain On Music, contained some provocative stuff. The musician-turned-neuroscientist also displayed a philosophical streak, with answers to questions like “if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” His answer – an ...

So Giacomo Puccini is the biggest opera composer in the States. That’s no surprise. Fred Plotkin reports from Italy, though, that in Puccini’s home country it is Giuseppe Verdi who is considered to be the superior composer, and apparently by quite a large margin. In a sense, that’s not too ...

While my lifelong love affair with horse racing is a poorly-kept secret, I am not in fact into gambling at all. (Thoroughbred racing is different. Don’t ask me how – it just is.) So while work has occasionally taken ...

I’ve followed the Billboard charts since I was in school, back in the late 70s (and that, kids, is what they mean by “old school”). But it wasn’t the Hot 100 that I was interested in; that was just pop pablum, nothing interesting there. I read the Top 200, the ...

I think we can all applaud the idea of doing something well, becoming successful at it, and then deciding to try something a bit different instead of just repeating yourself. And if the results aren’t always what one might’ve hoped for, well, it’s like that old line from the Mary ...

First of all, everybody calm down. We are not really suggesting that the electric bass is expendable. But sometimes you just gotta stir the pot a bit, you know? And it is true that what used to be a novelty (“hey look – the Doors don’t have a bass player”; ...

I am, and have always been, a big sports fan. And therefore, I have always hated the Olympics opening ceremonies. Huge spectacles, garish costumes and even more garish music, and not ...

Musicians generally hate being stuck into one stylistic box. Debussy and Ravel disliked the term “Impressionist.” Steve Reich and Philip Glass still rail against the use of the term “Minimalist” for their music. Miles Davis hated the term “jazz.” Well, you might think that someone like Lead Belly (and that ...

It’s the summer of the superhero. Batman returns in “The Dark Knight,” and we have eponymous films from Hancock, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man (wow – just had to type that three times because I kept writing “Iran ...

It's tempting to look down on all those people standing in lines around the block at the various Apple stores, waiting to buy yet another Apple gizmo. Tempting to say, 'look at them; they're like addicts. Apple hooks them, and then ...