Travis Morrison could have this job if he wanted it. If he felt like giving up his day (and night) job fronting The Dismemberment Plan, he could step into a gig talking and writing about music with no trouble, with little discernible change in his routine. It’s something he would…
Usually you figure the rock star doesn’t want to be asked about his guitar solos–that it’s old hat, something he’s had to pontificate on countless times in his career as a professional musician, each time getting closer and closer to slipping into that glazed autopilot mode familiar to anyone who’s…
Because she covers Hank Williams (“Cold Cold Heart”) and songs made famous by Nina Simone (“Turn Me On”) and Hoagy Carmichael (“The Nearness of You”), because her debut comes courtesy of revered jazz label Blue Note, because Come Away With Me was produced by Arif Mardin (who’s worked on albums…
Since when has it been cool for dudes to cry? You turn around for a minute and suddenly the same kids who were frontin’ at the mall are weeping on each other’s shoulders. Did emo spawn the sensitivity of the new century or visa-versa? Either way, I guess I’d rather…
Old 97’s guitarist Ken Bethea is up and running with his new solo project, The Scrap Hotel. (Apparently, it’s a metaphor for your brain. We still prefer to call ours The Jack Daniel’s Museum of Bad Ideas and Cloudy Memories. Same idea, we guess.) Haven’t heard a note yet, but…
The history of country music is littered with guys like Riley Crabtree and Leroy Jenkins and Mitchell Torok and Frankie Miller–the coulda-beens and shoulda-beens fallen prey to bad deals and bad decisions, or men for whom being good just wasn’t good enough. If the history books are written by and…
Had the singular pleasure last week of hearing Is a Woman, the new album by the avant-country outfit Lambchop, in its perfect setting, standing in a 45-minute line at the post office, waiting to send a certified letter to my mom. If you’re not familiar with Lambchop, or only know…
John Dufilho = The Deathray Davies. Until The Deathray Davies recorded their third and latest album, the just-released The Day of the Ray, that statement was more or less fact, unless you felt like showing your work, in which case it would look more like: The Deathray Davies – live…
There is a small, forgotten gem of a short story by Fritz Leiber, an industrial-era tall tale called “Gonna Roll the Bones.” The hero, Joe Slattermill, is a broken-down ore miner with a born gift for precision throwing. One night when he feels the pressure inside him building to the…
Let’s say you’re a young person, maybe between the ages of 19 and 26, and you’ve finished school and you’ve moved to a new city and you’re happily in the process of finding your way around the world, maybe working a job, maybe not, maybe riding a bike, maybe driving…
Todd Lewis and Taz Bentley probably could have interested a bigger label in their new project, The Burden Brothers. After all, Lewis was, until last August, the front man for the Toadies, and for years Bentley supplied the big beat for Reverend Horton Heat. Instead, fed up with the bureaucracy…
The title of Lucy Loves Schroeder’s album says it all: Lucy is a Band. Lucy is not the name of the woman who sings and plays guitar on the majority of the songs. Schroeder is not the bass player, the drummer, Lucy’s boyfriend or, like the Peanuts characters they’re named…
Mark Stuart’s laundry is done. He knows, because some guy he doesn’t know just came outside and told him to get his socks the hell out of the dryer. “It’s all about the glamour,” Stuart says wryly. “The rock-and-roll lifestyle.” Scratch a rock and roller with clean skivvies and find…
Alicia Keys is so 2001’s Lauryn Hill: a young, beautiful, smart African-American woman with more talent than the white critical community knows how to handle, pushed to the lip of the mainstream media stage by editors and producers grateful for the chance to chip away at their guilt over never…
The four members of Los Angeles-based System of a Down are the unlikely architects of a twisted new prog-rock schematic. Their quirky time signatures and complicated instrumental arrangements make their music a little difficult to embrace upon first listen. (Give their audience credit for remembering to take their Ritalin.) Pay…
Our short attention spans have rendered her an afterthought, no less so because Sara Hickman long ago (or was it last month?) stepped off the 500X and Club Dada stages and moved to Austin, where all the pretty folk and folkies go sooner or later. But just because she’s out…
Don’t know about you, but I’m personally counting the days till an emo star ends up on Oprah. At a small club gig in New York City a couple of weeks ago, Rainer Maria guitarist Kyle Fischer opened his set by thanking a dozen or so people (by name and…
On February 2, Rich Soul got in bed next to his wife, Renee. Their son Julian was in his room asleep. None of this was out of the ordinary for the young family. What happened next, sadly, was; Rich Soul never woke up, passing away quietly during the night. He…
So, OK, yes, I spent more nights last year standing with my arms crossed in rock clubs than standing with my arms crossed in dance clubs (and still more nights than that sitting cross-legged at home watching Law & Order). But even if the paradigmatic shift that was supposed to…
Fifteen years ago, Justin Broadrick helped create one of the most intense, groundbreaking death metal albums ever. Now, he’s co-created one of the most intense, groundbreaking hip-hop albums in recent memory. What gives? Broadrick, who drifted out of Napalm Death after its debut, Scum, to found the dense industrial group…
It’s never really mattered who’s dropped by to lend a hand in the studio; as long as Anders Parker is in the house, so is Varnaline. The band, both a legitimate group and a de facto one-man operation, rose from the ashes of Space Needle six years ago, with drummer…
“The way I see it,” Loudon Wainwright III says from his California home, “all I’m really doing is reporting what’s going on with me, although obviously I’m aware that what happens to me happens to other people. I’ve always written a lot about what was going on in my life…
