music-and-concert-reviews-you-wont-see-anywhere-else
Special Edition Live: Mark Lawrence
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MARK LAWRENCE live at Googie’s Lounge, NYC, October 1st 2008
On an almost daily basis, I wonder how up-and-coming singer-songwriters manage to do it these days. You can release your own CD, upload your tracks to the internet, then get in a car with as few people as possible and hit the road, I suppose.  Can you be a one-man business in this modern world, selling your own T-shirts and booking your own gigs and driving yourself from town to town? I guess. I’ve often dreamed of getting a CDL and becoming a self-contained trucking & entertainment industry myself, performing my favorite Marty Robbins tunes at truck stops ’round the country after dispatching giant cords of lumber, a pot-bellied pig named Porky my only traveling companion. Joe Six-Packs and Hockey Moms nationwide could band together and order my 8-Track hits comps from K-Tel! Well, a former beauty queen from The Last Frontier can dream, can’t she? Oh, nevermind…
The thing is, all these thoughts just wash right out of my mind when I witness an actual performance by a great singer-songwriter, if only because the magic of a great performance tends to sweep me up into a world where the technical aspect of being a performer no longer matters. Who cares how the magician does the trick, if the illusion is breathtaking enough, right? Well this is how I felt last Wednesday night when I caught a set by Mark Lawrence at Googie’s Lounge, a small cabaret perched above The Living Room on Ludlow Street in lower Manhattan.
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Robin Thicke Proves He Still Has the Magic on “Something Else”
It’s always nice when the public catches up with an artist or band that you’ve been singing the praises of forever. I’ve been on the Robin Thicke bandwagon for almost a decade now. From hearing the masterful job he did co-writing and producing Jordan Knight’s 1999 solo debut to his 2003 debut “A Beautiful World”, I’ve thought that the soul-singing son of TV stars Alan Thicke and Gloria Loring had the goods.
The rest of the […]
Matt Keating Plays a Show Just For Me…
…well, me and six other people. Or seven.Â
Matt Keating at The Frequency in Madison
A particular blessing and curse of living in a city like Madison which is just big enough to occasionally attract a really great national “indie” act, but small enough that, in all likelihood, very few will have heard or even heard of that really great “indie” act, is that occasionally, you might stumble into a show like the one Matt Keating put […]