Nevertheless, these words give us the permission to experience and understand this music in whatever way resonates within us. I choose to understand the music of these particular 20th century troubadours as playing a vital role in my life; in this music I have found great teachers, and great comfort. The discomfort in the romanticising of their tragedy is relieved, if not expunged, by their vibrancy and loudness in my everyday.

I have learnt that the most wonderful way to listen to Nick Drake’s Pink Moon is to be alone at night, with a window cracked open. It’s definitely a solitary exercise. Drake’s is a story painted in a suffocating loneliness, so to look up at the sky as he may have done thousands of times, brings a sense of connection and comfort, of sharing something with him even if that moment is almost 50 years apart.

It was the year 1970 that Simon and Garfunkel had split, albeit the pairs’ musical ventures were far from over.

Graceland as a Musical, Microcosmic Artefact of South African Diaspora, Collaboration, and Disjuncture.

What I maintain as the avant-garde is exciting possibility. It offers glimpses into what the future of aesthetics may hold, what kinds of sounds could be included within music phenomena, and what ideas or philosophies drive creation.

“Reducing music history to a pageant of masters is, at bottom, lazy. We stick with the known in order to avoid the hard work of exploring the unknown.”

The curse of posthumous fame is an undercurrent which continues to rattle the music industry to its core. There will always be consumer demand for the release of cultural products which seemingly defy the length of a biological life; the ephemeral being that is music is what keeps this morbid curiosity very much alive.

The music industry has seen massive change in the technology which underpins it. From the digitisation of sound, technology has brought new facets of piracy and exploitation into an ever-changing realm of consumer behaviour. Streaming platforms are altering not only the way we pay for music, if at all, but what we expect from it. Duration and structure of the modern pop song have evolved to capture the attention of a listener within the first few seconds, under the threat of being skipped and thus blocking monetisation.

We have seen time and time again that these periods of struggle and crisis seem to feed into the music machine; time and time again we look to art for a place of comfort and rest, and to make sense of a new ‘everyday’.

They say never meet your heroes; but truisms are seldom true. Gary Lucas is a case in point.

Music is the outlet through which we avoid a dreadful silence, collectively, and live music is the method by which we celebrate sound. In the wake of COVID-19 where we now live in a locked down world, how is live music surviving?

The forgotten legend of the 1960s, Jackson C. Frank a craftsmen of folk, is recognised once more in a recent reissue of his discography. American Troubadour pays homage to the tracks produced by Paul Simon on Frank’s eponymous 1965 debut, bringing light to the under-appreciated and relatively unknown component of what folk has since become.

As we approach the 45th year of a world without Tim Buckley, it seems only fitting to look back on the career which saw his buttery tenor stretch across 18 albums, both studio and live set. A standout, at least to me, was his performance at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, 1968.

Josh Pyke has embedded himself within Australian folk culture as a narrator of the everyday. And a spectacular one at that.

How does the Australian Indie-Folk scene challenge traditional notions of temporality and location in defining a musical subculture?

Whilst Jeff Buckley’s performance has seemingly flown under the radar of both academic analysis as well as public critique, it challenges the role of the artist as a teller of stories and a reflector of the contexts in which they find themselves.

This paper outlines the impacts that Jeff Buckley’s performance of Strange Fruit had during the early 1990s, through which a more balanced account of the song’s existence within American civil rights activism can be told

We all know the single that broke multiple records, becoming the earworm of the 2010s, but Making Mirrors as a complete body of work offers so much more than ‘Somebody That I Used To Know'.

Brandon Dodd has made quite an entrance into the world as a solo musician with the release of his debut album, 'What A Way To Die'.

We’ve had the barefooted, beach-haired, acoustic troubadour in our sights since the 2014 released single ‘Window To The Sky’, but Kim Churchill’s nomadic storytelling has never felt more at home than in his latest live show setup; The One Light One Mic Tour.