I totally dig the alt-country rock of Scott Miller. Upside Downside, his new one with his band the Commonwealth (Shawn McWilliams – drums, Eric Fritsch – keyboards, Park Chisolm – bass), has stomping roots-rock like “It Didn’t Take too Long” and “Raised By the Graves,” thoughtful folk-rock (“The Way,” “Red …

The technology of this may be very cool, but it is intrusive as hell: Beginning [yesterday], more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, [ran] full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives …

A number of artists and songwriters seem to be doing their best to ensure that the free file sharing services like Kazaa and LimeWire continue to do a booming business: The world’s largest music company had been hectoring rock singer Tom Petty since last summer. You’ve got a big and …

The Fourth Annual Weblogs Awards have arrived over at Nikolai Nolan’s Fairvue site. These are the original “Bloggies.” We were honored to win the Best Weblog About Music award last year. In apparent recognition that we are so much more than a music site, this year we are very pleased …

Dean flips his wig.

I guess we know what’s in store for this week. American Idol runs three times this week – tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday – for a total of five hours of audition footage, two hours more than last season: The fun, of course, is in the hunt. The audition segments have …

Maybe stuff like this: Mike Rowe thinks it’s funny that his catchy name for a Web site design company sounds a lot like Microsoft. ….”Since my name is Mike Rowe, I thought it would be funny to add ‘soft’ to the end of it,” said Rowe, a 17-year-old computer geek …

Commentator Norman Lebrecht says the classical recording industry is worse off than the pop industry, and for a surprising reason: You may wish to jot this in your diaries and upbraid me with it in twelve months’ time but I am about to make the rock-solid prediction that the year …

The saga of the duplicitous Cleveland imam continues. After imam Fawaz Damra of the Islamic Center of Cleveland was charged with federal terror-related crimes on Tuesday morning, his mosque voted to retain him Tuesday night: But the meeting was rancorous, according to sources, and some mosque members are urging their …

Grease was a great movie not – the 1978 film version of the wildly popular stage musical starring John Tavolta and Olivia Newton-John squeezed a faux-’50s worldview and musical sensibility through a 20-year filter of wishful thinking that made Happy Days look authentic. This bizarre, mildly bawdy pastiche actually had …