Bored now.

The spacious, airy song “Amsterdam,” which opens Griffin House’s CD Lost & Found, announces that we’re in serious, sensitive-guy territory.  But though the tune recalls Sting’s “Why Should I Cry For You”, House has an earthy, pop-Americana style that ought to stand him in good stead in a mileu where …

Hello To All That: A Memoir of War, Zoloft, and Peace recounts in time-shifting chapters the author’s depression, pharmaceutical cure, and subsequent formative experience as a freelance war correspondent reporting from the siege of Sarajevo in 1993-4. The parallel stories are interesting and vividly told. But readers expecting something heavy, …

Stand aside, Bridget Jones. Look lively, Carrie Bradshaw. And look out, Adrian Mole: if you see this woman, run. A sharp-witted British social satire fresh from the New York Times bestseller list, Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber hits the idiot box on March 12 courtesy of Oxygen Media. The …

This DVD documents the 2003 Springing the Blues Festival in Jacksonville, FL. Interspersing performances with artist interviews, it conveys the flavor of what’s happening down South on the blues festival scene in the 21st century. The interviewers also elicit from the artists verbal descriptions and private demos of what the …

Max Schmeling’s death at the age of 99 conjures up a rainbow of feelings. Joe Louis’s famous knockout of Schmeling occurred in 1938, right around when my parents were born and exactly a generation before I popped into the world. Schmeling was born in 1905, the same year as my …

The Ella Blame duo combines Michael D. Temple’s hypnotic electronica with Ella Blame’s snaky vocals. Blame’s voice is a startlingly versatile instrument prone to a metallic nasality. Some of Temple’s music is quite pretty, while Blame’s voice most of the time isn’t, and that makes for interesting contrasts. The duo …

Through ignorance or bad advice, very young artists often bite off more than they can chew, applying precociously mastered technical skills to adult material they can’t quite get their souls around. Teenage country singer Blaine Larsen, who sings in a clear, rich baritone that sounds at least a few years …

"Walk A Mile In My Shoes," one of his two Billboard-charting singles, is one of the greatest soul records ever made.

Joining an increasingly extensive and rich body of new roots music is this first release by The Great Unknowns, a quartet of seasoned musicians fronted by singer Becky Warren. Warren, who co-writes the songs with guitarist Michael Palmer, has a voice reminiscent of Lucinda Williams’s, but her tones are easier …