FRESH AIR: People who have been taking antidepressants for several years sometimes hit a wall, a point when that treatment no longer seems to ease their symptoms. Psychiatrist Julie Holland says that’s where psychedelic drugs could help. Holland was in charge of Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric emergency room on the weekends from 1996 until 2005, and currently has a private psychotherapy practice in Manhattan. She’s a medical monitor on the MAPS studies, which involve, in part, developing psychedelics into prescription medication. Her new book, Good Chemistry, explores how she thinks psychedelic drugs, including LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and marijuana, might be […]
ALBUM REVIEW: Phoebe Bridgers Punisher
Phoebe Bridgers makes the kind of music best suited for sad self-indulgence, satiating a near-masochistic craving for loneliness. The soft-spoken specificity of her 2017 debut Stranger in the Alps charmed its listeners with eerie emo-folk tales of inescapable blueness. Now, with her 2020 follow-up Punisher, Bridgers casts the same spell with new lyrics, crafting a fresh sense of isolation that cuts deep in quarantine. The album comes a day earlier than expected. Originally scheduled to arrive on June 19th, Bridgers shared a link to the new songs on Twitter with the words “I’m not pushing the record until things go […]
MIKE POLIZZE: CheeWawa
VIA BANDCAMP: Long Lost Solace Find — the first Mike Polizze solo release for Paradise of Bachelors, due out July 31st — finds the Purling Hiss frontman and Birds of Maya shredder stepping out from behind the wall of guitar noise into the bright sunshine. Performed entirely by Polizze with longtime friend Kurt Vile and recorded by War on Drugs engineer Jeff Zeigler, this intimate Philadelphia affair clarifies the bittersweet earworm melodicism of Dizzy Polizzy’s songwriting, revealing bona fide folk-pop chops. Long Lost Solace Find finally harvests the wild local honey from the buzzing hive of Hiss. “Cheewawa,” the second […]
THE FLAMING LIPS: Race For The Prize
PREVIOUSLY: We’d been traversing the spine of Tornado Alley for the last two hours when the stewardess announced that we would be landing in Oklahoma City in a few minutes, and that we should fasten our seatbelts and return our minds to the upright position, when the drugs took hold. We are, as the saying goes, off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Odd—or, if you prefer, the Wizard of OK, a.k.a. Wayne Coyne, frizzy-brained mainman of the Flaming Lips, the P.T. Barnum Of The Stoned, a.k.a. The Man Who Had A Headache And Accidentally Saved The World. […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
Photo by ALEX PATERSON-JONES FRESH AIR: In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police, protesters across the country are demanding systemic changes in the way American police forces operate and are funded. Journalist Jamiles Lartey says the discussion about policing feels different now than it has in the past. “You’re hearing so much less of the ‘few bad apples’ argument and so much more of the, ‘What is wrong with this system?’ [argument],” he says. Lartey is a staff writer for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. He […]
WIRE FROM THE BUNKER: Meet Go To Blazes
BY JONATHAN HOULON This week’s Wire is dedicated to the memory of Bruce Langfeld, musical associate and friend of our subject, Go To Blazes. I swear that I selected Blazes (as they were sometimes called by their fans) before these incendiary, recent days. By the way, starting a fire can, indeed, be a component of anarchism. Fetishizing, coveting, and collecting commercial merchandise (is there any other kind?) is decidedly not. Not sure what — if anything — that has to do with the below but … really, folks? In any case, when I moved up to Philly from Austin, […]
NICK LOWE + THE SOUTHSEA ALTERNATIVE CHOIR: What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, Etc
? This is pretty sublime.
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
Self portrait of photographer Astrid Kirchherr. FRESH AIR: Astrid Kirchherr, who took the first publicity photos of a then-struggling rock group called The Beatles, died last week. She was 81 years old. In 1960, young Astrid had just completed a photography course at the College of Fashion and Design in Hamburg when her boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, took her to the seedy Kaiserkeller in Hamburg’s red-light district. He wanted to show her a new rock group from Liverpool he had discovered the night before. When Astrid met the group in 1960, The Beatles consisted of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison […]
EXCERPT: The Wichita Lineman Meets Joni Mitchell
1971 On the surface, Joni Mitchell was a friendly, almost deliberately ordinary Canadian girl with a bright smile and a quick wit. But when it came to music and lyrics she had been blessed with a divine gift. I knew with no envy or jealousy that she was a better writer than I was. I envied her easy conversational phrasing that turned everyday banter into a new kind of song lyric. Her sensual guitar tunings delivered deep, dissonant yet compelling chords that, to use an expression by Linda Ronstadt, “rubbed.” Play that warm chord. I would sit with her and watch […]
REST IN POWER: Little Richard (1932-2020)
Photo by MICHAEL OCHS NEW YORK TIMES: Richard Penniman, better known as Little Richard, who combined the sacred shouts of the black church and the profane sounds of the blues to create some of the world’s first and most influential rock ’n’ roll records, died on Saturday in Tullahoma, Tenn. He was 87. His lawyer, Bill Sobel, said the cause was bone cancer. Little Richard did not invent rock ’n’ roll. Other musicians had already been mining a similar vein by the time he recorded his first hit, “Tutti Frutti” — a raucous song about sex, its lyrics cleaned up […]
JOHN TRAIN: “Where Were We (For John Prine)”
Boss, Here’s a link to a brand new John Train song called “Where Were We? (for John Prine).” The lyrics and credits are in the description as well as a link to my Phawker piece on Prine. I first encountered Prine via my father’s record collection (which is how I discovered the majority of music that still means the most to me!). He had a copy of Common Sense which remains my second favorite Prine LP (Aimless Love from 1984 has always been my number one). I first saw Prine live in 1988, opening up for Johnny Cash at the […]
WIRE FROM THE BUNKER: Meet Howard Tate
Art by NIALL MCCORMACK BY JONATHAN HOULON This week’s Wire concerns Philadelphia’s own late great R&B legend, Howard Tate. I’ll send this one out to another late great Philadelphian, my dear friend Peter Stone Brown who passed away earlier this year. Peter, of course, was known both as a formidable songwriter and as one of the world’s leading “Dylanologists” as recognized in David Kinney’s book of the same name. Kinney tells a wonderful story about how Peter, as a teenager, mowed the words “Fuck You” into his parents’ lawn in Millburn, New Jersey where he grew up. They don’t make […]
ISOLATION DRILLS: Socially Distant Fest
BY VANESSA GOMEZ PEREYRA Back in my day, we would gather in groups of ten and more, with bare faces and no hand sanitizer in sight. Usually, it was someone’s cramped, stained-carpet living room where a friend’s beloved band would play. The sound wasn’t amazing, and the new guitar player could never tune his guitar quite right, but who cared — we were gathered. A sweaty keg bought with everyone’s wrinkly dollar bills stood by, and the only thing you worried about catching was your best friend’s heroin addiction. But those were the good ole days of loud and close […]
