Petra Haden and six female vocalists, whom she referred to as “the choir,” performed a capella at the World Cafe Live, featuring most of The Who’s 1967 concept album “The Who Sell Out” and half a dozen others songs including some lovely and weird originals, the Beach Boys’ God Only…

“The higher I climb, the more I present myself to the possibility of falling down.” Vertigo

In a couple Saturdays — October 14th — I’ll be teaching at the Penn Writer’s Conference. If you’re interested, sign up and check out the other courses being offered. Early in my current novel, I created a character who had a good job and a loving family, but who, it…

In 1983, the year my son was born, I threw away several thousand vinyl LPs and packed the ones I felt I couldn’t really live without in boxes. This summer, 2006, twenty-three years later, I opened them and began to play each one on my turntable, hooked up to an…

You could find him stamping the dates in books behind the front desk of the Chestnut Hill branch of the Philadelphia Public Library or shuffling back and forth, his torso tilting, head down, eyes taking everything in, waiting for the 23 to take him home. He was lean, with frizzy…

Along with lipograms, rhymed poems and Elizabethan verse, Bob Gallagher enjoyed the nice tight laces of a good palindrome, which is basically a phrase or poem that is the same backwards and it is forwards (Madam I’m Adam). For a wonderful essay by Bob Gallagher entitled Palindromes and the Unconscious,…

Sometime in the Spring of 2005, Bob Gallagher finally got an email address and an internet connection. This is an excerpt from a message he sent me last July 5th: Don — Sometimes inhibition has the same effect as boundless license! The form is profoundly inhibiting but the effect is…

A bit of happy flew into my life this week in the form of the new Josh Ritter album, Animal Years, and the new Bruce Springsteen album of Pete Seeger and Seeger-related tunes, We Shall Overcome. In his, Springsteen is working with an old-timey band with New Orelans style horns,…

In 1978, as I was finishing my undergraduate degree in Boston, I got a call from a teacher at Berklee School of Music. He was very excited about this musical act he was working with who had financial backing, and was looking for a manager who could make him a…

For the past 35 years, I’ve had a love affair with an acoustic guitar. When I was 14, my friend Bob showed me a bunch of chords and we started passing weekends with him fingerpicking and me playing little melodies up the neck. I fell hard. That spring, my mom…