Category: Common Chords

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 […]

By the summer of 1965, Bob Dylan wasn’t just restless; he was actively shedding skin. Fame had arrived early and loudly, and he seemed determined to antagonize it before it could settle in. Bringing It All Back Home had already kicked a hole through the folk barricade, half electric, half daring anyone to accuse him […]

Michael Eugene Archer, aka D’Angelo, a native of Virginia whose parents and grandfather were pastors, released Voodoo in January 2000, though the album itself feels unmoored from calendars. Its creation stretches back through the latter half of the 90s, a long, deliberate gestation marked by withdrawal rather than acceleration. After Brown Sugar in 1995 reintroduced […]

Frank Ocean arrived at Blonde the way memory arrives. Unannounced. Slightly out of focus. Already rearranging the furniture. By August 2016, he had mastered the art of being present without being available. Born Christopher Edwin Breaux and operating under a name he chose for himself, Frank had already learned how to disappear in plain sight. […]

Radiohead’s origin story is almost aggressively unglamorous, which may be part of the point. Five schoolmates from Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Thom Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, and Philip Selway. No Svengali. No lightning-bolt frontman mythology. Just a band that stayed intact because it operated like one, closer in spirit to R.E.M.’s quiet democracy […]

The Black Parade didn’t arrive like a masterpiece; it hit like an intervention. In 2006, with the world wobbling under the weight of endless conflict and a rising tide of cultural burnout, My Chemical Romance delivered a record that felt like Queen crashing a Warhol wake inside Tim Burton’s sketchbook. But you can’t appreciate the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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” […]

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 […]

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: […]