Music & More

Every October since 2004 WXPN has done a listener survey and played back the results in the form of a countdown of the 885 best this or that; it started with best songs and since then they've done albums, artists, musical moments, road trip songs, and last year it was the best songs of the new Millenium. The first one in 2004 was conceived to celebrate the station's move to their new building, a beautiful state of the art facility that shares a building with World Cafe Live, a first class live music venue. This year, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the building and of the 885 countdown, they are repeating the category from 10 years ago, The Greatest Songs of All Time. It will be interesting to see the difference that ten years has made to the taste of the XPN community. That first year, when thousands of top ten lists were tabulated, the number one song was "Thunder Road" by Bruce Springsteen, which just happened to be the number one song on my top ten lis...

Our favorite Scottish blues-rocker, Eilidh McKellar, has just released the third video from her full-length album, Delta Devil Dreams. "Home" is anchored by a slow, rocking riff on electric guitar. It has a warm steady groove and Eilidh plays a sweet solo. I really like the visual vibe of the video. The subdued lighting and the neons or colored florescence in the background make the area look futuristic, industrial and retro at the same time, with nice close-ups of Eilidh singing and playing her guitar. Well done. Delta Devil Dreams Since we last wrote about Eilidh, she has completed her studies at University and done a successful string of concerts in London as well as a sixteen city tour of the U.K. Her much anticipated debut album, Delta Devil Dreams, is now available at Amazon and iTunes . The album, a showcase for Eilidh's virtuosic talent on guitar and vocals, features good songwriting, great sound, and a tight band propelled by Grammy winning producer ...

In Don Jon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Jon, the title character, unreconstituted working class Brooklyn, who, in the first 30 seconds of this trailer, spells out quite specifically, the things about which he cares the most. Don Jon This is a rare, excellent trailer in that it effectively tells you what the movie is about, without giving away the story at all. It seemed to me that most of the press when the movie came out was hung up on the main character being addicted to porn, to the point that he believed it was better to get off with porn than to have sex with an actual girl. In reality that was only one aspect of the character that Joseph Gordon-Levitt so excellently portrayed. He considers Scarlet Johansson the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. But when she becomes his girlfriend, he finds out that she is as shallow as he is, if not moreso. What I really like about this movie is the fantastic acting by the two leads: they are completely believable, and you ha...