Muscle Shoals, Ala., became a soul-music mecca in the '60s on the strength of its famed recording studio and crack crew of mostly white but unfailingly soulful sidemen. Fame Records was associated with the Muscle Shoals sound and one of its top artists, Jimmy Hughes, is honored with a CD reissue of some of his best material from the era. Hughes was an expressive and insistent black R&B singer armed with a batch of irresistible songs performed by tough yet supple rhythm sections with a touch of brass and some soul-deep grooves. Although less remembered nowadays than Otis Redding or Sam and Dave, he was no second-stringer when it came to making great records.
Remember when bands cared about albums as an art form? Instead of
slapping together a dozen tracks because, hey, they'll just end up on
everyone's iPod shuffle anyway, musicians considered how their songs
might congeal as a whole or form some sort of dram
Elvis Costello's frequent collaborator T-Bone Burnett produced Secret, Profane & Sugarcane,
an Americana-inflected album working with country and folk traditions
for images of sawdust floors set to mandolin and fiddle. Costello
intended one s
You wouldn’t expect to find T-bone and sirloin dinners at a place with stool seating and a location next to a shop hawking cell phones and cigarettes. But one of the city’s most evocatively named eateries, ZaZa Steak & Lemonade (4919 W. Capito
The enduring fantasy of older men is that a gorgeous
young woman will fall in love with them, find them sexually arousing
and long to imbibe their wisdom while sitting at their feet. That
fantasy is the spring driving Woody Allen's often-hilarious f
Away We Go, a droll comedy-cum-drama by director Sam Mendes (American Beauty),
perceptively explores the lives of more-or-less ordinary 30-somethings
lost in a world without much meaning. Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Bu
