Category: Common Chords

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

When Saint Cloud landed in late March 2020, just as the world was sliding into lockdown, it felt less like an album release and more like a dispatch from the future. Here was Katie Crutchfield, the Alabama-born singer-songwriter behind Waxahatchee, standing on the other side of her own personal storm, sending out songs about resilience […]

Bringing it back to these shores, Dayton’s The Breeders may have started as a “side project” for Kim Deal, fresh out of the friction of the Pixies, but by the time Last Splash dropped in 1993, it was clear she wasn’t sidestepping anything — she was building her own empire out of distortion pedals, surf […]

Similar to their sisters in sentiment if not genre, Wet Leg shares Florry’s deadpan vocal style that’s less about detachment and more about agency— using restraint as a form of power.  They haven’t abandoned the sarcasm, side-eye, or sing-song taunts that made their 2022 self-titled debut album explode, but this time, they’re wielding those tools […]

Still warm from the afterglow of Boat Songs and that moonlit Neil reverie, we drift into Florry’s world — looser, louder, and lit like a backyard hang that turned into a recording session. They’re a Philadelphia crew that comes across less like a band and more like a chosen family, bonded by late nights, shared […]

Neil Young is one of the very few people on earth who can make a corporate-branded amphitheater feel like a cathedral. Not because he tries to — he doesn’t — but because the gravitational pull of his career, and the stubborn refusal to sand down its jagged edges, turns even a place named after a […]

Coming off “On the Beach,” we now present to you the closest thing Gen Z has to a modern-day Neil:  a slacker poet with a fuzz pedal, a fondness for heartbreak, and a voice that sounds like it’s thinking out loud. MJ Lenderman might not be running from the mainstream, but he sure as hell isn’t […]

First, a quick word about what this column is all about. The big idea here at Common Chords is simple: All music is connected. Over the course of this series, we’re going to try to prove it — not with charts or genre tags, but with vibes, guitar tones, and emotional through-lines that make sense if […]