I suppose around his house, at least when it came to singing, Jack Cassidy must have been thought of as something of a slacker. After all, for years his wife Shirley Jones was the first lady of the Hollywood musical. And sons, David and Shaun, had both grown up to teen pop idols of the highest magnitude. […]
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It remains, for my money, the greatest film noir ever made. I put it up against Laura, Out of the Past, Sunset Boulevard, Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, any of them. What’s particularly amazing is that it was made 40 years after noir’s heyday and shot, not in that genre’s traditional black-and-white, using ultra-dramatic shadows and light, but in […]
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Gravelly voiced British slide guitar virtuoso Chris Rea was at the crossroads. His career was going nowhere. His label was about to drop him, and the records he’d released in his native England had flopped. What’s more, while in London to finish the album that would satisfy his contract, when he asked the label for […]
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To many late Boomers and early X’ers, she was little more than the middle-aged ER nurse in Emergency, the two-dimensional Jack Webb procedural from the 70’s. But to their parents, she was something else altogether. Throughout the late 40’s and 50’s she was the leggy, smoky actress/singer who doubled as the better half of jazz pianist and actor, Bobby […]
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Today’s Song of the Season may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I promise you there is not a person reading this now who would not benefit from a deeper appreciation of it — especially at this joyful but reflective time of year. Ray Davies was not rock’s greatest composer, but what he remains […]
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They are three Mormon sisters from Utah. And yet, unlike, say, Mormon songsters Donnie and Marie Osmond, the trio’s music is anything but white-bread and middle-of-the-road. They’re nominally listed as a country act, yet SheDAISY’s arrangements and (at times) edgy song choices seem to be the embodiment of almost everything today’s safe and formulaic country is […]
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Before it was called roots music or Americana, there was the Band, four Canadians and a laid back mandolin-playing drummer from Arkansas whose music was a throwback to a time when, as an experiment in not just democracy, but self-destiny, America was still untamed and, in a very real way, still unrealized. And I’ve long contended that, […]
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Daniela Andrade is a head scratcher like few contemporary artists. A twenty-something millennial with a voice that is simultaneously angelic and full-bodied, a citizen of Canada who splits her time between Montreal and Toronto, and an artist who mixes in a handful of truly great originals with a number of just stunning, if not jaw […]
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Frank Loesser’s particular genius was that he could put conversational English to music, whether it was the everyday English of colorful, street-educated hustler types (Guys and Dolls) or the English of ambitious and manipulative three piece suit types (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying). For today’s song of the season, I bring you […]
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Three years ago this very week I got the news no one ever wants to receive. I had somehow managed to contract full-blown cancer. Stage IV squamous cell carcinoma, to be exact, in the form of a tiny, almost microscopic tumor at the base of my tongue. So the first week of December, two weeks […]
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About M.C.
M.C. Antil is a Chicago-based writer, baseball junkie and self-styled pop culture omnivore who has fed his addictions over the years by successfully holding down a series of day jobs, most notably as a communications and marketing strategist in the competitive and often hyperkinetic worlds of television, new media and professional sports.
