Joe Breen

Life weighs heavily on some shoulders. Guilt, remorse and a steely resolve stalk the songs of Irish-American Chicagoan Michael McDermott: “I know this(...)

“Mama’s worried all the time/ She tells everyone she’s fine/ But she’s hurting bad and worried so/ She don’t want no one to know.” The opening lines i(...)

She sounds like she was raised well south of the Mason-Dixon line in a small town where country and soul found common cause, agonising over life and l(...)

The ambiguity inherent in the title of this album, The Unseen in Between, runs through the fourth solo collection by Steve Gunn, the Brooklyn-based gu(...)

It’s always good to ring in the new year with an old friend. And Townes Van Zandt and I go back way too many years. When I first heard his classic al(...)

The curtain comes down for the final time on Springsteen on Broadway on Saturday night, the one-man show that has been playing to packed houses in the(...)

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar on Tuesday launched a new book chronicling the history of Ireland’s Sunday newspapers. The book, The Sunday Papers: a History (...)

It is November 1976. Jimmy Carter has just been elected US president, the Vietnam war is finally in the rearview mirror and Neil Young has turned 31. (...)

Mark Knopfler tends to be at one remove from the narrative arc of his songs, even those born of personal experience. Perhaps his training as a reporte(...)

In September 1974, as Bob Dylan’s nine-year marriage to Sara Lownds fell apart, he entered a New York studio and, playing mostly solo, laid bare, in h(...)