Ken Tucker

Kacey Musgraves is something of an anomaly. A Texas native in her mid-20s, she fits most easily into the contemporary "country" category, but the work she co-writes with a variety of collaborators is really a throwback to an earlier era of singer-songwriters — as much influenced by rock and ...

The orchestral swirls, the transition to a soul-man groove, the falsetto croon — there you have some of the key elements to Justin Timberlake's album The 20/20 Experience. The title implies a certain clarity of vision, even as any given song presents the singer as a starry-eyed romantic, ...

"Closer," the first single from Tegan and Sara's new album Heartthrob, pulses with an urgency that's propelled by the synthesizer keyboards of one of the album's producers, Greg Kurstin. The sisters' voices entwine to sing the catchy chorus with a soaring quality that would be airy ...

The cover of David Bowie's new album The Next Day is actually the cover of Bowie's 1977 album Heroes, with a white square placed over the singer's face. It's a brilliantly simple yet shrewd piece of appropriated art, a gesture announcing that Bowie will not try to break with ...

The high lonesome sound of Ashley Monroe's Tennessee voice in "Like a Rose" serves as a clear signal that she's working within a tradition that extends back well beyond her twentysomething years on Earth. One of Monroe's collaborators in that song was Guy Clark, a seventysomething Texas country veteran ...

Guards is a New York band that just released its first full-length album, In Guards We Trust. In "Nightmare," the album's first track, you hear layered vocals and echoing drum thumps — it's like an inviting dream. Guards' music is big on atmospherics: When the band puts together a ...

Critic Ken Tucker says that some songs on Tempest sound less like concentrated efforts than outpourings of rambling thoughts; others are as precisely crafted as any Bob Dylan has written.

The song "I Got You Babe," on Bahamas' new album, Barchords, is obviously not Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe." This version is an original song the Canadian singer-songwriter Afie Jurvanen, who records under the stage name Bahamas, has written about holding and losing someone.

Jurvanen, who has spent ...

It’s a Soundcheck Smackdown singles edition! We’re throwing Queen’s 1975 hit "Bohemian Rhapsody" into the ring for our weekly debate. Emily Rems, managing editor of Bust magazine, and Entertainment Weekly editor-at-large Ken Tucker join us to debate a song that is either ingenious…or just indulgent. And, Queen biographer Mark Blake explains the story behind the song.

Last week, drummer-turned-singer Phil Collins once again publicly stated - and restated - his intentions of withdrawing from the music biz. The news leads us to this week’s Soundcheck Smackdown, when music writer Andy Greenwald and Entertainment Weekly editor-at-large Ken Tucker face off about the highs and lows of the former Genesis frontman’s career.

We say goodbye to The Sopranos with a discussion with Entertainment Weekly critic-at-large Ken Tucker and your predictions about how the show will end. Plus: what TV shows from the past do you miss most?