Ken Tucker
speaker
453 appearances
27 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 17 Sep
Ken Tucker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
I've read a couple pieces recently about how country music is the place where rock and roll now resides, or how guitar rock is an outmoded form that persists only as nostalgia.
Then I hear new work by Mike Campbell or low-cut Connie's Adam Wiener, and I'm reminded once again that rock and roll is always alive, always hiding in plain sight.
That's Mike Campbell and the Dirty Knobs from their new album, Mission of Mercy, in which Campbell continues with unabated energy and skill to explore the kind of elemental rock he made for decades with Tom Petty.
Campbell's new work always avoids nostalgia while carrying an air of hard-won serenity.
Low-cut Connie is Adam Wiener's vehicle for piano-based rock and roll tinged with social politics.
For a decade now, as singer, songwriter and pianist, Wiener has fronted a shifting group of musicians, putting on wild, sweaty shows that usually find him stripped to the waist and leaping off the piano.
Wiener's method is liberation through controlled chaos, better living through rhythm and blues.
Wiener was one of the first musicians to decline to play at the Kennedy Center under the current administration, and given the tone of this collection and Wiener's recent statements, the Bobby in that song could be Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr.,
Now, and in some of his earlier work, Wiener has spoken of the oppression of people in matters of race and gender.
Overall, this album's finest moments occur when Wiener's music embodies the soaring freedom promised by Roots rock and roll.
He's done a superb job of updating it on a song such as Can't Be Wrong.
Wiener says in a statement accompanying the album that every song here was, quote, recorded in one hot take, just blurt it out, capture it, and put it out.
That's how rock and roll was born.
But of course, Adam Wiener and Mike Campbell know that the music is more than blurt and release, that rock and roll was born from performers who very knowingly transfigured their experiences to create revolutionary art.
The revolution is over, but its passion, complexity, and rewards remain as life-altering as ever.
Fresh Air · How sky-high ticket prices, war & politics could impact the World Cup · 9 Jun 2026
podcast
The conventional framing of Kacey Musgraves' recent career is that she went pop for a few years on a couple of albums and now is returning to country music with Middle of Nowhere.
But the Texas twang in her yearning, searching voice has always remained rooted in country's deep melancholy.
One of the best moments on this album occurs on the song Back on the Wagon, whose lyric is upbeat and optimistic.
The guy she loves has gotten sober and responsible.
The two of them are planning a new, cloudless future.
Showing 141–160 of 453 · page 8 of 23
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