Nick Paumgarten

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Nick Paumgarten

The Tubs are a British jangle-rock band, with a cheeky-dirtbag edge. The front man is a thirty-three-year-old Welshman named Owen Williams, who sounds like Richard Thompson and whose songs on the Tubs’ most recent album, “Cotton Crown,” arose out of grief over the suicide of his mother, a singer and novelist, a decade ago. The album cover is a photo of her breast-feeding him.

3 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Nick Paumgarten

Stephen Malkmus likes tennis. He recently moved to Chicago, with his wife, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and tries to play at least once a week. Not long ago, he passed through New York while on tour—not with Pavement, his longtime band, or with the Jicks, his other longtime band, but with the Hard Quartet, his latest project, which is almost always described, with indeterminate irony, as an underground supergroup.

1 month ago | businessandamerica.com | Nick Paumgarten

In 2011, Dobney put together an exhibition celebrating the work of the Italian American luthiers who had designed and built the archtop guitars beloved by jazz musicians. Seeking objects for the show, he met a record producer and guitar maven named Perry Margouleff, who said that he might have a few instruments to share, as an anonymous lender. Dobney visited a warehouse outside the city where, in a reception area, Margouleff showed him eight guitars.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Nick Paumgarten

In 2007, Jayson Dobney, an Iowan with a master’s degree in the history of musical instruments, from the University of South Dakota, moved to New York to be a curator in the department of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For decades, there had been whispers in guitar circles of a vast trove of twentieth-century guitars, in private hands, somewhere in the tri-state area—an El Dorado of coveted Strats and Les Pauls and Martins of impeccable provenance.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Nick Paumgarten

In 2014, Ricky Cobb was a sociology professor at Moraine Valley Community College, outside Chicago. Reared in Horse Cave, Kentucky, fatherless since the age of five, Cobb was now forty-two, with five daughters, and in the middle of his second divorce. To keep his students, and himself, interested, he cracked a lot of jokes; by his accounting, twenty per cent of his lecture material was basically standup.