Springtime…man, I gotta tell you, there are few things in life that just immediately lift your mood the way spring does. It really is one of those universal, almost magical transitions that everybody feels, whether you’re a nature person or not. You go from that long, brutal, gray, miserable winter (especially here in Chicago where winter feels like it lasts about eleven and a half months) to that first day where the sun actually feels warm on your face, and suddenly everythi

It’s hard to believe that the Red Hot Chili Peppers have been around for almost 45 years. That makes me feel very, very old. I mean, seriously, this band that started out as this weird, funky, punky, half-naked chaos machine on the Sunset Strip is now one of the biggest bands in the history of rock and roll. We’re talking over 120 million records sold, Grammys, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame…they’re legends. Absolute legends. But they didn’t

The TV theme song. Just saying those words makes me smile. Or sigh. Or get a little pissed off. Or all three at once. Because once upon a time, the TV theme song mattered. It wasn’t just background noise. It wasn’t something you skipped past so you could shave ten seconds off your binge-watch session. It was an event. It was a statement. It was mood, tone, personality, storytelling, and sometimes the entire damn plot of the show, delivered in under a minute. And now? It’s pre

INTRODUCTION: My 10 Favorite Music Biopics (Non-Documentary) With the release of the new music biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere , I thought it would be fun to give you my list of my Top 10 Favorite Music Biopics of All Time. Now, just to make this clear right off the bat, these are not documentaries . The ten films I’m ranking here are narrative movies, they are fictionalized (sometimes very  fictionalized) dramatizations of real musicians, songwriters, and bands.

So it’s my favorite time of year and that would be the fall. Yes, Autumn. The best season of the year. Hands down. I am not a summer guy. Never have been. I hate the summer. I despise hot weather. I hate it when it’s humid and muggy, and here in Chicago, we get slammed with humidity and ridiculous heat all summer long. Those dog days of August? Pure misery. This past year was even worse, with multiple 90+ degree days that sucked the life right out of me. By the end of summer,

Hip-hop and movies have been linked since the beginning. Now sure, hip-hop music itself officially kicked off in the early 1970s, born from block parties in the Bronx where DJs were spinning disco, stretching those instrumental breaks, scratching records, letting MCs jump on the mic, and creating something totally new. It was disco rap at first, but it grew fast, into something more than music. It became a movement. A culture. A way of life. And film caught onto that energy r