Showing 40-45 of 45 results tagged “Interviews”

Most performers would kill for one of Kris Kristofferson’s careers. But he has three of them: as a great country songwriter, a musical performer of no small repute, and a successful actor. This man has been in a musical group with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings, and as an actor has worked with Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, Sam Peckinpah, and Tim Burton. But for all that, Kristofferson seems amazingly modest, and he sounds nearly unsure of himself when he talks about playing solo.

Singer-songwriter Chris Smither has been around long enough that not much surprises him. His latest album, though, came together in a way he didn’t expect. But his producer knew what he was doing, and that’s the way Smither prefers it. His expertise is in songwriting, not producing albums.

Nick Clooney hit upon an interesting idea when he was approached about doing a book about film: that movies sometimes should be looked at outside the realm of entertainment. A persistent literary representative kept asking him to write a book, but he kept deferring because of his schedule as host of American Movie Classics. When he left the cable channel a few years ago, the representative told him, “Now you’ve got time.”

But time wasn’t the only obstacle. With list after list about great movies, and with the Internet democratizing film commentary, Clooney wondered, “What can anybody say about films that hasn’t been said before?”

It’s probably only a slight overstatement that Kronos Quartet has done more than anybody else to bring “classical” music to the rock world, by playing the music of Jimi Hendrix and Mr. Bungle but also by taking it seriously, and without sniggering.

Dismiss Monster Magnet at your peril. It’s certainly not difficult, but it’s unwise. The band might be all that rock and roll has left. The five-piece New Jersey outfit has taken the Black Sabbath/Led Zeppelin torch that Soundgarden carried in the early 1990s and stripped the 1970s-style heavy metal of its grungier self-loathing and self-importance of the past decade. By re-claiming heavy music from rap metal and what passes for “alternative” these days, Monster Magnet might just be the savior of good ol’ rock and roll.