music 20

A friend of mine recently asked me for a Spotify playlist of alternative rock—but I don’t use Spotify, so I decided to make the playlist here. This week on A…

The more I came to know my students, the more the songs I formerly despised emptied themselves of their triteness. They became, in their own way, sacred.

I present to you my twenty favorite songs of the year! What did I miss? Email it to me at symposiumofsongs@gmail.com.

Because those dancing it have worked and stretched and warmed up for three months prior to performance, breaking in shoes and bandaging toes, the dream is anchored by reality.

While I’m past the point of burning my records and musical books, and I’m no longer having to evacuate coffee shops because “Sympathy for the Devil” is playing, I still…

We’re listening to music about music on this week’s Symposium of Popular Songs. I’ve got fewer literary readings for you than usual, but more personal stories, including my all-time favorite…

In this first episode of A Symposium of Popular Songs, we’ll be listening to music about middle age and talking about its various indignities.

Sometimes in life, silence pervades our stories. The dissonance has passed, and we wait. We wait for resolution; we wait for harmony.

Over the decades, I suppose I learned a lot from podcasts; plenty of facts and all the “sides” to stories. Very little of those things seem to matter to me…

If we are willing to listen, we might be able to learn what we are listening for. Not just a deeper connection to our humanity, or a meditative appreciation of…

Perhaps AI isn’t referring to the technology itself, but only those who use it.

We can gain something from the Ike Carters and the student DJs of our communities: a human connection, a community connection—not to mention great music.

Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and…

As C.S. Lewis noted in The Abolition of Man, the souls of our youth are not jungles that need pruning but deserts that need irrigation. We could start by getting…

Like Bob Dylan, Hamer’s life was marked by protest and songs of protest. Her protests, however, grew from her personal experience on the ground in Mississippi. Kate Clifford Larson’s Walk…

That this country boasts something called “The Great American Songbook” is one of the best jokes around. The Great American Songbook? Our songs—let alone songbooks—don’t stick around long enough to…

It is a mark of the middle class to maintain a low-grade prowl on eBay or Craigslist for some odd thing. My prowl was for a bugle. The desire was…

Every few weeks, in what I assume is a uniquely Protestant ritual, a dozen small children stand at the front of our church and sing for the congregation. A kindly…

Wichita, KS. I'm more than capable of putting on my localist and communitarian hat(s) during the fall, winter, and spring: I defend the public schools, speak out in favor of…

Claremont, CA - The first thing you see, when you enter the Memphis Rock N Soul Museum, is a front porch. This front porch is a dilapidated thing, decorated with…