Nick Lowe knows something about the fickleness of fame.

Back in 1970, his then-band, Brinsley Schwarz, was scheduled to make a big splash at a New York concert arranged by the group's manager. But the British journalists flown in by the label were late and inebriated, trashed the concert, and Brinsley Schwarz retreated to England.

At the end of the decade, Lowe -- by then a producer or sideman for a host of punk/New Wave acts -- had his own Top 40 hit, "Cruel to Be Kind." But the hits didn't keep on comin', and Lowe spent the '80s trying to find his place in a changing pop world.

Now it's 2007, and the "headmaster of British rock" -- so-called by a clever publicist -- is out with his first album in six years, At My Age (Yep Roc). It comes after a career renaissance in the '90s as well as what Lowe, 58, calls "events, events, events" -- the birth of his son, the death of his parents -- that kept him away from the recording studio after 2001's The Convincer.

- Todd Leopold, CNN

Click the link below to read the full article.