Popdose

July 11, 2026 13 Min Read I’ve been writing a lot here about non-superhero movies about adults. Let me now go a little further and declare my love for talking movies. Not “talkies.” I mean movies where people are basically just talking. Sometimes I love falling asleep to one of these if I’ve seen it a bunch of times; I find the talking soothing and the lack of explosions easy to sleep with.

June 26, 2026 2 Min Read It’s tempting to call New Zealand quartet Borderline a band out of time, but that would be unfair, because the production on the band’s eponymous debut album is very much in the now. The songwriting and musicianship, however, recall a time when, well, the bar was higher for what it meant to be good at either of those things.

July 1, 2026 3 Min Read This article is about something that never ceases to make me roll my eyes. It’s the seemingly endless band names and song names with “cute”, “funny” or “anti-establishment” capitalization and spacing. k.d. lang, P!nk, fun., P:ano, blink-182, !!! (Chk Chk Chk), RAYE. I’m sure without prompting that you can think of 5-10 examples I didn’t include. Lower-case, removing spaces, numbers inside words, special characters.

June 30, 2026 2 Min Read After a period of silence and retreating back to my “comfort food” diet of The Beatles, The Who, Big Star, etc., it’s nice to hear something new and uplifting in a vein that I appreciate. Crafted songs with warmth that exude hope are the main menu items on Maybe Things Will Be Alright, the newest offering from New York-based singer-songwriter Jim Allen.

June 26, 2026 3 Min Read No sooner does the 2025-2026 theatrical season end in New York than the 2026-2027 one begins. Not, I should add, on Broadway; there are usually a few shows opening in the warm weather months but the book was abruptly closed the Sunday summer started on the lone one that sneaked onto the schedule at the last minute, a main stem mounting of the gossipy gab fest Celebrity Autobiography.

June 26, 2026 2 Min Read It’s tempting to call New Zealand quartet Borderline a band out of time, but that would be unfair, because the production on the band’s eponymous debut album is very much in the now. The songwriting and musicianship, however, recall a time when, well, the bar was higher for what it meant to be good at either of those things.

June 19, 2026 4 Min Read My Instagram feed/algorithm is pretty ponderous; it’s a steady diet of old baseball cards, great music clips, and things like the opening credits to “Love, American Style.” What does that tell us, besides how shallow my social media experience is? I think the interesting thing is that this genuinely crappy-to-mediocre show is fondly remembered by people who haven’t watched it for 40 or 50 years. And there’s only one reason: A great theme song in the opening credits.

June 7, 2026 4 Min Read Early in the film “Power Ballad,” a scene featuring Rick Power (Paul Rudd) and his bandmates foreshadows what’s to come. Power fronts a cover band known as The Bride and the Groove, and while the lads do a slow-motion hero walk at a wedding reception gig for a rich couple, AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)” is playing.

May 23, 2026 4 Min Read Every major city likes to believe it has a “music scene.” Sometimes that’s true – Minneapolis in the ‘80s, Seattle in the ‘90s, Atlanta’s hip hop 2000s. But often “scene” just means a few hardworking local bands playing to the same crowds and winning regional music awards while being invisible outside their area code. New York in the 2000s was something else entirely. It had multiple overlapping crowds that genuinely shaped culture.

May 17, 2026 4 Min Read Not long ago,  I wrote about how lots of us wish there were more movies about and for grownups as opposed to intellectual property / superhero movies. I was wondering, what’s a good example of the type of movie they don’t make anymore. It came to me: Wonder Boys Plot Without looking it up, it’s about an author/professor, Grady Tripp, teaching at a liberal arts college in Pittsburgh.