By Dave Swanson - Summit FM Contributor Tattoos, piercings, heroin, dreads, distorted drum machines, noisy guitars, a gallon of angst and dirt all made up the Ministry that wandered out of the Lollapalooza Generation. But in the beginning, there was a "kinder, gentler" Ministry, much more in tune with the synth-pop sounds of the early ’80s. In […]
Read MoreBy Dave Swanson - Summit FM Contributor Many a good story begins with the phrase, "seemingly out of nowhere," so, seemingly out of nowhere, Florence Welch came forth with her Machine and presented her debut recording in the summer of 2009. Welch, barely 23 years old at the time, had worked on various projects before […]
Read MoreBy Dave Swanson - Summit FM Contributor It didn't take long for Paul Westerberg to prove he was more than a drunk punk. From those very first Replacements records, songs like “Kids Don’t Follow,” “I’m in Trouble,” and “Color Me Impressed” all showed the guy knew how to write a good song. By 1984's Let It […]
Read MoreBy Dave Swanson - Summit FM Contributor The Bangles were, in many ways, a textbook example of a great rock and roll band who got sucked into the corporate system and drained of all that made them so special. Following the death of John Lennon in December of 1980, guitarist Vicki Peterson became fast friends […]
Read MoreBy Dave Swanson - Summit FM Contributor From where I stand, the less definable, the better, especially when it comes to music. When you hear one verse or half a chorus and you can already feel the bridge, you're all set to slap a label on it to define what section in the record store […]
Read MoreBy Dave Swanson - Summit FM Contributor Some bands, it seems, make far too many albums — even worse in the CD era, when artists felt the need to fill up 79-plus minutes with their, um, art. Other bands, by design or happenstance, make one signature collection of songs and, to quote the ever-present George […]
Read MoreBy Dave Swanson - Summit FM Contributor “The game you’re expected to play to be in this world — I just knew I’d like to have as little as possible to do with it,” Sarah McLachlan told the Los Angeles Times in a fairly recent interview surrounding the anniversary of her landmark LP, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. “I think […]
Read MoreBy Dave Swanson - Summit FM Contributor When the Byrds burst upon the music world in the summer of 1965, it was a sound of freshness, of a new direction, a new future that would last far longer than any trend of the day known as “folk rock.” With folk music as their roots, the […]
Read MoreBy Dave Swanson - Summit FM Contributor When it comes to electronic music, there are often two camps. One is wholeheartedly invested in the technological aspect and creating sounds and, sometimes, other worlds. The other, first and foremost, are songwriters, with electronic music as their chosen path to executing those songs. Ideally, those two worlds […]
Read MoreBy Dave Swanson - Summit FM Contributor From their days as a trusted backing band for artists like Otis Redding, the Bar-Kays soon emerged as a force for the great Stax label. Like Motown in Detroit, Stax had proven itself as a go-to label for a different style of soul music in the 1960s. The […]
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