April Lindner

At age 63, Chrissie Hynde is still a badass, still the reigning queen of cool.  So when our ticket taker at Upper Darby's Tower Theater informed us that Chrissie had requested we not take cell phone photos at her show, I wasn't about to risk pissing her off. photo lifted from The Tower Theater Facebook page Andre and I have been looking forward to seeing Chrissie and the Pretenders for a long time.  More years ago than I care to count, we saw them with a bunch of our college friends from the front few rows of the University of New Hampshire field house. The band was incredible.  I was nineteen, surrounded by friends, seeing a band we all loved more or less from the front row.  The good vibes are basically all I remember. Original lineup circa 1989 photo by Fin Costello  Fast forward to 2014. The show began with new material--all of it top-notch--from Chrissie's Stockholm album.   I'm happy to report that Chrissie Hynde still...

Jesse Malin at Drew's While I was writing my novel Catherine , I listened obsessively to the music of Jesse Malin.  At first, my interest in the guy was casual; I'd seen him play a couple of times at Light of Day, a yearly concert that benefits research against Parkinson's Disease.  Also, he had recorded a song--"Broken Radio"--with Bruce Springsteen, and as a huge Springsteen fan, I always pay at least passing attention to musicians who interest Bruce. But over time, my appreciation of Jesse became more intense.  For one thing, he's a vibrant performer.  For another, he writes the kind of song that's all too rare these days--rock and roll that manages to be smart and edgy yet unironically, full-heartedly romantic. And then there were the parallels between Jesse's life and that of Hence, one of the key characters in Catherine --Heathcliff in my retelling of Wuthering Heights.  Like Hence, Jesse Malin had a first act as...

In 1988, my husband Andre and I were living in Yonkers, N.Y. in an attic apartment that got hotter than hell in the summer.  We were newly married; I was in grad school, and we were dead broke.  We didn't have money back then to buy music, but we listened to the radio--a lot.  One day I stumbled onto something unusual; the deejay on a college station was so crazy about a new song he'd just heard that he couldn't stop playing it.  He played it at least ten times running--which might have sent me running for the dial.  But the song was captivating--the tune memorable, the lyrics biting and smart, the guitar solo blazing--and ten times running wasn't enough.  I called Andre into the the room so he could hear it too. That song was "Judas Kiss" by a band I'd never heard of before, New York's own Del-Lords. Like I said, we didn't buy CDs back then; we didn't go to concerts either.  Not long after that we had two kids, and signed on for mo...