Stories

It started, like a lot of important musical lessons for me, with a borrowed CD. A flatmate in our share house in Fitzroy had propped the compilation against…

Jazz improvisation can sound like magic from a distance: a saxophone takes flight, a rhythm section shifts beneath it, and a solo seems to arrive fully formed.…

Carole King’s songs have a way of arriving without making a fuss. They do not need a grand entrance, a complicated concept, or a vocal performance built around…

When a producer presses play on a battered copy of a 1970s funk record and hears a snare fill that sounds like it's begging to be looped, something starts…

I did not set out with a grand collecting strategy. My first 7-inch single from the 1970s was an inexpensive second-hand find with a worn paper sleeve, a…

Some guitar sounds announce themselves with volume, distortion and a wall of effects. Mark Knopfler’s tone works differently. It can arrive quietly, almost…

Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city works as a coming-of-age story, a crime narrative, a family portrait and a spiritual reckoning at the same time.…

There are instruments that impress me with their precision, and then there are instruments that seem to remember something before they have even played a note.…

The best live albums that captured a band in their prime do more than preserve a successful tour. They reveal how musicians think under pressure, how a crowd…

I used to hear vocal harmony as decoration. It was the pleasant layer around a lead singer, the polished lift in a chorus, or the familiar stack of parts that…