Splitting off from Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, Laurel Canyon Boulevard runs a circuitous route through unkempt mountain acres, past the Laurel Canyon Country Store, weaving and curving for miles before finally spilling out in Studio City. Along the way small roads split off into the mountains like tributaries from a river. Up these narrow,…

Halfway through the first season of HBO’s megachurch comedy The Righteous Gemstones, the show devotes an entire episode to a flashback, showing how the family of Bible-thumping televangelists came to be so hilariously dysfunctional. The episode culminates in a live performance of a song called “Misbehavin’,” by siblings Aimee-Leigh (played by Jennifer Nettles) and Baby…

When Ryan Bingham accepted an Academy Award in 2010, he looked like he was on top of the world. Amanda Seyfried and Miley Cyrus announced that his song “The Weary Kind,” from the film Crazy Heart, had beaten two compositions by Randy Newman, and he took the stage with producer/co-writer T Bone Burnett, thanking his…

When it hit theaters in 1979, The Muppet Movie took that troupe of felt characters out of the theater and into the real world. On their hit television show, they ran a vaudeville company that hosted a different celebrity each week, but their first feature film sent them on the road in America, to small-town…