That's the reason people go to shows: they want to feel connected to something, and not so alone. | | | | He's gonna ride till he can't no more. Bruce Springsteen's "Western Stars" is out today on Columbia.
(Danny Clinch/Shore Fire Media) | | | | |  | “That's the reason people go to shows: they want to feel connected to something, and not so alone.”
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| | rantnrave:// Every Wednesday or Thursday I compile a list of all the albums coming out that week that seem worth knowing about (caveat A: subjective, obviously, but I try to cast as wide a net as possible) (caveat B: wait, albums? In 2019? Seriously, dude?) and I listen to a song or two from (almost) all of them. On Friday, I add as many as time allows into a SONOS playlist, hit shuffle and go about my business. This week, my pre-release-day ritual led me for the first time to the title track from LUKAS NELSON & PROMISE OF THE REAL's TURN OFF THE NEWS (BUILD A GARDEN). Good title (unnecessary parenthetical tag). Good song, too. With a familiar country-rock melody. Naggingly familiar. But I couldn't place it. I racked my brain for a few minutes trying to figure out the long ago source, walked away for a couple minutes, and then it hit me that Nelson's melody was of rather recent vintage. As in "HELLO SUNSHINE," the lead single from another album of some note that comes out today, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN's WESTERN STARS. They're pretty much the same song, musically speaking. In the same key, even. The chance that either is in some way ripping off the other is almost nil, and I doubt I'd care if one of them was. It is, rather, a coincidence of influence, of instincts, of guitarists writing in D major, of the collective conscience from which all music is pulled in one way or another. Doesn't matter if you're a 69-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer from New Jersey, the 30-year-old son of a Country Music Hall of Famer from Texas or, hell, a 20-year-old hip-hop striver from Atlanta. You're all jumping into the same cosmic pool of musical possibility. The connections aren't always so obvious but they're always there. And what we share with each other has much to do with who we are as what we don't share. That's my takeaway from music this week. Happy Friday. Turn off the news for 72 hours if you want... Oh, and there's a new MADONNA album, too. Every one one of her 21st century albums, even HARD CANDY, is better than you think it is. This week was created, I believe, with me in mind... The BLUE NOTE documentary BEYOND THE NOTES opens today in New York, and MARTIN SCORSESE's ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY is in limited release in theaters and unlimited release on NETFLIX. The latter chronicles one of the strangest and most compelling chapters in Bob Dylan's strange and compelling career. We take a look at how it felt in real time circa 1975, and how it's remembered today, in MusicSET: "When Bob Dylan's Thunder Rolled"... DRAKE is releasing two songs today to celebrate the TORONTO RAPTORS' first NBA championship... And yes it's FRIDAY and besides BRUCE and MADGE and LUKAS, that means new music from BARONESS, CRUMB, JOHN LUTHER ADAMS, JULIA SHAPIRO, BILL CALLAHAN, JEAN DEAUX, YOUR OLD DROOG, CHRIS SHIFLETT, KATE TEMPEST, BASTILLE, IRON & WINE/CALEXICO, BLOCBOY JB, MATTIEL, ANTHONY NAPLES, ANAT COHEN TENTET, EDMAR CASTAÑEDA & GRÉGOIRE MARET, MEERNAA, PERSONAL BEST, WILL YOUNG, NOAH KAHAN, NOEL GALLAGHER, X AMBASSADORS, TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB, ZHAVIA WARD, ANATOLIAN WEAPONS, CHRIS ROBINSON BROTHERHOOD, SWEET OBLIVION, KEB' MO', JORDAN RAKEI and ROGER DALTREY... RIP ANDY GILL (the rock critic, not the GANG OF FOUR guitarist) and PAUL J. PELKONEN.
| | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Water and Music |
| Stem is growing up, and not everyone is happy. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| Springsteen's new album connects to a stream of pop balladry that emerged in tandem with Hollywood's turn in the late 1960s toward hippie antiheroes and modern masculinity's fatalistic drift. | | |
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 | KCRW |
| Song of a Gun | | by Jessica Hopper, Robin Linn and Myke Dodge Weiskopf |
| As long as there have been guns, there have been songs about guns. But American culture's relationship with guns is changing. Does popular music reflect that? | | |
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 | Variety |
| The controversy surrounding the recent chart battle between DJ Khaled and Tyler the Creator has been a first-class problem for Sony Music, the parent company of Epic Records and Columbia Records, home to Khaled and Tyler, respectively. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| A 2008 fire destroyed master recordings for a who’s who of popular music. A new investigation explores the damage done. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| From NBC to the MMA to the 30 people behind “Sicko Mode,” songwriters are at the center of the cultural conversation -- and navigating more complex challenges than ever before. Here are answers to the 12 key questions facing today’s behind-the-scenes hitmakers. | | |
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| Billboard |
| For many songwriters today, royalties from their song copyrights can be their most consistent and dependable source of income. But often, significant amounts of money earned by music creators are left on the table or, worse, distributed to someone else, simply because they didn’t understand their rights and properly manage their works. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| KCRW will conduct a nationwide search to replace departing "Morning Becomes Eclectic" host Jason Bentley, who also doubled as station music director. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| John Baizley's band returns with the best record they've ever made. | | |
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 | Afropunk |
| Recently, Frank Ocean gave an interview to "Dazed," and it got me thinking about musicians who flip their middle fingers at institutions that try to control their creativity and profit. Thankfully, there are platforms to talk about adversities we face, allowing us to learn from each other. | | |
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 | NPR |
| On her 14th studio album, "Madame X," Madonna sings in Portuguese and Spanish in addition to English and highlights multicultural influences that she's encountered while living in Lisbon, Portugal. | | |
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 | Android Authority |
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 | Music Industry Blog |
| Spotify has launched a radio-like feature set for premium subscribers in the US called Your Daily Drive.Although it is only positioned as a playlist, the content mix includes podcast news content and plays music the listener already likes with a sprinkling of new tracks. | | |
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 | Consequence of Sound |
| As Phish returns to Bonnaroo this weekend, Ming Lee Newcomb traces the influential American festival's journey from jam-band past to present. | | |
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 | The FADER |
| Two years after her promising debut, "Messes," Detroit musician Stef Chura honed her skills to make her most powerful record yet. | | |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| Amuse CEO Diego Farias explains how he's building a record label fully attuned to the needs of artists in the digital age. | | |
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 | Medium |
| Retail has little interest in the compact disc. If downloads were the nail, streaming is the hammer. Seeing a mass merchant's CD section drives the point home, however. Over the years I've seen the decline of the CD at a Target store near my home in Nashville. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| As we prepare for ‘Men in Black: International,’ here’s a look back at the unforgettable ditty that put the movie franchise on the map. | | |
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 | Nashville Scene |
| The openly gay country artist discusses re-recording his 1995 hit -- and how country music can open itself up to the LGBT community. | | |
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 | Time Magazine |
| While public conversation about the military tends to devolve into feverish political debate, Bruce Springsteen is a voice for the veterans. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | From "Gold & Grey," out today on Abraxan Hymns. |
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