Word: folk
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Jakob Dylan looks like a guy who's finally comfortable in his own skin. As he walks into the restaurant in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, the 30-year-old frontman for the folk-rock band the Wallflowers, whose lyrics are often dour, even has a slight smile on his face. His black hair is lightly tousled. As he sits down, he removes his wraparound dark glasses to reveal wide, soulful eyes that seem to beg for music-video closeups. He admits freely that he used to have a reputation for being difficult ("People...
...time explaining why plastic did not conduct electricity. Heege, MacDiarmid and Shirakawa, however, won their Nobel for proving that plastics (or polymers) can be manipulated into a conductive state. The Nobel judges call the discovery critical not only to chemists and physicists, but also to ordinary folk; the conductive polymers are already in use on cell phone displays; in photo labs, where anti-static substances are applied to film; and in electromagnetic radiation shields on computer screens...
...stardom. Americans, while buying the album enough to make it successful, didn't quite embrace them in the all-senses media-assault way that is the top of the pyramid in modern musical success. Perhaps the American audience was leery of a band that even had pretensions at involving folk music in their sound...
Mark Knopfler, former lead singer of Dire Straits, is not scared to blaze a new trail. In Sailing to Philadelphia, the indignant, muted, yet invitingly incomprehensible lyrics of "Sultans of Swing" are absent. Most of the songs are fairly transparent paeans to episodes of America's folk past, never mind Knopfler's British extraction. The title track features Knopfler and guest James Taylor in a mock-up of a very awkward conversation between Mason and Dixon of Mason-Dixon line fame, but the song holds together if you don't pay attention to the lyrics. Unfortunately, Knopfler seems to have...
...stint as the fiddler for Frank O'Brian's Spare Change Ensemble, he got the opportunity to perform for an audience of about 600 people at the Folk Life festival in Seattle this past Memorial Day weekend...