THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Calling all Bowie fans, post haste... The wonderful website Pushing Ahead of the Dame  has thrown down the gauntlet, asking readers to do the unthinkable task of reducing the career of David Bowie down to the "best" thirty songs and the "best" ten albums.  It's as subjective a task as you can have with such a deep and rich catalog spanning over five decades; however, for me, selecting my ten favorite albums (which, of course, may or may not be the "best") was by far the easier task. Those albums, in chronological order: The Man Who Sold The World (1970) Hunky Dory (1971) The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders Of Mars (1972) Aladdin Sane (1973) Station To Station (1976) Low (1977) Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980) Let's Dance (1983) Black Tie White Noise (1993) Outside (1995) The songs, however, were much more difficult to whittle down. My first run -- just spitting out titles without any prompting, tunes w...

When you work in record stores for any length of time, you start hearing about acclaimed artists heretofore unexplored with large and daunting catalogs, artists that you know you should like, with album titles you know by heart even if you've never heard a single hook from the albums in question. You know that you could like these artists, maybe even grow to love them, but you never allow a spare moment to excavate the layers of vinyl and tape and zeroes and ones to find the sonic gold, the joy and empathy that some artists provide in rich and robust dollops with seemingly effortless verve and glee. For me, there are too many names -- Miles Davis, Tom Waits, Slayer, The Who -- whose catalogs have so far remained in the cold ground of someone else's life. And until the winter of 2009, the band Sparks (featuring brothers Ron and Russell Mael) were one of those names. I visited a friend in Los Angeles in February 2009 at the exact same time that Sparks were playing one of thei...