Last time I saw Taylor Swift in concert, it was ten some-odd years ago, I was living in San Antonio, and Swift was sort of on the way up in country music circles. What a difference a decade makes. Swift, once the darling of country music, is a ful...

Failure is a relative term. For the Astros, falling short of a second-straight World Series title would be a failure for a team that, ya know, won the thing last year. Failure is when a Marvel or Pixar film doesn’t do half-a-billion dollars at the...

Brian Vander Ark’s opinions of his band’s most famous song have changed over time. When he wrote The Verve Pipe’s “The Freshmen” as a young man in the ‘90s, the song came from a place of real pain and emotion. Writing, recording, releasing and per...

Certain bands are fairly easy to quantify. Many of their songs sound the same. The music lineup is set, and everyone has a defined role. There is nothing wrong with positioning a band in this way; hell, bands like Green Day and 311 have made a min...

I never cared much for the term “grunge,” though I certainly understood its appeal. “Grunge” was a way of defining a cadre of similar-sounding bands from a fairly concentrated geographic locale. These bands dressed alike. Drug issues ran rampant t...

Sometimes, declaring the “song of the summer” for any given year is a fairly easy call. See last summer, when “Despacito” lapped the field, and deservedly so. The song is slickly produced, catchy as hell and, simply put, sounds like summer. As for...