Mickey Gilley, the smooth-voiced, piano-playing country crooner who helped popularize the “Urban Cowboy” movement of the Eighties, died Saturday in Branson, Missouri. He was 86. Gilley’s publicist confirmed the singer’s death. While Gilley had a run of success in the Seventies singing barroom-piano country ballads and rave-ups like “Room Full …

When Arcade Fire first came roaring out of Montreal with their firmament-strafing debut, Funeral, in 2004, they promised something new, exciting, and somewhat contradictory: heroic, culturally significant indie rock. A significance-deprived world ate it right up. This band didn’t just musically honor Springsteen, U2, and Bowie in the coming years, …

How would you complete this sentence, “Life is too short to…”? Drink bad coffee? Drive boring cars? Be unhappy? However you answer that question will give you an idea of where you should direct your energy. Directing your energy to a goal can also be thought of as manifesting. As …