Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, courtesy. “Living for Love,” the latest single by Justin Hayward, came about in a familiar way as many of the songs he’s written for the Moody Blues and subsequent solo projects. “I always think things jump out of my guitars, and then I…

Neil Young, “Harvest (50th Anniversary Edition).” Harvest, released in 1972, was the fourth solo album from Neil Young after the dissolution of Buffalo Springfield, with whom he made his name as the idiosyncratic guitar-playing genius. And though his solo career largely veered farther into non-commercial, even experimental territory from there,…

Jerry Lee Lewis performs in 1957 in Los Angeles as DJ Art Laboe looks on. Photo by Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images. Leave it to Jerry Lee Lewis to upend convention even as he was preparing to ascend to Heaven … or descend to another place altogether. The Killer, as…

Sammy Hagar and the Circle, “Crazy Times.” It’s a different Sammy Hagar who leads his newest band, The Circle, than the guy who couldn’t drive 55 in the mid-1980s, or who gave Van Halen a more melodic pop bent several years later. Crazy Times Sammy Hagar and the Circle…

Freedy Johnston, “Back on the Road to You.” Freedy Johnston has been sharing his tales of sad, troubled souls in his plaintive way since 1989. If he dwells less these days in chronicling the adventures of firebugs, victims of clergy abuse and morticians’ daughters and more on his own…

Norah Jones performs at Oxbow RiverStage in Napa, Calif. on June 25, 2022. NAPA — The kind of music Norah Jones makes – an intimate jazz-pop with country inflections – doesn’t always translate well to a larger stage, especially an outdoor one. But her show at the Oxbow RiverStage in…

Willie Nelson, “A Beautiful Time.” The 14 songs on A Beautiful Time, the new album from Willie Nelson, don’t appear to have been purposefully written or assembled as a goodbye or a final statement, but this new series of songs has an undeniable overall theme of rumination on the past.…

Daryl Hall, ‘BeforeAfter.’ The songs of Hall and Oates permeated both the AM and FM airwaves in the later 1970s and much of the ’80s, with 29 Top-40 singles (six of them going to No. 1). These were slick songs, most of them mid-tempo earworms that mixed Philly soul…

Bryan Adams, “So Happy It Hurts.” Listen to the catchy title song of Bryan Adams’ new album, So Happy It Hurts, and it’s almost like the late ‘80s never left us, and the oppression of COVID-19 never existed. That’s much of the point of this and the 11 other new…

The course of John Mellencamp has been fairly well established for the past 20 years or so. It consists of tales of lessons learned (or not) along the hard road of life, set largely to acoustic music with one foot firmly in Americana and the other on stage with…