Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers : Ms. B.C. [ purchase ]  When you’ve been a theme-oriented blog for as long as Star Maker Machine , it...

Have you ever realised how many Jones's there are in music. And I don't mean performers, I mean in the material. Is it the commonest...

  purchase [461 Ocean Boulevard] Main, to me, conjures up the Stones' Exile on Main Street, but let's that leave that aside this tim...

So this mainline Jesus is on, right, what is it actually? I always thought it was about a train, especially with the world of gospel awash w...

Quiet Sun : Mummy was an Asteroid, Daddy was a Small Non-Stick Kitchen Utensil [ purchase ]  For no particularly good reason, other than...

"Main Street  is a  metonym  used to denote a primary retail street of a  village ,  town  or small city in many parts of the world. It...

The Call : The Walls Came Down [ purchase ]  If we were playing a game where I asked you to guess what band I was talking about, and the...

I actually remember this song as being a banger from the minute I first heard it. It's true, quite when that minute was I don't reca...

  purchase [ Crown of Creation ] Digging around for a possible alternative using the obstruction co-theme, what to my surprise but ... the A...

  purchase [ Paradise and Lunch   ] I find myself pre-disposed to prefer the Ry Cooder version of this because that's where I first hea...

 Hang on, what the bejasus has this to do with walls, I hear you say, the perfectly decent back to Bakersfield project by Jay Farrar and his...

  purchase [get   some Hank Williams   ] This week SMM's contributing vloggers have done a remarkable job skirting the obvious- we have ...

Purchase Head Over Heels --skip the middleman, buy from the band!  I love songs that work in dichotomy. Particularly, when the upbeat melody...

Can there be a more evocative intro to a song? The pizzicato guitar plucks, with then the rolling riff of the lead guitar, sounding exactly ...

Crowded House : Don’t Dream It’s Over [ purchase ]  When this theme was announced, I decided to write about the X song, “Once Over Twice...

 Well, you can try and draw some inference into this song and the exit of Agent Orange or, even, prematurely, I fear, to feel vaccines are a...

X : The Once Over Twice [ purchase ]  I think that the impetus behind this theme is the end of the Trump Error, and one of the things that...

  purchase  [ RJ's version   ] Because <In Memoriam> is kind of a coda to the year past, we might call this the first theme of the...

  purchase [ Tone Poems   ] My better half thinks I carry a jinx. Possibly: 2 years back, I played Tom Petty's <You Got Lucky> on ...

To say I am fond of pedal steel guitar would be an understatement; I bloody adore the instrument and how it sounds, whether as high lonesom...