Posts From Sam Sutherland

Sam Sutherland

Sam Sutherland

Sam Sutherland has worked both sides of the music biz street as music industry journalist at Billboard and Record World (as well as freelancing for Phonograph Record, Musician Magazine, High Fidelity and Rolling Stone), and in the label trenches with Elektra/Asylum, Windham Hill Productions and Discovery Records. In the ‘90s, he was beamed up to the digital rapture via software and early online projects for Microsoft and Amazon’s original music and video storefronts. He’s since produced entertainment content for Windows Media and, most recently, MSN Music. Nevertheless, he still prefers vinyl to digital. A New York ex-pat, Sutherland lives near Seattle.

Elvis Costello & The Attractions ‘Trust’: A Dark Masterwork

The album, Costello’s fifth overall, captures the quartet at a potent but troubled peak, its title a loaded, ironic signifier

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Elvis Costello ‘Armed Forces’: What’s So Funny?

The band’s third album was a leap forward in songcraft and sonic ambition, a song cycle weaving the personal and political.

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Bob Marley and the Wailers’ ‘Live!’ Album: Reggae Rocks Babylon

The 1975 London concert provided validation that they had breached the rock market with their potent strain of reggae.

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‘Buffalo Springfield Again’: An Embattled Creation

A volatile mix of talent and dysfunction percolates beneath the surface of the California band’s second and best album, cobbled together amidst rivalries

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Jackson Browne ‘The Pretender’: Dreams and Nightmares

The 1976 album, arriving at a difficult time in his life, projects a more sinister and less forgiving world than Browne’s earlier works.

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Graham Parker & the Rumour’s ‘Heat Treatment’: When Pub-Rock Met New Wave

When the Village Voice unveiled its 1976 Pazz & Jop Poll winners, an unknown English musician commanded two of the top five entries from the influential poll’s panel of music critics

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Dire Straits’ ‘Making Movies’: Mark Knopfler’s Widescreen Ambitions

The album restored the band’s platinum stature with a more expansive style verging on prog rock while retaining retro accents.

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Paul Simon ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’: A Solo Triumph

His only #1 LP, and an Album of the Year Grammy winner, this 1975 release offered definitive proof that he was not going back to the past.

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‘John Prine’: A Debut for the Ages for a Songwriter’s Songwriter

The album is a quiet masterpiece, a portrait of a young singer-songwriter already fully formed and crafting songs for the ages.

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The ‘Swinging’ Dire Straits Breakthrough Debut Album

“Sultans of Swing” was immediately distinctive in both sound and story. The album proved the band to be one of the most refreshingly creative of its day.

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