... but you'll get it all the same. Along with moves and moments. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN Find a gallery of hundreds more playlists made by these same hands at Spotify.

SOME OF YOU THINK because a person is softly spoken that they are always amiable and quiet, the kind of person who will suffer in silence, maybe resent you but not hit back. At most maybe they’ll write a passive-aggressive song one day – ooh, don’t hurt me! – so you’re safe from any stray Canadian singer/songwriters with gentle voices and cherubic faces. Hmm. Ron Sexsmith would like a word, and he has his most recent album, Hangover Terrace , as exhibit A for the Ron Has Had

No wings of desire for Ron Sexsmith. WE DON’T SEE Ron Sexsmith around these parts all that often. It’s not that he has a problem with Australia and New Zealand – we’re nice people, he’ll tell you, and while he’s not exactly Bryan Adams or Drake or Grimes level sales-wise, he’s got fans here in decent numbers for a Canadian singer/songwriter whose style is classicist pop, whose influences are Ray Davies, Paul McCartney and Gordon Lightfoot, whose beats are rhythmic but not tec

Best of both worlds? Peter Garrett (front) and Rob Hirst (back) of Midnight Oil at Sylvania Hotel circa 1979. Photo by Stuart Spence Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence. Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be s

A shadow looms. Warren Ellis (L) and Carly Paradis (R) with Nick Cave above them all. Photo by Megan Cullen NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS Domain, Sydney, January 23   THERE WERE SO MANY moments on this night that were sublime, transcendent or just plain marvellous and there was a section of the show which did almost everything you’d want with almost nothing in the way of tools. Connection and collaboration between on-stage and off-stage was instinctive as well as physical, and

Well really, who wouldn't want to jump back in time right now? CLICK HERE TO LISTEN Find more playlists by me where time is fluid at the house of Biff types, Spotify.

LUCINDA WILLIAMS World’s Gone Wrong (Highway 20)   TO BORROW FROM The Greg Kihn Band (kids, don’t bother asking your grandparents, ask yourself why you’re even reading this!) when it comes to protest songs “they don’t write ‘em like that any more”. Why, in my day … … which is, actually, bullshit. But very popular and oft-repeated bullshit. Ask any music, arts or culture writer anywhere and they’ll tell you for a couple of decades now they’ve been asked to write a story or go

COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS Valentine (Thirty Tigers)   YOU KNOW, I’D LIKE TO BELIEVE this. I’d like to believe when Courtney Marie Andrews sings in Pendulum Swing  – a kind of Buffalo Springfield fringe on a folk song jacket, which opens the album – “if I get what I want, gotta let the pendulum swing/Can’t be good for too long”, that it portends well. This is an album after all called Valentine , and love promised or love sought or even love found would presumably be the currency