Sometimes discretion is simply the better part of valor — just ask Paula Cole. After winning a 1997 Grammy for best new artist — and composing the addictive theme song to “Dawson’s Creek,” “I Don’t Want to Wait” — the Berklee-schooled singer-songwriter saw the writing on the wall. “There was a huge change in the culture,” she says. Read More

Rock ’n’ roll is a simple thing — it’s about sex. And moving, walking, talking. Living, in other words. And The Rolling Stones embody that. The wiry 69-year-old lead singer, strutting and skipping around an enormous stage shaped like his own enormous mouth and tongue, with a microphone occasionally shoved down the front of his extremely tight jeans, is not hiding anything from the roughly 17,000 people who paid stupendous sums to see him do what he and his friends have been doing for 50 years. It’s all out there. Read More

Sam Beam, like Alexander, can survey his kingdom and weep for lack of further worlds to conquer. At this point in his career, under the sobriquet of Iron and Wine, the folk singer has mastered every art form he’s attempted. He’s directed short films and videos, written screenplays, painted or designed almost every album cover in his catalog, and – while he was first setting his Rimbaud-evocative poetry to music over a decade ago – taught film and cinematography classes at a Florida university. He plans to helm a feature-length movie in the near future. Read More

 “This album should be played loud,” read the line notes of “Small Fires,” the new third outing from Bay Area blues-rockers The Stone Foxes. And rightly so. The disc – anchored in the gravelly vocals of frontman Spence Koehler and fiery harmonica of his drumming brother Shannon Koehler) crackles with Willie Dixon fervor, from the sinewy “Everybody Knows” to a stomping “Ulysses Jones,” a gravelly “Cotto,” and the forlorn “Goodnight Moon,” sung from the perspective of a homeless man. Read More