Throughout 2025, The Fox Theatre upheld its historic legacy as one of the world’s most influential and high-performing venues, earning top industry rankings, editorial honors and leadership recognition. The Fox Theatre was named IEBA’s 2025 Theatre of the Year – one of the live entertainment industry’s most respected distinctions, and highlighted the Fox’s excellence in […]
Author Archives: Megan Anderson
Posted inCommon Chords
The Alien who made us human: David Bowie’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’
A new year asks for a new skin, or at least a new angle on the old one. It’s fitting, then, that the first Common Chords column of 2026 returns to the moment David Bowie perfected that very art. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars isn’t just an album […]
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Post-purple pivots and paisley possibilities: Prince’s ‘Around the World in a Day’
Every so often, an artist with the world at his feet steps off the stage, shuts the door and starts again. Not because he’s lost the thread, but because he suspects there’s a deeper, stranger one hiding beneath the floorboards. In 1985, Prince Rogers Nelson stood atop the musical world after Purple Rain, a record […]
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Sly & the Family Stone’s ‘Stand:’ Filing a groove-based petition for a better world
There are families you’re born into, and families you assemble out of talent, trust and necessity. Sylvester “Sly Stone” Stewart had both. Growing up in the San Francisco suburb of Vallejo, the Stewart kids absorbed music the way most kids absorb oxygen… church harmonies in the morning, neighborhood performances in the evening, siblings gathering around […]
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Talking Heads’ ‘Remain in Light:’ You may find yourself in the groove
Every few years, a record slips the leash of its own decade. Remain in Light did just that — a pulse from the future disguised as 1980. The New York underground was shifting shape, punk giving way to funk, noise, and raw experimentation. David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison were already fluent […]
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Grooving through the end times: Gorillaz’ Demon Days
Damon Albarn has always thrived on friction. In the 1990s, he was a central combatant in the Britpop wars, fronting Blur’s art-school mischief versus Oasis’ pub-rock bravado. But by decade’s end, the spectacle felt small. Blur’s shift from Parklife’s London cheekiness to the fractured melancholy of 13 hinted that Albarn was ready to escape the […]
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Funk, fire and the future: OutKast’s Stankonia
There’s a line that runs from Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back to OutKast’s Stankonia, a current that hums with righteous noise and ungovernable imagination. Both albums seized chaos and bent it into statement — Chuck D turned fury into news broadcast; André “3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” […]
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The sound of an awakening: Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’
When Kendrick Lamar released good kid, m.A.A.d city in 2012, he handed us a film in album form — a Compton coming-of-age saga told through confession, confrontation and cruising beats. It was about trying to stay pure in a polluted world, a spiritual son to Boyz n the Hood and The Diary of Alicia Keys […]
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An Intimate Evening with David Foster and Katharine McPhee at Fox Theatre is a must-see this holiday season
There is no better way to get cozy and ring in the holiday spirit than to spend the evening with 16-time Grammy-winning producer and songwriter David Foster and singer-actress and American Idol runner up Katharine McPhee at their Atlanta tour stop at Fox Theatre on Dec. 11. As they prepare to visit venues across the country with […]
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Where the beat became the barricade: Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
There’s no easing into It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. It doesn’t start so much as it detonates — a siren, a shout, a sample barrage that sounds like every protest and party in America colliding in a single furious second. Chuck D’s voice hits like scripture yelled through a megaphone: […]
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Stay Free: The Clash’s London Calling and the art of staying awake
There are albums that define their moment, and then there are albums that defy it — absorbing its chaos, rewriting its rules, and leaving the door open for the next generation to walk through. The double LP London Calling is that kind of record. When it arrived in December 1979, The Clash were no longer […]
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Born to howl in the temple: Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’
There’s a moment, early in Horses, when Patti Smith tears through the polite fabric of 1975 and rewrites what a rock album could sound like. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” she declares, not as rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but as a kind of invocation — the curtain call of a new church. […]
Posted inMegan Anderson
Haunted by home: R.E.M.’s ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’
There’s always been a whisper around this record that it was the moment R.E.M. felt gravity’s pull — that slow descent where faith meets fatigue, and the only way forward is deeper in. Recorded in a damp London studio far from Athens, with a producer (Joe Boyd) better known for Fairport Convention and Nick Drake […]
Posted inMegan Anderson
Big Star’s Radio City: How to be forgotten and eternal
Big Star’s second album doesn’t so much arrive as it careens into the room. Radio City is the sound of brilliance, half-drunk and half-desperate, with Alex Chilton steering the whole thing like he knows the car’s alignment is shot but he can’t help gunning it anyway. Chris Bell had walked away after #1 Record, leaving […]
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Ordinary legends: The Replacements’ ‘Let It Be’
The Replacements had already cut three records of spit and vinegar by the time Let It Be dropped in 1984, but this was the moment they vaulted out of the Minneapolis dive bars and into the bloodstream of American rock. Those early blasts — Sorry Ma Forgot to Take Out the Trash, Stink, and Hootenanny […]
Posted inColumns, Common Chords, Megan Anderson
Athens Calling, with an Alabama drawl: Drive-By Truckers strip down the myths on ‘American Band’
Drive-By Truckers have never been shy about politics. Their songs have long been about the small-town duality of the South: pride and shame, memory and myth, family history and the uneasy ghosts of history at large. But American Band isn’t just a political record in the way their earlier albums circled around the edges of […]
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Wednesday’s ‘Bleeds’ is a Southern dusk that refuses to end
There’s a certain Southern dusk that changes everything. The day’s heat fades, the sky bruises purple, and the sounds around you start to carry weight — cicadas, dogs, the creak of a porch swing. That’s the hour when Wednesday’s Bleeds belongs. The record doesn’t just play; it settles into the half-light, reminding you of all […]
Posted inColumns, Common Chords, Megan Anderson
Pavement’s ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain:’ Too weird for the charts, too great to Ignore
If Slanted and Enchanted was Pavement’s brilliant accident — garage-sale amps, cryptic in-jokes, and the kind of confidence only born of not caring — then Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was the moment they started wondering what it meant to be a “real band.” Split between New York City studios and their scruffy hometown of Stockton, […]
Posted inColumns, Common Chords, Megan Anderson
Courtney Barnett’s ‘A Sea of Split Peas’: Lo-fi charisma and kitchen-table cool
By the time A Sea of Split Peas was released in 2013, Courtney Barnett was a Melbourne guitarist and songwriter with a knack for making slacker storytelling sound like precision work. She’d played in garage bands, run her own label out of a spare bedroom, and cultivated a voice that could turn a trip to […]
Posted inColumns, Common Chords, Megan Anderson
Silver Jews’ ‘American Water’: David Berman’s outsider gospel of America’s beauty and rot
People love to treat American Water like a fluke, the record where David Berman finally wriggled out from Pavement’s shadow and stumbled into genius. But flukes don’t age into scripture. This is the moment Berman weaponized his wit, forged his grief into quips, and started speaking in aphorisms so undeniable they feel less written than […]
