You are here: Los Angeles Arts and Entertainment Music Examiner

Steve Knopper

Music Examiner
Steve Knopper [knopps.com] covers the music business for Rolling Stone. His next book, on the record business in the digital age, is due from Free Press/Simon & Schuster in January 2009.

  
Advertisement

Not really dumb, not really blonde

April 15, 10:12 AM
by Steve Knopper, Music Examiner
 
 
Spent a great, relaxing Sunday catching up on new music and watching the Tigers and Kenny Rogers get crushed.

Here's a review of the first one. More coming soon.

Dolly Parton, Backwoods Barbie. Good for Dolly for ditching her record label(s) and putting this one out with her own vast fortune. Weirdly, the album sounds over-produced, like it's trying a bit too hard to get on country radio, particularly "Jesus & Gravity," which is way more about Jesus than gravity. But her versions of Smokey Robinson's "The Tracks of My Tears" and Fine Young Cannibals' "Drives Me Crazy" are nicely Dolly-ized, she turns a few poetic phrases on the title track and the done-me-wrong "I Will Forever Hate Roses" and "Shinola" just totally frickin' rocks. I note she still hits the high notes (in her 60s) on a bonus live version of one of my fave songs ever, "Jolene."

   Subscribe   Feed

Comments

Name:  
Email Address:  
Comments:  

More from Music Examiner

Clive Davis and the music biz

April 24, 1:32 PM
Last summer I tracked down a copy of Clive, the out-of-print 1975 book by veteran music-business mogul Clive Davis, on Amazon for something like $35. (I see three copies now for as low as $9.91, so the joke's on me.) He wrote it shortly after then-extremely-powerful... Read More

Danny Federici, secret weapon, RIP

April 18, 8:42 AM
Crap. The first member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band to die is keyboardist Danny Federici. Check out the end of that March 20 concert video on The Boss' site -- I think Bruce whispers "My brother" to him, but I'm not sure. In any case,... Read More

Hooray for volume!

April 17, 9:38 AM
Man, I hope XM and Sirius merge -- and lower the monthly subscription prices! I've been paying $12.95 a month for a year for XM, which I absolutely love. My favorite channel is The Rhyme, an old-school hip-hop extravaganza that plays a great song every... Read More

Speaking of Jolene

April 17, 9:14 AM
Dolly has been singing "Jolene" live for some time -- my wife and I saw her do it about two years ago at the Denver Convention Center. (For the record, her best song there was Tommy James and the Shondells' "Crimson and Clover," in... Read More

My teams suck

April 15, 10:11 AM
Why couldn't I have picked the Yankees as "my team"? Or the Celtics?No, I grew up in Detroit, so am stuck with the Tigers. (It's getting to be an obsession -- every day there's some new injury to Google-news: Joel Zumaya, Fernando Rodney, Curtis... Read More

What isn't funny about the comics

April 15, 10:11 AM
Every morning, my 5-year-old wants to read Heart of the City and Family Circus in our morning newspaper. She likes the strips with characters close to her age who sort of talk like she does. So every day I read them to her, and she stares blankly and... Read More

Stones, dude

April 9, 3:27 PM
So, Metamorphosis. How could I have missed this one? Amazon says it's the only Stones' rarities collection, rushed into print by ex-manager Allen Klein after a lawsuit. Of course I know "Heart of Stone," but the rest are new to me. I'm not... Read More

Old fart needs new music

April 9, 8:47 AM
As a 39-year-old still stuck in the Dinosaur Land of buying music on little pieces of plastic, I'm finding it harder and harder to discover new songs. There's so much good stuff on the Internet, and tracking it all via MySpace, blogs, eMusic, iTunes,... Read More

Hey everybody

April 8, 11:45 AM
Thanks to coaxing (and one excellent free lunch) from my pal Gil, I'm the new Music Examiner on this site. I'll be writing about music I like, where to find it, occasional music-business issues and various personal crap.By way of introduction: I cover... Read More
 
Site Map   
Family Movies and Books
from Walden Media
Venues, Sports and Music
from AEG Worldwide
Concerts, Artists and Tickets
from AEG Live
Be Inspired - Quotes and Stories
The Foundation for a Better Life
© 2008 Copyright Examiner.com.
All Rights Reserved