Geoffrey Himes
Geoffrey Himes has written about pop music on a weekly basis in the Washington Post since 1977, and has been a contributing editor to No Depression magazine since 1998. He has also written about pop music for Rolling Stone, the Oxford American, Musician Magazine, National Public Radio, Crawdaddy, Fi Magazine, Request Magazine, Downbeat Magazine, Country Music Magazine, Jazz Times, Bluegrass Unlimited, New Country Magazine, Sing Out, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baltimore Sun, Harley Davidson Magazine, the Unicorn Times, the Patuxent Newspapers and other outlets. He has been honored for Music Feature Writing by the Deems Taylor/ASCAP Awards and by the Music Journalism Awards.
Himes wrote two chapters for the book The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Country Music, and contributed entries to the The Encyclopedia of Country Music, The Music Hound Folk Album Guide and The Rolling Stone Jazz & Blues Album Guide. He has written liner notes for albums by the Isley Brothers, the Beach Boys, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Carey Bell, Tony Rice, Chris Hillman, Beau Jocque, Earl King and others. He is currently working on a book about Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell and Ricky Skaggs for the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Himes has lived in Baltimore since 1974. His lyrics have been recorded by Billy Kemp & the Paradise Rockers, the Kinsey Report, Mojo Filter, Edge City and Pete Kennedy & Bound for Glory.
List of articles in the library by artist
Ryan Adams, Caitlin Cary, Whiskeytown: Life After Whiskeytown: Ryan Adams and Caitlin Cary
Comment by Geoffrey Himes, Baltimore City Paper, May 2002
Who was the most important figure to emerge from the break-up of Whiskeytown – Ryan Adams or Caitlin Cary? Geoffrey Himes ponders the issue. ...
Band, The: The Band: High on the Hog
Review by Geoffrey Himes, New Country, June 1996
WHEN ROBBIE ROBERTSON and the rest of the Band split into two camps in the late '70s, who ever thought Robertson would get the worst ...
Beach Boys, The: The Beach Boys' Schizophrenia
Essay by Geoffrey Himes, Musician, April 1981
ON JULY 4, 1980, the Beach Boys sat at the base of the Washington Monument and played to a vast sea of half a million ...
Beach Boys, The: The Disciples of Brian: The Beach Boys' legacy in Decade #4
Essay by Geoffrey Himes, Crawdaddy!, 1998
What were the best Beach Boys records of the 1990s? Geoffrey Himes takes issue with his friend Paul Williams. ...
Beach Boys, The: The Endless Echo of Pet Sounds
Essay by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, June 1990
COMIC STRIP characters rarely die, but Andy, the wisecracking AIDS patient in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strip, endured a long death watch this spring. When he ...
Walter Becker: 11 Tracks Of Whack
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, December 1994
AS THE TEAM called Steely Dan, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker wrote, produced and performed some of the smartest, most seductive rock-and-roll of the '70s. ...
Bob Dylan: Warner Theatre, Washington D.C.
Live Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, October 1994
BOB DYLAN'S show at the Warner Theatre last night was rapidly going down the tubes when the singer suddenly focused himself and turned the second ...
Bottle Rockets, The: The Bottle Rockets
Report by Geoffrey Himes, Crawdaddy!, October 1996
ON OCTOBER 20th, 1977, the single-engine prop plane carrying Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed into a swamp in Gillsburg, Mississippi, killing the band's lead singer Ronnie Van ...
Billy Bragg: I Smell the Blood of a Half-Englishman: Billy Bragg
Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Harp, May 2002
What does it mean to be an Englishman? Billy Bragg explains it to Geoffrey Himes. ...
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, July 1986
THE POOR SOUND wasn’t the only problem with Bob Dylan’s recent concert in Washington. A far more fundamental problem was the overbearing preachiness and unrelenting ...
Chic: Bernard Edwards, 1952-1996
Obituary by Geoffrey Himes, Rolling Stone, June 1996
BACK IN THE DISCO era, when most records went thump-thump-thump, the music produced by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers went bumpity-bip-bop, bing-bang-boom. ...
Culture Club: Hey Fella, You Wanna Step Outside And Say That?
Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Musician, October 1983
BOY GEORGE and Culture Club aren't what they seem. ...
Bob Dylan: Live 1966 (Columbia/Legacy)
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Baltimore City Paper, November 1998
CALL IT the triumph of the bootleggers. ...
Bob Dylan, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers: Bob Dylan In Concert - An HBO Special
Film/DVD Review by Geoffrey Himes, Columbia Flyer (Maryland), July 1986
THE RECENT HBO cable TV special, Bob Dylan in Concert, gave us a sneak preview of what we can expect when Dylan arrives in Washington ...
Steve Earle's Politics and Prose
Report and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, February 1998
IT WAS the kind of night that could only take place in Nashville, a town with as many songwriters as Washington has bureaucrats. ...
Alejandro Escovedo Under the Influence
Report and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Baltimore City Paper, April 2001
ON MARCH 22, 1998, Alejandro Escovedo introduced a new song at La Zona Rosa in his hometown of Austin, Texas. He was dressed cowboy-formal in ...
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, March 1993
DONALD FAGEN'S first album in 11 years, Kamakiriad, can be judged from two different perspectives. On the one hand, it marries tartly ironic lyrics with ...
Flatlanders, The: The Flatlanders: Once & Again
Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Harp, Summer 2002
After more than 30 years since their first recorded project together, the Flatlanders have come together again to record Now Again. Forward all 'thank you' ...
Merle Haggard: For The Record: The Hag Tells It Like It Is
Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Country Music, November 1999
LAST APRIL Merle Haggard turned 62, well past the age when most men slow down and mellow out. The Hag, however, is busier and ornerier ...
Hüsker Dü, Bob Mould: The Real Godfather of Grunge: Bob Mould's Modulate
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Baltimore City Paper, March 2002
KURT COBAIN WAS a wonderful musician, but the combination of a best-selling record, a tabloid marriage and a lurid suicide inflated his reputation all out ...
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Columbia Flyer (Maryland), October 1988
BOTH PRINCE and Michael Jackson came to the Capital Centre last week for a showdown between the two reigning giants of rock'n'soul. Appearing in the ...
Profile and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Musician, October 1981
Urban time warps and geomusical quantum leaps later, Kid Creole and his pal Sugar-Coated are washed up on a sandy Island with only their wits ...
Diana Krall: In Defence of Diana Krall
Comment by Geoffrey Himes, Baltimore City Paper, March 2002
Diana Krall and Jane Monheit are better than you think. Geoffrey Himes explains why. ...
Alison Krauss, Me'Shell Ndegeocello: Sounds of Heartache: Alison Krauss and Me'Shell Ndegeocello
Essay by Geoffrey Himes, Baltimore City Paper, August 1999
IT WOULD BE hard to think of two female singers more different than Alison Krauss and Me'Shell Ndegeocello. Krauss, a straight European-American from the Midwestern ...
Los Lobos: La Pistola y El Corazon
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, October 1988
THE DIFFERENCE between Linda Ronstadt's recent album of Mexican folk standards and Los Lobos' new album of Mexican folk standards, La Pistola y El Corazon, ...
Alanis Morissette: Jagged Little Pill
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Request, September 1995
IT'S AS IF Annette Funicello had grown up and become Janis Joplin. Just 11 years ago, Alanis Morissette was a cute, 10-year-old actress on Nickelodeon's ...
Nelly: Country Grammarian: Nelly
Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Baltimore City Paper, September 2000
THIS IS WHAT pop music is all about. A radio single with a sing-along hook so catchy and so danceable you can't resist it. A ...
Willie Nelson: Always On My Mind (Columbia)
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Musician, July 1982
JUST WHEN you thought you couldn't bear one more version of Paul Simon's 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', Willie Nelson comes by and makes the song ...
Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Harp, Summer 2002
TO APPRECIATE how special Beth Orton is, it helps to catch her at a show like the one she did at the 1999 South by ...
Phish in the Farmhouse: An Interview with Trey Anastasio
Interview by Geoffrey Himes, guitar.com, June 2000
THE FIRST WORDS you hear on the new Phish album are, "Welcome, this is our farmhouse," and you are invited, as never before, into the ...
Elvis Presley: From Nashville to Memphis: The Essential '60s Masters 1
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, October 1993
IT'S EASY TO DISMISS ELVIS PRESLEY'S post-army career – easy, that is, until one is forced to sit down and listen to a song like ...
Elvis Presley: Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential ‘70s Masters
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, December 1995
ELVIS PRESLEY'S music in the 1970s is often dismissed as the bombastic, half-hearted hack work of an overweight, pill-addicted, badly dressed has-been. In the liner ...
Raconteurs, The: Raconteurs: Rac & Roll!
Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Harp, June 2006
THE BRICKS stuck around to cheer on their pals in the Greenhornes, a Cincinnati garage-rock trio that played so often in Detroit they seemed like ...
Rolling Stones, The: Stones Still Hungry After All These Years
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Unicorn Times, July 1978
THE ROLLING STONES first crawled into our collective hearts as a teenage working class street punk band. And now, here are Keith Richard and Mick ...
Report and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Chicago Tribune, July 2001
TO UNDERSTAND WHY the Roots are the world's best live-on-stage hip-hop act, you have to look past the front line of rappers and check out ...
Rossington Collins Band, The, Lynyrd Skynyrd: The Rossington Collins Band
Profile and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Musician, February 1982
Southern Rock Survival Among the Alligators ...
Overview by Geoffrey Himes, Harp, Spring 2002
LIKE DR. JOHN in New Orleans and Paul Butterfield in Chicago, Doug Sahm was a white kid whose musical curiosity led him to the wrong ...
Bruce Springsteen: Tougher Than Most: Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love tour
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Baltimore Sun, March 1988
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN'S 'Tougher Than the Rest' is a sombre, unforgiving song typical of his recent Tunnel of Love album. It describes love not as an ...
Ralph Stanley: Back to Clinch Mountain: Ralph Stanley
Report and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Country Music, September 1998
"THREE GROUPS shaped bluegrass music," Ricky Skaggs told me recently, "Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, the Stanley Brothers, and Flatt & Scruggs. Everyone ...
Danny Thompson, Richard Thompson: Industry: A Tale of Two Thompsons
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, July 1997
DANNY THOMPSON grew up in the world described in the movie Brassed Off--the northern British villages where men scrub off the soot of the ...
Richard Thompson: Watching The Dark: The History of Richard Thompson
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Request, June 1993
LIKE MUCH OF his later writing, Greil Marcus' introductory notes to the new Richard Thompson box set, Watching the Dark, are a hodge-podge of strained ...
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, June 1995
IT'S EASY to understand why so many jazz and pop musicians have gravitated toward the buzzing, grinding and squealing of guitar distortion, even if those ...
U2's Journey Through The Past: Rattle and Hum
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, October 1988
BY THEIR OWN admission, the members of U2 had little sense of history when they started making music. Like so many of their generation, the ...
Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Musician, December 1982
LUTHER VANDROSS curled up in the stuffed arm chair with his Wizard-of-Oz red ruby shoes tucked under his massive bulk. When he described Dionne Warwick's ...
Junior Walker & The Allstars: Junior Walker 1931-1995
Obituary by Geoffrey Himes, Rolling Stone, January 1996
IN EARLY 1965, a new single lit up American radio. It began with a gunshot, echoed by the snare drum that followed. Then a tenor ...
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Rolling Stone, December 1995
EVEN TODAY the stereotype lingers that country songs are all words – storytelling lyrics backed by merely functional music. That cliché can be shattered once ...
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