Posts by Alby

Happy Thanksgiving! Or, as they call it à Paris, jeudi. American culture is consumed everywhere, so Parisians are aware of Thanksgiving, but only expat Americans celebrate it. In some regards,…

Mark Knopfler wrote this song, which appeared on his band's 1985 mega-hit album "Brothers in Arms," about the difficulty of conducting long-distance relationships by telephone. Speaking from experience, even 35…

Guest post by Nathan Arizona UK Americana sounds like a contradiction, but don’t tell the British. A lot of fans and websites there are devoted to both contemporary and classic…

If John Wesley Harding were as popular with the public as he is with other musicians, he'd be a household name. Or would Wesley Stace be a household name? The…

People who love soul music have to deal with the fact that artists stopped making it about the time that disco gobbled up R&B and funk in its Hustle-dancing wake.…

The French apparently have a weird idea of American music, at least if what they play in the local supermarché is any guide. This 1959 novelty single, for example, written…

Most American music fans know Welsh musician John Cale through his role as a founding member of the Velvet Underground. But his career in avant-garde music began years before he…

In France, Armistice Day is still a big deal -- a natural reaction, I suppose, considering most of the fighting in what was dubbed a "world" war was done on…

I'm not a Wes Anderson buff, so I don't know if the hubbub surrounding "The French Dispatch" accompanies all his films. Or if every time he gets a guy to…

So I'm talking the other night to a young millennial woman from London and during the conversation I tried to illustrate a point about someone going back on his stated…