It may have been a cool April and a deceptively temperate beginning of May in Delhi (which otherwise scorches at this time of the year) but I am sitting and writing this and listening to what I think is one of my ideal summer listening albums. It’s a  2004 album called Fly Between Falls and it’s by Animal Liberation Orchestra (ALO) and it has all the ingredients you need to make it best suited for summer: the band hails from sunny California; their music is upbeat and so are their lyrics; there’s a relaxed yet nicely funky groove to their sound; and they don’t tend to pound the stuffing out of your head no matter how loud you want to listen to them. [Read more]

A couple of days after Levon Helm, drummer, singer and key member of The Band, the legendary rock group of the 1960s and 70s (and then again the 80s and the 90s), died in the middle of last month, I got to hear a podcast that excerpted two radio interviews with Helm—one from 1993 and the other 2007. There was a distinct difference in Helm’s voice between the two interviews. In the 1993 interview he sounded exactly like he did on The Weight. Remember The Weight? I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin’ about half past dead;/ I just need some place where I can lay my head. “Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?”/ He just grinned and shook my hand, and “No!”, was all he said. What a gorgeous song that is. The vocals were shared by three of The Band’s singers. Besides Helm, there was Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. The song itself was written by guitarist Robbie Robertson who, I read somewhere, was inspired by the films of Luis Bunuel to write The Weight. [Read more]

Mud Morganfield and his half-brother “Big Bill” Morganfield play the blues. Sometimes they play together. I have a live recording of the two playing at the Chicago Blues Festival, doing songs such as Mannish Boy, Nineteen Years Old and Forty Days and Forty Nights, all songs that you can instantly recall as being standards sung by blues legend, the late Muddy Waters. No coincidence there because both the Morganfields are his sons. Remember Muddy Waters’ real name was McKinley Morganfield. Muddy died in 1983 but his two sons in their 50s–Mud’s the older one—keep his trademark Chicago blues sound and legacy alive. They play gigs. They cut records and have a considerably big fan following among blues aficionados. [Read more]

I have no idea what the lyrics in the music of Iceland’s Sigur Ros mean. They sing in Icelandic and I don’t think this column will be read by too many people who are familiar with that language, which, incidentally, is one of the few Nordic languages that have undergone the least degree of change from its root, Old Norse, the ancient language spoken by the Vikings. But the meaning of the lyrics is not what you should be looking for when you spin something by Sigur Ros. I was pointed to the band some years back by a friend with more adventurous taste in music than mine who’d slipped me a burnt disc with their second album, Ágætis Byrjun (which apparently means ‘good beginning’) with these simple instructions: “Go home. Switch off the lights. Play this. Sit back and shut your eyes.” [Read more]

It was intended to be a nice road trip. It was an extended weekend. Two men. Two women. A child (a very well-behaved one). A great car – one of those luxury SUVs that cost more than what my flat did when we bought the latter. A destination tucked away in the upper reaches of Kumaon where email reaches you only in fits and bursts. It helped that both the men – one young and the other middle-aged – enjoyed driving with the former being an expert driver and an information whale on SUVs. We had everything we would need up there in the hilly nook we were headed for – a case of wine, light woollens and so on. The only thing left was the music we’d listen to on the way. [Read more]