All Posts by

Mark Lager

Mark Lager has been writing music reviews for Julian Cope's Head Heritage website since 2007. His music writing also appears in PopMatters. His film writing is featured in CineAction, Cinema Retro, and Film International. His poetry has been published in Chiron Review and Opossum. His translations of the French poet Raoul Ponchon have been published in Circumference, Columbia Journal, and Denver Quarterly. He has also written a Southern Gothic screenplay (To Death With You) and a novella about the crisis in Syria that takes place during 24 hours in Aleppo (The Dust Shall Sing like a Bird).

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Bobbie Gentry Mark Lager Music

Bobbie Gentry – Ode to Billie Joe (1967): Et in Arcadia Ego ~ June Light, June Wind

Arcadia was an idyllic paradise, a rural sanctuary, that was longed for even in the days of ancient Greece and Rome as urban life dominated and pastoral life disappeared. Arcadia was a mystical, mythical realm for medieval Europeans. During the Baroque era, the Italian artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (known as Guercino) created a painting named …

Mark Lager Music Playlist Record Store Day

9 Tracks from Record Store Day Releases

“Devil Got My Woman” (Skip James)What better way to kick off Record Store Day than with this blues classic of heartbreak and isolation recorded by Mississippi musician Skip James in 1931? Skip James was rediscovered during the 1960s. Thora Birch’s misfit outcast Enid buys a blues compilation from the hermit obsessive collector Seymour (Steve Buscemi’s …

Mark Lager Music Shuggie Otis

Shuggie Otis – Freedom Flight (1971)

Shuggie Otis is a guitar genius whose talents were not fully recognized until decades after his seminal work was created. Freedom Flight is a gritty, visceral, and organic entity – a collaborative live-in-the-studio experience. Recorded when he was only 17 years old (!), Freedom Flight seems like the craftsmanship of a veteran because his father, …

Mark Lager Music Townes Van Zandt

Haunting, Melancholy Poetry- Our Mother the Mountain and Townes Van Zandt 50 Years Later

Townes Van Zandt has been nicknamed the “Texas troubadour” and this is an apt description of the tragic singer-songwriter. Similar to John Keats and Dylan Thomas, Townes Van Zandt experienced a creative explosion between the ages of 24 – 25. His lyrics are inspired by the extremes in the landscapes of his home state of …

Mark Lager Miles Davis Music

Miles Davis and His Musical Revolution – on the 50th Anniversary of ‘In a Silent Way’

by Mark Lager
We are listening to the city at night, but we hear only the nothingness of silence. We are back inside the church as the humming of the organ and the tentative, two-note guitar strum return us to the revival.

What was this truth so deep and profound that it could not be spoken in words but only carried on the night wind through the streets in acts of silence?

It was revolution.

It was that which is called peaceful.

Cotton Jones Mark Lager Music

Cotton Jones – Tall Hours in the Glowstream (2010)

by Mark Lager
Cotton Jones create music that sounds old and lived in: times spent wandering the backroads, the highways and byways, of America; times spent alone in the wilderness; times that seem out of our time and summoned from the past. Yet even though they are extraordinarily underrated and at the outset placed in the genre categories of “lo-fi”, “indie folk”, and “alternative country”, they transcend these boundaries and are a rarity for our generation: a band which wears its heart honestly on its sleeve and stands on the shoulders of giants but does not steal from them like the majority of contemporary groups.