Recordings

Steve Reich: Beauty in Repetition

July 24, 2012

by Seth Rogovoy From children’s songs like “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” to blues like “Freight Train Blues” to the Clash’s “Train in Vain,” the relentless, repetitive rhythms of the railroad have inspired countless songs that recapitulate those rhythms musically while making overt reference to them textually. But perhaps no music has ever made…

The Other Basement Tapes: The Rolling Stones’s Exile on Main Street

November 29, 2011

by Seth Rogovoy Since its release thirty-eight years ago, the Rolling Stones’s double album, Exile on Main Street, has widely been regarded as the British rock ’n’ roll band’s greatest achievement and one of the greatest — if not the greatest — rock albums of all time. Rolling Stone magazine recently called it “certainly rock…