We’ve all been duped at one time or another. At some point, everyone has made a serious error in judgment when purchasing music, whether or not he’ll ever admit it. It’s a common story: A really cool-sounding song that grabbed you the first three and a half times you half-heard…

If there is one complaint to be made about punk, or punk rock, or just plain rock music these days, it would have to be that most bands take themselves way too seriously. When one does find an inkling of humor embedded in a punk song, it is of the…

Poets and poetry can come from anywhere. Sometimes the poet and his hometown are completely intertwined, inseparable as the thorn and the rose — much as Lou Reed is fully a part of New York, and Tom Waits is the ragged king of down-and-out Los Angeles. The songs that Stockton,…

Perhaps the best indication that a band is doing something new and genuinely interesting is when music critics thrash around in desperation looking for other bands to compare it to. Season to Risk has been associated most often with Jesus Lizard — probably because of Steve Tulipana’s growling, howling vocals…

Perhaps the only thing worse than being an unknown, struggling musician without a hit song is actually scoring that hit and coping with the sudden, unfathomable fame that goes along with it. Just ask Kurt Cobain — or Warren Zevon, who performs Sunday, August 5, at the Fox Theatre. After…

In the vapid days of the early Reagan years — that period when the musical world turned as gray and dreary as Margaret Thatcher’s underthings — you couldn’t walk out the door without running into a Bangle or a Flock of Something. The first ballistic surge of punk had mostly…

Mike Doughty, Saturday June 30, at the Fox Theatre, is a hardworking man. Since the breakup of Soul Coughing in early 2000, Doughty has toured twice, recorded vocals on BT’s song “Never Gonna Come Back Down” for the soundtrack to Gone in 60 Seconds and prepared Slanky, a book of…

Boise, Idaho: Much has been made of the fact that Doug Martsch and his band, Built to Spill, are based there, as if a vast chasm yawned between the coasts where no one in the music industry could possibly reside. And like his neighbors — gun-happy militia members, snowboarders and…

To listen to each successive David Byrne (Thursday, May 24, at the Fillmore Auditorium) release is to witness the continuing evolution of an odd, skinny butterfly. It’s as if the Scotsman-turned-Manhattanite hatched from a cocoon that was built in a forgotten jar of habanero peppers, his sleeping, developing mind informed…