I have long held the opinion that with every album a band releases, there should be change, evolution, and growth. It’s for this reason that there’s a lot of people out there who would probably consider me to be a punk rock heretic; but the fact of the matter is, when it comes to Southern California’s Bad Religion, I just prefer the newer stuff to the old. This isn’t to say that I can’t appreciate their classics, but with every album there’s a noticeable …

Talented folk musicians do not create a song; they create a ghost. There is an instinctive past to folk music (and no, we are not speaking of the current trend of freak folk) that can be directly involving to the willing listener. But most easily accessible American folk music seems to borrow only from its North American roots: plenty of folk singers have upright bass and the occasional banjo, but few can cross further into the barrier of time than that. Christian Kiefer and …