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

There are few things better than a warm summer night at Ravinia . You get off the Metra and boom—you’re there. You walk a few feet and you're inside one of the most beautiful outdoor music venues in the country. The sound is always great, the trees sway gently overhead, and the picnic game is legendary. Wine bottles popping, gourmet spreads laid out on blankets, lawn chairs planted just right—it’s magical. My girlfriend Julie and I packed our own picnic, jumped in the car, b

With the release of Bono: Stories of Surrender  on Apple TV+ , I found myself diving back into the music of U2 —one of the most important, influential, polarizing, and flat-out fascinating bands of the last 50 years. The new film, directed by the great Andrew Dominik  ( The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford —an absolute masterpiece), captures Bono ’s intimate 2023 stage show at the Beacon Theatre . It’s reflective, theatrical, personal. And it got me thin