senior editor at Pitchfork.com, songwriter at The Bird Calls, inactive on here
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Articles by Sam Sodomsky
Neil Young / The Chrome Hearts: Second Song
Second Song is an act of hypnosis. For all of Neil Young’s enduring and endlessly regenerative influence, that power is what nobody can touch. Imitate his moody, mewing Canadian whine; adopt his verité approach to studio recording; tune your acoustic guitar to drop-D and overdrive your electric through a vintage amp; rip a solo that’s just one note and dig into the fretboard as if a weaker player handed you their instrument to help wear in the neck.
Neil Young / The Chrome Hearts: Second Song
Albums 15 hours ago “You don’t want to think about it. You don’t want to have it practiced. The whole idea is to not know what you’re doing”: Neil Young on the unconventional creative process at the heart of his 50th studio album musicradar.com - Paul Elliott • 15h Neil Young has arrived at a milestone that few recording artists ever reach. His new album is the 50th of his long career.
Lambchop: Punching the Clown
Nobody tells a story like Kurt Wagner, but then again, who would try to? In “The New World Wave,” a stunner from Lambchop’s new album Punching the Clown, the 66-year-old songwriter spins a generation-spanning yarn that touches on surviving the Great Depression, the patient assemblage of chosen family, and the way unattended dreams can crumble into sellable assets.
It’s a Good Time to Get Into Audrey Hobert Original
When I started working in music media around 10 years ago, I thought Taylor Swift was underrated, which seems like a ridiculous statement to make now. This was in the post-1989 and pre-Reputation days, when each album seemed like an expansion and continuation of its predecessor, each defined by a particular set of influences and imagery, all constellating around an increasingly confident style of writing that felt distinctive in any landscape she placed herself: country, singer-songwriter, pop.
Phoebe Bridgers: Lost Weekend
Why Phoebe Bridgers? Among all the young singer-songwriters baring their souls behind acoustic guitars in the past decade, what made the 31-year-old California native transcend to become an icon? Was it her voice—a soft, tugging whisper whose full dramatic force she reserved only for maximum impact? Was it her lyrics, which could lull you into a trance and then snap you out with chilling directness and irreverent humor?
20 contenders for 2026 song of the summer
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Jason Alexander 1 hour ago ‘Seinfeld’ Alum Jason Alexander Apologizes To Courtney Stodden For Filming “Inappropriate” Sketch When She Was Underage: “I Truly Regret It” Deadline - Armando Tinoco • 1h Jason Alexander is apologizing for filming a comedy sketch with then-17-year-old Courtney Stodden.
By Kiana Mickles Verified, Walden Green, Heven Haile, Mano Sundaresan Verified, Olivier Lafontant Verified, Kieran Press-Reynolds Verified, Alphonse Pierre Verified, Nina Corcoran Verified, Sam Sodomsky, Amy Haskour
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Ruth Garbus: Profound
Ruth Garbus can come across like the jazz singer at an elegant party who took peyote right before her set and just started freestyling. Her voice, her arrangements, and her performances are sophisticated and beautiful, even austere. But then, she’ll step to the mic and open a song like this: “When I penetrated that man I felt just like a dog.” Or maybe you’ll catch her in a more wholesome mood and she’ll tell you about the time she went to the fair and won a Moana doll.
Kurt Vile Is Chasing Everything Original
What do Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young have in common? Long-running legends, co-employers of guitarist Nils Lofgren, writers of songs called “Born to Run,” “Long Walk Home,” and “Wrecking Ball.” But on Kurt Vile’s latest album, the only thing the 46-year-old songwriter cares about is that Bruce and Neil have both written music about his hometown.
Kurt Vile Is Chasing Everything
There are songs about love and songs about growing up, but what about the songs about pain? These nine songs were all inspired by real-world crimes …
Laura Nyro: New York Tendaberry
The first album was for the industry: More Than a New Discovery was the songbook that introduced Laura Nyro as a writer so original and suited for pop radio in the late 1960s that, for a wide array of artists, covering her songs all but guaranteed them a hit record. The second album was the masterpiece: Eli and the Thirteenth Confession was a dazzlingly prodigious statement that upgraded the then-20-year-artist from a behind-the-scenes hitmaker into a pop auteur.
Laura Nyro: New York Tendaberry
4 days ago In so many ways, the mid-2020s have just been a speedrun of the late aughts. A looming recession, neon pop-punk in the mainstream, the word “electroclash” appearing in press releases, and now Salem once again inching out of the shadows. Except this time around, the Michigan witch house sorcerers …
Thomas Dollbaum: Birds of Paradise
Thomas Dollbaum is a songwriter who values atmosphere above all else. His voice is loamy and deep, the dissipating smoke in a room right after you’ve blown out a candle, and it will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time with the road-trip elegies of Damien Jurado or the art-folk incantations of Richard Buckner.
An Audience With The Rolling Stones
An Audience With The Rolling Stones Keith Richards says this is the worst echo chamber he’s ever heard. He’s referring to the sound at The Weylin, the historic New York landmark where …
American Football: American Football (LP4)
A lot happens in “Bad Moons,” the climactic centerpiece of American Football’s fourth album. In his earnest Midwestern elocution, Mike Kinsella alludes to drug and alcohol abuse, marital infidelity and mid-life sexual awakening, self-harm and suicidal ideation, parts work therapy and a (relatively) happy ending to put the pain in perspective. But all that blood on the page can’t compare to what happens after he stops singing.
American Football: American Football (LP4)
BYU football just secured the commitment of the 'highest-rated CB commit' in memory BYU football just secured a 3-star cornerback out of New Jersey, and he might just be the best cornerback recruit the progam has ever seen in the …
My New Band Believe
The way Cameron Picton tells it, as his time came to an end playing bass and sharing lead vocals in Black Midi, he was exhausted from being part of a successful band and skeptical of starting a new one; he was finding fresh inspiration in the singer-songwriter music that spoke to him as a teenager but feeling boxed in by the aesthetic limitations of the genre.
Bruce Hornsby: Indigo Park
Bruce Hornsby will do a lot of things—join the Grateful Dead, write a hit with Don Henley, celebrity-coach the UVA basketball team—but he won’t do blow. In “Silhouette Shadows," a nearly six-minute song from his lively new album, Indigo Park, the 71-year-old songwriter enters a rare kind of flow state with an intricately composed melody that somehow feels improvised and lyrics that sound stream-of-conscious but build to something quietly profound.
Bruce Hornsby: Indigo Park
5 hours ago As the weather continues to warm up, the mosquitoes are starting to come out, and the folks at Suffolk Mosquito Control are working to control them before they start controlling you. Link: https://www.wavy.com/news/local-news/suffolk/suffolk-mosquito-control-crews-work-as-temperatures-begin-to-rise/ Subscribe to the WAVY YouTube Channel: https://bit.ly/3AL4Dnp ------------- Get updates on local news, weather, sports and more impacting Hampton Roads and Northeastern North Carolina.
Shane Parish: Autechre Guitar
On paper alone, Autechre Guitar is a fascinating endeavor. Take a visionary duo inspired by hip-hop and renowned for ceding control to their software and performing in total darkness, who have inspired haywire mutations of electronic music that seek to dissolve any remaining boundaries between our emotions and the machines we use to express them. Boil it down to just one musician and an acoustic guitar to reveal the durability of this cryptic, futuristic sound.
U2: Days of Ash EP
As of late, U2 have been having some trouble getting to the finish line. Because their new releases have grown so infrequent and because, as a songwriter, Bono retains the ambition of several precocious Model UN students all vying to be chairperson, even the band’s simplest ideas end up feeling labored to the point of incoherence, abetted by a revolving focus group of co-writers and producers.
Goo Goo Dolls: “Iris”
Back when the Goo Goo Dolls were a raucous local punk band with ridiculous hair and song titles like “Don’t Beat My Ass (With a Baseball Bat),” they snuck something truly subversive at the end of their second album, 1989’s Jed. After half an hour of tinny, fast-paced thrashing, the Goo Goo Dolls treated listeners to just Johnny Rzeznik, their occasional vocalist, alone with an acoustic guitar and a tender confession: “I just wanna be James Dean for a day,” he sang in a cracked whisper.
The Blue Nile: A Walk Across the Rooftops
Some art changes how we see the world. It catalyzes our politics or broadens our ambition, imparts empathy or disillusionment. But some art changes how we see ourselves. For certain listeners, hearing the Blue Nile for the first time activates a part of your brain that exists beyond language and between emotions.
King Crimson: Discipline
The artist Margaret Belew sent a letter to her husband describing the total immersion and creative agony she felt around her latest painting. She told him about the hours she had devoted; the strange mind games she played to maintain a sense of objective distance; the ultimate, inevitable loss of all perspective. Things were looking good as she neared completion, and her words hinted at an incoming wave of hard-earned fulfillment.
Agriculture: The Spiritual Sound
Take the title of The Spiritual Sound as a kind of syllabus, and you’ll find a heady list of musical reference points that Agriculture aim to exalt. The jarring intros of black metal songs that make you feel like a portal to Hell has opened inside your headphones. The sound design on later Scott Walker arrangements meant to conjure a Biblical plague. The slow, majestic build of post-rock epics that hold back their climax for maximum transcendence.
Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition
Bruce Springsteen was right. At the risk of oversimplifying the merits of this handsome box set, spoiling the plot of his dramatic new biopic, and squashing 40-plus years of fervent mythmaking, the truth is as Springsteen always insisted.
Geese: Getting Killed
Desperation looks good on Geese. In the past four years, the New York band has demonstrated an ability to rock out and sprawl out with the best of them, but it took until vocalist Cameron Winter’s understated solo album, Heavy Metal, for the emotional core to surface. Part of this breakthrough can be attributed to Winter’s voice: a slurred, straining warble whose cryptic delivery can feel like both sides of an argument you’re overhearing through apartment walls.
Phish: The Siket Disc
In 1997, Phish were jamming in a studio in Woodstock. Sequestered from the world, the quartet improvised for hours with the goal of finding some exciting bits to refine and embellish for its next studio album. Most of the material wound up on The Story of the Ghost, a funky, brittle album released just before Halloween the next year. But there was still some good stuff left over, so keyboardist Page McConnell took it upon himself to edit and compile it into a brief instrumental companion.
Phish: The Siket Disc
Chase Elliott Rips NASCAR Over Next Gen Setup Failures As Bristol Tire Disaster Unfolds After a rare DNF at Bristol, Chase Elliott vented his frustration with NASCAR, suggesting they could have done better in one particular aspect.
How Millennial Jam Gods Goose Built an Empire of Chill
Head to Prime Video right now to see this underrated cult movie that’s been hiding in plain sight You might not have even heard of "Automata." Or maybe you’ve scrolled past it while hunting for something to watch, thinking it’s just another dusty …
Goose: How the Millennial Jam Gods Built an Empire of Chill
In 2017, Peter Anspach had a life-changing experience on the John Muir Trail. For those unfamiliar with Anspach (now the mustached multi-instrumentalist from Goose, his generation’s most successful jam band) or the trail in question, a treacherous 200-plus-mile hike along the High Sierras, imagine your high school’s lovable stoner suddenly dropped into The Revenant.
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band: New Threats From the Soul
The narrator of “The Simple Joy” seems to have it all figured out. He’s outlived his hard times, outrun his demons, and found a semblance of peace, even at the risk of losing his sanity. “I keep busy in the daytime charging glowworms,” he tells us. “Joys less simple seem to feel like child’s play now.” In the cosmic, karmic world of Ryan Davis, it seems inevitable that, by the end of the song, this character will wind up in jail.
Bruce Springsteen: Tracks II: The Lost Albums
There comes a time when devotees of Bruce Springsteen start obsessing over the music he didn’t release.
Brian Wilson’s Symphony of Life
Depending on your age, taste, and life circumstances, you might see Brian Wilson as the sunny figurehead of youthful innocence; the tortured ideal of artistic integrity; the paragon of mastercraftsmanship; or a lovable eccentric who played his grand piano inside a giant sandbox. The common thread through all of these archetypes, of course, is that he endured.
Brian Wilson’s Symphony of Life
Watch: Trooping the Colour highlights on King's official birthday King Charles and Queen Camilla were joined by members of the Royal Family as they waved to cheering crowds. King Charles and Queen Camilla were joined by members of the Royal Family as they waved to cheering crowds.
Jerry Garcia: Garcia
As a precocious youth, Jerry Garcia found escape through painting, studying the Bay Area figurative style of abstract art. Late in life, it was scuba diving, acquainting himself with the ocean floors of Hawaii, petting octopuses and eels, setting a world record for the longest time spent underwater. But when he was turning 30, all Jerry wanted to do was play pedal steel.
Jerry Garcia: Garcia
1 day ago January has vanished in a flash, but it was a consequential month with a few opening announcements and plenty to look forward to over the next 11 months. This is Eater Chicago's Most Anticipated Openings for 2025, and we’ve sifted through social media posts, PR blasts, and chef interviews to …
Wish You Were Here
Roger Waters heard what everyone in Genesis was saying about him. In a 1975 interview around the release of Wish You Were Here, the Pink Floyd bassist and vocalist responded to his peers’ suggestion that they were aiming for real art, while Pink Floyd, whose records were now selling in the millions, had grown more interested in appealing to the lowest common denominator and fading into the background.
The Tender Evolution of MJ Lenderman
“What else can you say to help a friend with a broken heart?” MJ Lenderman asks in “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In,” near the end of Manning Fireworks. It’s another quotable, coolly conversational line from a songwriter quickly becoming renowned for them. But something is different this time.
The Easy Charm of the Hard Quartet
Stephen Malkmus is stuck in traffic, driving a car full of precious art across the country. Pavement just played a reunion show in Seattle, which gave Malkmus the opportunity to visit his old home in Portland, where he lived with his wife—the sculpture artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins—and their two daughters. His job now is to transport some of Hutchins' more delicate sculptures to the family’s new place in Chicago. “I'm in such a state of flux,” he reflects over the phone from the road.
Silver Jews: The Natural Bridge
Let’s say it doesn’t work out. You cross over from adolescence to adulthood and wind up living a life you didn’t choose. The rooms are depressing and fluorescent; the people who once offered comfort grow distant; any ambition for the future is replaced with a somewhat nauseating impulse just to get through the day. David Berman sings to one such person in “Pretty Eyes,” at the very end of The Natural Bridge, an album he made when he was 29.
Silver Jews: The Natural Bridge
Star pianist: AI will never replace me - Slippedisc From an interview by Christian Berzins with Khatia Buniatishvili: Do you think art will change fundamentally in this century? Do you think that an AI …
Exclusive: Introducing The Hard Quartet, Indie Rock's Next Great Supergroup
The members of The Hard Quartet, a new supergroup featuring some of the most revered names in the past three decades of indie rock, are passing a swelteringly hot summer morning in a serene garden in Manhattan’s East Village. Guitarist and songwriter Matt Sweeney acts as a kind of spokesperson, detailing their history with the narrative flair and self-awareness of a talking head in a retrospective documentary.
Exclusive: Introducing The Hard Quartet, Indie Rock's Next Great Supergroup
Cyn Santana of 'Love & Hip Hop' fame is pregnant with her second child, sharing a clip and snap of her baby bump on social media. The former Love & Hip …
Crypt Stermon, “The Stygian Rose”
ALBUM OF THE DAY Crypt Stermon, “The Stygian Rose” By Sam Sodomsky · June 14, 2024 Dark Descent Records Colorado follow ✓ following unfollow ... The Stygian Rose Dark Descent Records . / pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track .
Gatecreeper, “Dark Superstition”
ALBUM OF THE DAY Gatecreeper, “Dark Superstition” By Sam Sodomsky · May 23, 2024 Gatecreeper Arizona follow ✓ following unfollow ... Dark Superstition Gatecreeper . / pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track .
Now Is Now: On Wim Wenders's "Perfect Days"
Wim Wenders's Perfect Days is now showing on MUBI in many countries. “She uses the same words we do, yet there’s something so special.” This commentary is delivered by a bookseller (Inuko Inuyama) in Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023). The woman behind the counter is recommending the works of Japanese author Aya Kōda to the film’s protagonist, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho).
Feel So Different
Hi everyone, Sam here. This is an introductory message to my new Substack enterprise, which I am calling “Electric Nebraska.” I am truly grateful for everyone reading, and I plan to make good use of your attention in the coming days, weeks, and months. I’ll have plenty of exciting announcements then, but for now I’ll simply alert you to an article I wrote last week for The Independentabout the Carnegie Hall tribute concert for Sinéad O’Connor and Shane McGowan.
A song from Sinéad’s daughter, a stomping audience: stars in New York remember Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan
The Dropkick Murphys, Imelda May, and The Pogues’ Cait O’Riordan were among the stars to pay tribute to the Irish icons (Redferns/Getty) Early during a tribute show for the late Irish songwriters Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan, Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes appeared with a broken-looking violin and bow. Tentatively and shakily, he started to sing “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” a barroom classic from The Pogues’ 1985 masterpiece Rum Sodomy & the Lash.
Peter Gabriel
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Peter Gabriel: i/o
If you are someone who struggles with perfectionist tendencies, then you can maybe understand how Peter Gabriel is feeling right now. He has been working on an album called i/o for more than 20 years—and teasing it in the press for even longer—and, as of today, it is finally available to hear in full.
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