Caryn Rose

“THREE CHORDS AND BLESSED NOISE”
Horses 50th Anniversary
Chicago | New York City | Boston
November 2025
a tour chronicle
Caryn Rose

Bruce Springsteen has always tried to tell what he believed was the American story, and he is still telling it.

The opening of the new documentary about the loud, hilarious and irreverent ’90’s band the Lunachicks features the same kinds of devices anyone who’s ever watched a music documentary will be familiar with: a shot of an audience, with accompanying excited murmurings, and then, voices making fearless assertions: “Everything was a challenge that needed to be conquered,” “We’re gonna, like, melt people’s fu*king faces off because they expected us to suck,”

2026 is shaping up to be a year for incredible music books. Some of the best non-fiction books are projects where the writer is stepping up to fill a gap, to document the undocumented (or insufficiently chronicled), to tell a story that hasn’t been told adequately, to share a subject the writer is insanely passionate about.

Last night, Bob Dylan played the final of his three Michigan shows this tour. Veteran music journalist and Detroit resident Caryn Rose attended all three, and reports in on the final night.

If you’re a music fan, especially if you are young enough to remember the ’90’s, you know who Melissa Auf der Maur is, even if you don’t recognize her name. She’s the woman who stepped into the bass spot in Hole when Kristen Pfaff died literally moments after “Live Through This,”

If you have never seen the Tommy movie, this will not make any sense to you at all whatsoever. This is not any kind of review.

With the surprise release of brand new music from U2 — the EP, “Days of Ash” — it feels self-indulgent to be thrilled that all four members of the band, including Larry Mullen Jr. (who had been missing from U2’s Las Vegas Sphere residency in 2023-24), are in the studio, writing and recording new music.

“​​Highway of Diamonds – Black America Sings Bob Dylan” is the latest release in Ace Records’ “Black America Sings…” series. Ace is a small but mighty UK label that specializes in reissues and vintage catalog material, prioritizing physical releases that feature thoughtful annotations and liner notes.

On January 28th, 2026, Bruce Springsteen released “Streets of Minneapolis,” a protest song he’d written “in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis.” He continued, “It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.”

In the early 1980s, I was a college student, visiting my parents for the weekend, staying up late and taking advantage of their large color television, flipping through channels and looking for something worthwhile to watch.

If you’ve got a holiday season gift card burning a hole in your pocket and would like some new (or new-ish) music books to read, here are some potential choices for your reading list.

In 1963, The Beatles made a short holiday recording for their fans: the first Beatles Christmas single.

Box sets. Super deluxe editions. Reissues. Whatever you want to call them, it is the season for record companies to give consumers the opportunity to spend their hard-earned cash on previously issued material in new formats, usually buttressed by music you haven’t heard or at least haven’t heard in this particular form.

The first large image you see when entering the first gallery of “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” the massive retrospective of Yoko Ono’s work currently on exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is the large reproduction poster for her debut performance at Carnegie Hall...