David Bazan has always been a soul searcher. As the driving force behind Pedro the Lion, Bazan has made a career of examining the intricacies and shifting dynamics of relationships — between men and women, parent and child, God and man, siblings, and all points between. Initially a stripped-down, acoustic…
Country legend Merle Haggard is on the phone from his hotel room in Tucson. He performed there last night, and right after this interview, he’ll jump on the tour bus and head for another show in El Paso. Despite the decades-long grind of travel and repetitious interviews, the 65-year-old Hag…
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“Most people in bands don’t drink if they’re serious and professional,” Bono testified during Peter Buck’s recent air rage trial — and anyone who understands how absurd the words “serious” and “professional” are in connection to rock ‘n’ roll may also understand why the Replacements — and not U2 or…
About halfway through her new live record, MTV Unplugged 2.0, Lauryn Hill stops to consider her public image. “I don’t know what the press is saying,” she tells the rapt, borderline-fawning crowd, “’cause I don’t really listen to the press too much, but I know the view is I’m emotionally…
If Elf Power had emerged in 1985 instead of 1994 from Athens, Georgia, it’d most likely be lumped in with the (mostly) ill-fated Paisley Underground bands (Rain Parade, the Three O’Clock, Dream Syndicate) or the more general niche of “neo-psychedelic” (the Church, Bevis Frond, Spacemen 3). Fortunately, there’s been a…
Dead of a heart attack at age 52 on January 1, 1997, Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt can’t enjoy his recent resurrection. He’d surely get a kick out of the recent tribute album Poet, which assembled the likes of Steve Earle, Guy Clark, Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, and the Cowboy…
In 1998, around the time Painted From Memory — his team-up with Burt Bacharach — hit stores, Elvis Costello gave up on the idea of playing rock ‘n’ roll, or so he said. But he didn’t really need to put it in words: Costello had already spent much of the…
Before www.truckersonspeed.com was up and running, all routes of Truckers on Speed Web information led to P.A.T.T. Who’s P.A.T.T.? Parents Against Tired Truckers, that’s who! Ever since Mothers Against Drunk Drivers realized they were M.A.D.D. (cool!), folks have been organizing under any cause, just as long as the initials spell…
It’s a sound that’s swiftly showing up everywhere, like a suddenly trendy drink embraced by the masses as the perfect tonic for the times. A bracing mix of tough and tender, sweet but street, that somehow makes everybody feel ar-right in these strange, uncertain post-9/11 days. Switch on the radio,…
Martin Sexton is the central character in one of those bootstrapping success stories that Americans love. The performer, who began his career by busking on Boston street corners, has built a supportive fan base of thousands across the nation, yet he remains independent of the machine that perpetuates mediocre talents…
There’s a famous story about Sonny Boy Williamson’s attempt to record with the Yardbirds in the mid-’60s. The band entered the session with the cockiness of emerging British pop stars, almost as though they were doing this broken-down mule a favor just by showing up, but when Sonny Boy began…
If there’s one thing the world most definitely does not need right now, it’s another watery mix CD from some overhyped trance DJ — you know, the ones with the tastefully modernist cover art (invariably featuring a handsome European staring meaningfully into space) and the interminable synth build-ups that eventually…
Top 10 Things to Like About the New Lisa Loeb Album: (10) It’s 100 times better than the new Alanis. And dig: The best track (the dreamy/anthemic “The Way It Really Is”) was co-penned by Glenn Ballard. (9) No “Stay” — none of these dozen tunes is as cloyingly mush-silly…
If hip-hop is indeed “the proverbial sad clown of music,” as New York rapper J-Live proclaimed on 1999’s unreleased and unofficial anthem “The Best Part,” then J-Live himself is quite possibly the art form’s Emmett Kelly. Despite personal and professional heartache, he’s managed to maintain his optimism and love for…
Joy is woefully underrepresented in today’s popular music. Your average rock musician would rather admit to an unironic appreciation of Britney Spears than express something so unfettered — so uncool! — as pure pleasure. So thank God for Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh. On stage, he might come off as your standard-issue,…
“Disco sucks” are fighting words to the finely honed ears of Charles Fields, widely known in the world of house music as DJ Feelgood. As a child growing up in Baltimore during the ’70s, Fields was often awakened early in the morning by his father blasting current club hits on…
During its seven-year tenure as one of indiedom’s leading lights, Seattle’s 764-Hero has reaped a massive harvest of glowing reviews — fascinatingly, all written by the same person. Or at least they’re the result of hapless cub reporters cribbing wholesale from the group’s press kit, recycling the same info and…
When Hunter Brown was a kid back in Georgia, he used to listen to records in his room and try to play along on the guitar. It’s a necessary rite of passage for all players — male or female, genre irrelevant — but where other kids his age might have…
Years ago, when I lived in Dallas, one of the local bands threw a huge party for itself to celebrate its two-year anniversary. Keeping a band together for two years is a rare, extraordinary feat, its singer explained to me at the time. I remember being amused by his self-importance,…
The “official” record — Stereo, credited to Paul Westerberg, remember him? — is sloppy in an “artful” way, meaning songs abruptly end when the tape runs out while others collapse when the guy singing them peters out; they’re demos, or sound like them, assembled from two years’ worth of basement…
Cibo Matto’s 1996 debut, Viva La Woman, was a refreshing blast of ass-shaking grooves and nonsensical lyrics, made distinctive by its evocative samples and spare instrumentation. The duo’s 1999 follow-up, Stereo Type A, expanded upon Viva La Woman’s methods, using more instruments and more band members — including keyboardist Yuka…
