News

New tracks by Robert Earl Keen, Jamestown Revival and Mickey Guyton make up the 10 must-hear country and Americana songs of the week.

Bastian Baker, “You Should Call Home”

Bastian Baker isn’t just a road warrior; he’s a jet-setter, playing shows in 40 countries throughout the last seven years (including some as Shania Twain’s hand-picked opener). Here, he dispenses advice to the homesick and heartbroken, encouraging his fellow travelers to reach out to their loved ones for a much-needed pick-me-up. The song itself is appropriately buoyant, beginning with piano...

Celebrated author, humorist and The New York Times columnist Russell Baker died Jan. 21 in his home in Leesburg, Va. He was 93.

In addition to his celebrated and much-lauded newspaper columns, Baker hosted PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre beginning in 1993, succeeding Alistair Cooke, and stayed in the spot until 2004, becoming one of public television’s most familiar presences.

According to the New York Times, his son Allen Baker said that he died of complications from fall. Baker was born August 14, 1925 in Morrisonville, Va. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1947. From there, he went on to become a prominent writer. He is best known for his irreverent Times column titled “Observer” which leaned into politics as well as other facets of culture. The column also ran in hundreds of newspapers for 36 years. He received his first Pulitzer Prize for his column in 1979 and then received a second for his best-selling autobiography Growing Up...

As recording artists grapple with the low-yield streaming era, there’s been a surge of creativity off record — in pumped-up concert staging, film scoring, musical theater, memoir-writing. Flexing the storytelling skills he’s flaunted in songs and concert banter for decades, Bruce Springsteen rose to the moment with his 2016 autobiography Born to Run and the subsequent Springsteen on Broadway, his (mostly) one-man meta-jukebox-musical, which ends its year-plus New York City run this month. It’s now both a Netflix film and 2.5 hour soundtrack LP — a model of modern, multi-platform art-making,...

“Springsteen on Broadway” might be the single best thing that Netflix has ever done. Which isn’t to say that it’s a better film than “Roma” or “Private Life” — or that it’s even a film, at all (it’s categorized as a “special”) — but that it epitomizes the full potential of a platform so large that it tends to crush whatever it touches. Beginning on December 16, just a few hours after Bruce Springsteen growls the final notes of his Broadway residency, Netflix subscribers around the globe will be gifted front-row seats to one of the most exclusive shows the Great White Way has ever seen.

And this is the show — nothing more, and nothing less.

Directed by longtime Springsteen videographer Thom Zimny, the streaming version of “Springsteen on Broadway” starts with the Boss arriving on stage, it ends with him leaving it, and it doesn’t appear to...