The Washington Post

Founded in 1877, The Washington Post is an influential American daily newspaper, published in Washington, D.C.
49 articles
List of articles in the library
Review by Charles Bermant, The Washington Post, 9 March 1975
WHEN DAVID BOWIE and the Spiders from Mars barnstormed America almost two years ago they managed to astound anyone who saw them perform. The Spiders ...
The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac: Fleetwood Mac's Tusk and The Eagles' The Long Run
Review by Al Aronowitz, The Washington Post, 14 November 1979
LONG AND EAGERLY AWAITED, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk comes as the most spectacular event in records since Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life. Less ...
The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac: The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac: Live
Review by Robot A. Hull, The Washington Post, 28 December 1980
LIVE ROCK ALBUMS, especially the pompous two-record variety, generally are an excuse for extended guitar work and prolonged drum solos. A marketing strategy and a ...
Black Flag, Minor Threat, Henry Rollins: Slamdancing in the Big City
Report and Interview by Richard Harrington, The Washington Post, 19 July 1981
THE PIT is ferocious and frightening: Young men's bodies slam into each other, arms and elbows out, fist flailing, like razor-edged Mexican jumping beans popping ...
Irene Cara: What a Feeling! Irene Cara as Her Famous Self
Profile and Interview by Richard Harrington, The Washington Post, 12 January 1984
FOR IRENE Cara, the price of Fame is to play… in film and on television… Irene Cara! ...
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 24 July 1986
THE POOR SOUND wasnt the only problem with Bob Dylans recent concert in Washington. A far more fundamental problem was the overbearing preachiness and unrelenting ...
U2's Journey Through The Past: Rattle and Hum
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 12 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 ...
Los Lobos: La Pistola y El Corazon
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 14 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, ...
The Beach Boys: The Endless Echo of Pet Sounds
Essay by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 19 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 ...
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 28 April 1991
YOU HEAR Luther Vandross's voice everywhere these days — and not merely on his own recordings. Listen to the recent albums by Freddie Jackson, Will ...
Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out By Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield
Book Review by Tom Graves, The Washington Post, 18 October 1992
THE LATE Bill Graham is remembered by most as the prickly, hyperactive browbeater who opened not one, but two Fillmore concert halls during the height ...
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 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 ...
Elvis Presley: From Nashville to Memphis: The Essential '60s Masters 1
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 1 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 ...
Bob Dylan: Warner Theatre, Washington D.C.
Live Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 31 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 ...
Walter Becker: 11 Tracks Of Whack
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 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: MTV Unplugged (Columbia)
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 24 May 1995
BOB DYLAN has released 52 songs on five different albums since 1992 but has not included one song of his own written after 1990. This ...
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 25 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 ...
Report and Interview by Richard Harrington, The Washington Post, 30 July 1995
IN THE LATE '70s, Washington's Bad Brains pioneered a style of speedy hard-core punk that is now a commercial juggernaut for young bands such as ...
Elvis Presley: Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential ‘70s Masters
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 13 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 ...
Book Review by Tom Graves, The Washington Post, 23 June 1996
RECORD PRODUCER Sam Phillips, who owned the tiny Sun record label in Memphis, has been hounded for years by journalists and biographers about his decision ...
George Jones with Tom Carter: I Lived To Tell It All
Book Review by Tom Graves, The Washington Post, 23 June 1996
I LIVED TO TELL IT ALL, the long-awaited autobiography of country music legend George Jones, has to be one of the bleakest, most disconsolate music ...
James Sallis: The Guitar In Jazz – An Anthology
Book Review by Tom Graves, The Washington Post, 23 June 1996
WHY IS IT that jazz, one of the most exciting and explosive forms of music, has been the subject of some of the lamest, most ...
Book Review by Tom Graves, The Washington Post, 23 June 1996
ESSENTIALLY A NOVELTY book for novice songwriters, Songs In the Rough is both shy on substance and skimpy on songs. The idea behind the book ...
Danny Thompson, Richard Thompson: Industry: A Tale of Two Thompsons
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 4 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 ...
Steve Earle's Politics and Prose
Report and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 6 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. ...
Frank Sinatra: Sinatra Crooned, World Swooned
Obituary by Tim Page, The Washington Post, 16 May 1998
HE CALLED himself a mere "saloon singer" from Hoboken, New Jersey. But Frank Sinatra, who died late Thursday at the age of 82, was much ...
The High Llamas: A Different Breed
Overview by Tim Page, The Washington Post, 10 January 1999
'Crossover' British Rockers Deftly Blend Old and New. The Result Is A Horse of Another Color. ...
Captain Beefheart: Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart)
Essay by Tim Page, The Washington Post, 12 December 1999
BACK IN THE early 1970s, when Captain Beefheart was at the decidedly sub-stratospheric pinnacle of his fame, there was no faster way to clear out ...
The Magnetic Fields, Stephin Merritt: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
Interview by Tim Page, The Washington Post, 7 May 2000
NEW YORK — There is a distinct whiff of Disney to the Lower East Side these days. Tidied and fattened by the Manhattan real estate ...
Lisa Marie Presley: To Whom It May Concern (Capitol)
Review by Richard Harrington, The Washington Post, 9 April 2003
SUSPICIOUS MINDS want to know: How much Presley is there in Lisa Marie? ...
Lisa Marie Presley: The Princess of Rock Makes a Name for Herself
Interview by Richard Harrington, The Washington Post, 6 May 2005
LET'S FORGET last names for just a moment. ...
Caitlin Cary & Thad Cockrell: Begonias
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 24 June 2005
Traditional country music is marriage music, and there's no better way to dissect a troubled marriage than to have a female country singer and a ...
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 3 March 2006
HOW DO YOU write a song about homeland security without sounding preachy or trite? On the other hand, how do you make honest music in ...
Arthur Lee, Love: The Everlasting Forever Of Arthur Lee
Retrospective by Tim Page, The Washington Post, 5 August 2006
ARTHUR LEE and his off-again-on-again rock group Love made only one great album – a brooding, opulent and improbable dream called Forever Changes, released in ...
Book Review by Miles Marshall Lewis, The Washington Post, 20 August 2006
The early years of a reggae superstar who gained worldwide renown. ...
Judee Sill: A Brief Life, an Enduring Musical Impression
Retrospective by Tim Page, The Washington Post, 30 December 2006
ON THE DAY after Thanksgiving 1979, Judee Sill, a 35-year-old, deeply depressed and physically broken singer-songwriter, took an overdose of opiates and cocaine in her ...
Ruthie Foster: The Phenomenal Ruthie Foster
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 30 March 2007
WHEN RUTHIE FOSTER performed at the South by Southwest Music Conference two weeks ago, the short, dreadlocked singer demanded attention with the sheer power of ...
Janet Jackson: True You: A Journey To Finding And Loving Yourself
Book Review by Michael Gross, The Washington Post, 25 March 2011
JANET JACKSON'S True You boasts alluring packaging: It's printed on the kind of ultra-white paper you rarely see in books anymore, chock-full of photos and ...
Graham Parker repeats the Rumour
Report and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 23 November 2012
IN THE NEW Judd Apatow movie, This Is 40, Paul Rudd's character runs an indie record label that reunites Graham Parker and the Rumour, the ...
Bad Religion: No Assumption Safe with Punk Vets
Report and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 22 March 2013
THE TITLE OF the first single from Bad Religion's new album, True North, is unprintable in this newspaper, but the two-word expletive advises one to ...
Elbow: With Maturity, U.K. art-rockers Elbow finally stick the Landing
Profile and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 8 May 2014
BIG HANDS, a pub in Manchester, England, that takes its name from a Violent Femmes song, has long been a watering hole for local bands. ...
Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers: Chuck Brown Band, still crankin'
Report and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 26 December 2014
CHUCKY THOMPSON had to lie about his age to play with Chuck Brown. It was 1984, and Thompson, 16 years old and already one of the ...
Emmylou Harris, back where it all started
Profile by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 8 January 2015
THERE'S A REASON so many artists have signed on to take part in The Life and Songs of Emmylou Harris: An All-Star Concert Celebration on ...
Report by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 28 June 2015
FEW POP MUSIC acts have enjoyed a year like Creedence Clearwater Revival had in 1969. That year, the John Fogerty-led quartet released three top-10 albums: ...
Report and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 16 July 2015
LAST SUMMER, when the James Brown biopic Get on Up opened on movie screens, jazz bassist Christian McBride organized an all-star concert at the Hollywood ...
The National's Bryce Dessner: A man of many talents
Report by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 18 November 2016
Show: With the National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Jacomo Bairos on Friday at the Kennedy Center. ...
Review by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 29 September 2017
HARRY STYLES has gone back to the future. Sooner or later, this short, wiry singer with the tousled hair and giddy tenor had to leave ...
St. Vincent: Catching St. Vincent at the Anthem? Expect to see two acts, like a play.
Profile and Interview by Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post, 24 November 2017
THE LAST SONG that Annie Clark wrote for Masseduction, the new St. Vincent album, was the title tune. The track begins with a stuttering percussion ...
Kendrick Lamar: Sorry, rock fans. Hip hop is the only genre that matters right now.
Comment by Marc Weingarten, The Washington Post, 17 April 2018
NO ONE WHO has heard Kendrick Lamar's stunning album Damn could be at all surprised that it is the first nonclassical or jazz recording to ...
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