Author Archives: Wendell G. Kensey

Album Review: Lucinda Williams – Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Mercury Records, 1998

By 2013, Jason Isbell had already become a celebrated Southern songwriter, a frighteningly gifted guitarist, and a steadily collapsing eyewitness to his own life. The miracle of Southeastern is not that he survived long enough to make it. It’s that he became honest enough to. These songs do not arrive with the swagger of a […]

By the time Darkness on the Edge of Town begins, the ride is already over. The headlights have disappeared over the horizon, the promises have thinned out, and the people left behind are figuring out what comes next. Lean, bruised, suspicious of easy salvation, it remains the moment Bruce Springsteen stopped running long enough to […]

There was a moment, right before the fault line made itself known, when Pearl Jam still felt like part of a neighborhood instead of a movement. Seattle in the late 80s and early 90s was less a scene than a weather pattern with guitars, the kind of place where the rain pinned everyone inside long […]

Most bands spend their second album figuring out what just happened. Led Zeppelin spent theirs seeing how much farther they could push it. Built in hotel rooms, recording studios, and stolen hours between tour dates, Led Zeppelin II carries almost none of the caution that usually accompanies sudden success. The debut had already bent the […]

You can hear the room change on Let It Bleed. The laughter’s thinner, the shadows stretch longer, and nobody’s quite sure how things got this far gone, like someone quietly decided to paint it black and leave it that way. The Rolling Stones don’t explain it. They just play through it. By then, they had […]

Some artists announce themselves. Howlin’ Wolf sounded like something already in motion, low and distant at first, until you realized it was thunder walking on two legs. Born Chester Burnett near West Point, Miss., he started in the hill country, but the story bends west. At thirteen, he ran from an abusive home, crossing into […]

A hush can carry just as much voltage as a shout, and Nina Simone understood how to wire a room accordingly. Nina Simone in Concert does not open like a performance so much as a tribunal already in progress, as if the audience has walked in mid-verdict, the charges already read aloud. Long before this […]

Fame has a way of sanding artists down to their most presentable edges. By the time Beyoncé stepped into Lemonade, she had already scaled the visible peaks, first as the engine inside Destiny’s Child, where early success came fast and polished, and then as a solo force with chart dominance and cultural ubiquity, the kind […]

There was a moment in 1998 when anticipation felt less like marketing and more like the first day of a class everyone knew would matter. You could feel the room settle before a word was spoken. Lauryn Hill, all of 23, stood at the front of it. She had already stamped her authority across hip-hop’s […]

Certain cities produce music the way alleyways produce rumors. New York has always excelled at it. One decade, the noise spills out of CBGB, another from the Bronx, another from mirrored dance floors. By the end of the 1990s, the city had grown sleek and expensive, yet the clubs still smelled faintly of beer and […]

Every young band that breaks through faces the same riddle: what happens after people start paying attention? For Geese, the question arrived early and loud. 3D Country turned a scruffy Brooklyn curiosity into one of the most argued-about guitar bands in America. Suddenly there were expectations, a dangerous substance for musicians still figuring out how […]

For The Velvet Underground, 1969 arrived like a dimmer switch turned slowly to the left. The noise recedes, the edges soften, and the band begins to reveal a different kind of intensity. The downtown New York outfit that once rattled cages under the gallery glow of Andy Warhol’s patronage now seems less interested in confrontation […]

Success can be a strange kind of thunder. When Chicago’s Wilco emerged from the critical storm surrounding Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the logical move would have been consolidation, maybe even celebration. Instead, Jeff Tweedy and company turned inward and built something more fragile and more revealing. Their 2004 release A Ghost Is Born feels like a […]

Every great live album begins as a bad idea. Recording At Fillmore East was a gamble stacked against logic and industry sense. The Allman Brothers Band had released two studio albums that failed to capture what people actually paid to see. They were expensive to tour, hard to market, and stubbornly uninterested in trimming their […]

The five members of The Band released their self-titled album in October of 1969, only weeks after performing a highly regarded set at Woodstock just up the road. The festival was already beginning to calcify into myth. The record that followed, later known as the Brown Album, came from musicians who had lived several musical […]

Uncle Tupelo arrived with their debut No Depression sounding like a band that had already paid a few dues nobody remembered charging. The story begins in Belleville, Illinois, a struggling suburb of St. Louis, but it stretches back into the Missouri Ozarks, where Jay Farrar’s family roots ran deep and musical. These were people who […]

By the time Excitable Boy arrived in 1978, Warren Zevon had already lived several musical lifetimes, most of them unfolding in Los Angeles, the very place where success was supposed to be contagious. He wasn’t on the outside looking in. He was in the rooms, at the parties, and on the couches, friends with the […]

When Sad and Beautiful World was released just a couple of months ago, Mavis Staples was 86 years old and still doing the rarest thing in American music: sounding not preserved, but present. This is not a victory lap, not a museum piece, not a soft-focus farewell. It is a record that meets the moment […]