Recently saw the movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and one of the funniest parts of the movie is when Dewey goes through a Brian Wilson phase, complete with a Smile-era parody suite called “Black Sheep” – what suprised me is that’s actually written by Smile co-writer Van Dyke Parks! The movie misses as often as it hits, but the music is what is makes it memorable. Lots of tunes here were written by Mike Viola, Marshall Crenshaw, Dan Bern and Charlie Wadhams. The soundtrack was nominated for both a Grammy and Golden Globe Award and was nominated and won the Sierra Award for Best Song in a Motion Picture from the Las Vegas Film Critics Society.
Category: My Honest Opinion
Ugly Pop World Drives Beauty Underground
A good current article on the history and flourishing state of power pop music by Mike Baron is posted here and Powerpopaholic gets a brief mention (cool!). It’s my opinion that as more people “discover” power pop, you get a reaction like, “That’s pretty good. How come I’ve never heard of them before?” and a new convert is born. And as word of mouth spreads, bands that never got a second look during their commercial heyday will cultivate a growing fan base long after the band has dissolved. This is exactly what happened to Big Star — and it’s being repeated with several 90’s bands recently (i.e. Jellyfish, Posies). The “mainstream” music media has pretty much ignored this phenomena, and that’s what the blogosphere is all about. So continue to spread the good word and the good music.
Introducing "Today’s Modern Pop"
I get plenty of interesting music that doesn’t really fit into the power pop category — but if I put too much of it in this blog, it would dilute the Powerpopaholic’s main purpose. So I started another site, just for any type of new music. If you’d like to hear new modern music – this is the place. No album reviews, just new artist, new album introductions. Visit Today’s Modern Pop to see what it’s all about.
Powerpopaholic now on The Rock and Roll Report.
Some of my selected reviews will now be published on The Rock and Roll Report. That’s a good thing – spreading the word of a powerpopaholic! My review of Justin Kline – Six Songs is in the latest buzz section.