I’m really sorry Stephen King’s Entertainment Weekly column is done. I didn’t necessarily agree with his picks or his criticisms, but his conversational voice (shown off so well in Faithful, his 2004 Red Sox diary with Stewart O’Nan) is a wonderful thing to spend time with. And I think the column was a useful illustration of the fact that you can have a lot more fun, while... 

I’ve heard a few albums in the past few months that should have been nominated for Grammys: Little Dragon and Joe Henry both put out singular albums, lyrics and melodies that challenged the listeners to buy into the proud overlapping of genres. Yukumi Nagano deserves a Grammy, damn it, based on her voice alone. And Joe’s a quiet veteran of the business, he’s played with and produced... 

You know what might be interesting?  A movie where Angelina Jolie played twitchy and nervous but ultimately effective, and Johnny Depp played calm and collected to the point of ridiculousness. This is not that movie: Oh, and where Paul Bettany played something other than menacing. With the exception of voice work in cartoons, and maybe Franky in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, it’s... 

The video for Rihanna’s “Only Girl In the World” is quite pretty, but there’s a lot in here that feels tonally off: For a video with a color palate this cheery, you might expect that “Only Girl” would be a song about a love achieved. Instead, the whole thing’s a request for the unnamed gentleman who’s caught Rihanna’s guy to make her... 

So, my buddy Tyler is finally back in the blogging game, and last week he hit on something I’ve been thinking about lately: why we don’t have great girl groups (or really, boy bands) right now. He writes: There doesn’t seem to be even the pretense that we’re getting music that uses multiple voices in harmony to convey some emotion or idea that can’t be conveyed in the... 

I realize it’s hyperbole to say America Fererra’s fallen off the map. She’s pretty fresh out of an 85-episode run as Betty Suarez. She was in Our Family Wedding and did voice work in this year’s How to Train Your Dragon, too. But other than that, the very generic-looking home-from-the-war story The Dry Land is all she’s got lined up this year or in the future: I... 

Rumor has it that Amy Winehouse is going to form a band with Raphael Saadiq and ?uestlove. I don’t particularly object to the teamup if Winehouse is, in fact, healthy enough to perform. It’s got me wondering, though. Wasn’t she recording during her time in St. Lucia? What ever happened to that music? And what does it mean for the state of her voice? There were just so many things... 

From The Atlantic yesterday, on why you should read Ender’s Game to understand blogging today, particularly the confusion that surrounds Dave Weigel: Peter and Valentine are able to be successful–and more importantly–plausible in their guise as adult policy experts and demagogues because their online personas provide something that reading audiences want. Valentine, the... 

But the only thing I felt upon watching the trailer for Megamind was “I had no idea I had so little sense of what Brad Pitt’s voice sounds like.” I guess that’s never been the point with him, though, has it:  Read More »

This may be one of the strangest damn trailers I’ve ever seen. Johnny Depp, Abigail Breslin, Isla Fisher, Bill Nighy and Alfred Molina doing voice work and you choose to tease the movie with a magically unmagical windup toy? Don’t get me wrong. I kind of like the fact that the studio’s messing with us (especially since the tagline is “The story of a chameleon with an identity...