Benjamin Roesch

Category: Music

  • Post #26: “IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?”

    As someone who’s many times been walking through a subway station, been briefly inspired to pause at the quality of the busking musician I just walked past, wondering, how the hell could someone this good be playing for change?, this article was a revelatory gem.  It’s about the violin virtuoso…

  • Post #20: Under 500 Words on an Album that Changed my Life, Part Two

    The summer of 1992, when Extreme’s Three Sides to Every Story came out, I was fifteen and a sophomore in high school.  The album, compared with its multi-platinum predecessor Pornograffiti, sold only 700,000 copies and was largely considered a commercial failure.  But that deserves some context.  We all know that…

  • Post #15: The Sky Was Crying

    I have a piece about to come out in Word Riot (Nov. 15th issue) that features a narrator who spends a lot of money on a guitar that looks like one that used to belong to Stevie Ray Vaughan.  It’s not about Stevie Ray, per se, but his image and…

  • Post #8: Abbey Road & Risotto

    There are only a handful of moments in recorded musical history as near to an audio orgasm (“eargasm,” if you’re an Outkast fan) as those few unbearable seconds when “Polythene Pam” swells and swells and finally bursts into “She Came Into The Bathroom Window” on The Beatles Abbey Road, the…

  • Post #4: Under Five Hundred Words on an Album That Changed my Life, Part 1

    Kind of Blue (1959, Columbia Records)   Freshman year in college I auditioned and was cast in (I didn’t have any lines, though) a student written and directed play called “A Summer in Delaware” that was very cool and totally weird.   It was eighteen minutes and thirteen seconds long, timed…