Entries for June 2022

One of the best things about early summer in San Diego has been the San Diego International Fringe Festival. Music acts, theatrical groups, stand-up comics, and performance artists from all over the world gather here—and in more than 200 cities worldwide—for this celebration of all things fringe-y. The pandemic put the kibosh on the Fringe, […]

Always the Outsider is the latest release from singer/songwriter Stacy Antonel, a native San Diegan who splits her time between here and Nashville, where she moved in 2017. Beautifully recorded and mixed by Ben Moore, it’s a showcase for Antonel’s vocal versatility throughout 12 tracks of original tunes backed aptly on most tracks by veteran […]

No, his mind is not for rent To any god or government Always hopeful, yet discontent He knows changes aren’t permanent But change is ––Neil Peart, “Tom Sawyer” The death of acclaimed drummer and lyricist Neil Peart on January 7, 2020, after a protracted three-year battle with glioblastoma, marked the demise of not just one […]

On November 18, 1972 I reviewed the Loggins and Messina concert for my college newspaper at the Orrie de Noyer Auditorium in Hackensack, New Jersey. The opening act was an impressive guitar/vocal duo, Batdorf and Rodney, whom I gave a glowing review. So here I am a half century later coming full circle with a […]

Back when she was a young girl on the brink of a bright road to musical success, Mary Chapin Carpenter was in a car with friends going down a dark road at one in the morning. It seemed her entire life was ahead of her. She leaned her head back, closed her eyes and “Wild […]

Hello Troubadourians! I recently started giving guitar lessons to a friend from work. I usually don’t give private lessons—for various reasons—and certainly not to people I work with for many of the same reasons. I made an exception in this case because the young man I’m teaching, who I’ll call T for the purpose of […]

“To change the world, you’ve got to be really depressed,” singer-songwriter Judy Henske once told me. “You have to have an attitude that things are really bad, and we have to change them. But I kept cheering up all the time.” When Henske was a rising folk music icon in the early 1960s, folkies were […]