Zeros

The Harmonica Under the Tree: A Cautionary Tale Every year, around this time, well-meaning aunts, uncles, and grandparents across the nation have the same thought: This is the year I become the cool relative . And every year, that thought leads directly to the music store, where a shiny harmonica sits in a little velvet-lined box, looking like the gateway to a lifetime of blues riffs and campfire singalongs. I know this because I've been that mom. I've stood in the checkout line, harmonica in hand, already imagining my son's face lighting up. I pictured him at eighteen, thanking me in his graduation speech for sparking his musical journey. What I did not picture was the harmonica living in a junk drawer by February, nestled between dead batteries and a broken game controller. Here's what happens when you gift a child an instrument they didn't ask for: nothing . Or worse, something . In my case, the harmonica begat a xylophone the following Christmas. Th...

D'Angelo: The Neo-Soul Architect Who Made the Piano Sacred Again The music world has lost one of its most enigmatic and influential voices. D'Angelo , born Michael Eugene Archer, died Tuesday, October 14, 2025, after a courageous battle with cancer. He was 51 years old. To understand D'Angelo's impact is to understand what soul music became in the 1990s—and what it could never be again without him. When his debut album Brown Sugar arrived in 1995, it didn't just introduce a new artist; it announced a movement . Neo-soul , they would call it, though that label always felt too small for what D'Angelo accomplished. He took the church-trained reverence of his Virginia upbringing and merged it with hip-hop's rhythmic complexity, creating something both ancient and utterly new. But it was 2000's Voodoo that cemented his genius. Here was an album that moved like molasses, that understood silence as music, that made the piano not just cool but e...