Bloggerhythms

This week marks Bloggerhythms' 18th birthday and I can't believe it's been that long! This little outpost on the web was born in April 2005 as a place for album reviews of mostly new music. Gradually, over time, it's focus shifted toward older material but you'll still find some interesting new releases featured here on occasion. The first review I ever posted was about a classic old Chicago album, Hot Streets . Later, this review was copied, moved, and re-used again with a more recent date to fill in a gap when there was no time to write something new. This has happened with several other very early posts that absolutely no one read because hardly anyone knew Bloggerhythms existed. Currently, both the oldest and least read article is a review of a Matchbox 20 album,  Mad Season , that  was posted on April 29, 2005 and  was originally written for someone else...

I'm one of the many who discovered Shelby Lynne only after hearing her for the very first time with the release of her sixth album, I Am Shelby Lynne , in 2000. Even though it was eleven years after her debut this CD was the reason she won the "Best New Artist" Grammy in 2001. While winning that particular award is hard to explain almost everything this non-traditional, country, singer-songwriter has released from that point on has been uniformly excellent and could have won awards. It says on the cover of Just A Little Lovin' , that it was inspired by the late, great, Dusty Springfield. The idea for this album was suggested to Lynne by her friend, Barry Manilow, while they were discussing Springfield's music. Taking Manilow up on his idea turned out to be a brilliant move. She served up nine Springfield songs, added one of her own, and turned in a perfect performance on every single one. Lynne just doesn't mimic her idol's greates...

The music is called country-rock, but I fail to hear the rock on most of Gram Parson's classic LP,  Grievous Angel . To me, he was a country star with a rock attitude - Keith Richards and The Rolling Stones were his good friends - and that is why he appealed to the Woodstock generation. Grievous Angel was only Parsons' second solo album after having a very brief but artistically productive stint as a member of The Byrds and later with his own Flying Burrito Brothers. The album was recorded just a few months before Parsons overdosed in a Joshua Tree, CA motel at only age twenty-six - just a little too young to qualify for the infamous  27 Club .  Despite outwardly suffering from heroin and alcohol addiction all through the sessions in the summer of 1973 critics considered the record an artistic triumph even though it never climbed higher than 195 on Billboard's album chart. The sessions prominently ...

How can a song be considered a hit without ever making an appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 at all? Easy, release a track as catchy as "The Way." Fastball did just that in 1998 on their second album, All the Pain Money Can Buy . The single charted well in Canada, Australia, Iceland, Sweden and Norway. In America the full length CD reached #29 on the Billboard 200 album chart so it's possible that the success of the album here at home may have hurt sales of the single. "The Way" also spent seven weeks at the top of Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks survey and VH-1 ranked it #94 on their list of the hundred greatest songs of the nineties. The trio's lead singer, Tony Scalzo, who composed "The Way," was inspired by a real news story about an elderly, married couple who disappeared and were found dead two weeks later in their car a long way from home. The couple, Lela, 8...

Bett Butler and her husband Joël Dilley have been featured in Bloggerhythms a few times in the past, separately and as a team. Dilley is a bass player and composer who works in multiple genres including jazz, funk, R&B and Latin music. Butler, the more mainstream artist of the two, is a singer-songwriting pianist with a soulful voice who also works in many styles but appears to favor mainstream jazz. I became familiar with Butler first. She recorded two albums of original jazz tunes followed by an album of covers from the Great American Songbook that features only her voice and Dilley's piano. Butler's last original solo work is the finest record in her catalog so far, a 2016 Christmas release, Songs For The Christmas Child . It is not a record for children.    In 2020, Dilley wrote and composed a soundtrack to the politically influenced film,  Wall In The Desert , with Butler assisting the multi-instrumentalist by reciting the fam...