Posts by Alby

Happy Halloween. Were you expecting "Monster Mash"? There's a good reason this song is built around the "Bo Diddley beat" -- it started out as a cover of "Bo Diddley,"…

I'll wrap up my songs-inspired-by-photos week with a connection nobody saw coming. When Lorde's 2013 song made her the youngest person to ever have a No. 1 single, most people…

"A Day in the Life" wasn't directly inspired by this photograph of Tara Browne's Lotus, which appeared in London newspapers on Dec. 19, 1966, the day after the Guinness brewery…

This is my favorite song on Lucinda Williams' masterpiece, 1998's "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road." When I learned that most of the lyrics were inspired by photos in a…

Plenty of songs were inspired by photographs -- I might steal an idea from El Somnambulo and do a theme week of them -- but this one is special. It…

This song contains a not-quite-rhyming couplet that many people consider, in the words of British author Dylan Jones, "one of the most exquisite romantic couplets in the history of song."…

Randy Bachman wrote a lot of classic rock hits for the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, most of them on a guitar he bought when he was 19 years old…

I haven't seen the new Todd Haynes documentary about the Velvet Underground yet, but many of the reviews make a point of praising his affecting interview with Jonathan Richman. Though…

I was walking through a metro station the other day when I saw an advertising poster for Future Islands, and my mind instantly flashed back to this performance from 2014,…

The Lemonheads might have been the most commercially viable jangle-pop band of the early '90s, and this was their biggest hit. Like many of Evan Dando's best songs, it's melodic,…

Guest post by Nathan Arizona The title says “Jazz Is Dead,” but they don’t mean it. I guess you could say it’s ironic. Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad’s recording…