There are roughly 1,061 miles between Denver and Austin, Texas. It’s a journey that takes the average driver — traveling at the recommended speed, of course — about twenty hours to complete (or, to be more specific, 1164 minutes if you follow the route provided on www.mapquest.com, which takes you…

Martha Stewart recently introduced her spring line at Kmart. Lovely, it is: full of pastels and flowers and festive little patterns that are meant to invite all kinds of feelings of renewal and meditations on the rebirth of all living things. (Not to mention feelings of inadequacy if the dishtowels…

Eric Bachmann recently had a revelation. He realized that he liked writing songs. He liked writing them so much that he came up with a name for a new project — Crooked Fingers — and wrote an entire album full of tunes, with verses and choruses and Bachmann singing like…

The Denver Record Collectors Spring Expo 2000, Sunday, March 26, might be the only place in town where you’re likely to see hip-hop DJs and fans of ’50s rock compete for access to the same record bins. The annual event will once again be held at the Holiday Inn Northglenn…

The Maybellines, with Dear Nora and Jason Heller Thursday, March 30, at the Bluebird Theater, bounce around the same musical stratosphere like fellow locals the Breezy Porticos and Dressy Bessy, and it’s an affiliation the band wears like a scratch-and-sniff sticker. The cover of the band’s new self-titled single features…

The policeman was standing near the entrance of the Fillmore Auditorium last Thursday night. Not that the crowd — sizable, but under capacity — that had amassed to see Fiona Apple presented any threat of violence or substantial drug possession. The cop — an older man, crew cut, dressed in…

Battle of the Bands, Thursday nights at the Buffalo Rose in Golden, provides local bands and musicians a chance to compete for top honors in a performance setting. The weekly event is part open-mike night, part rehearsal, part vaudeville cabaret. At its most heated, it’s a musical variation on American…

Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise, with John McEuen and Jimmy Ibbotson, Sunday, March 19, as part of an E-Town taping at the Boulder Theater, has maintained a somewhat more than normal level of interest in the past few years, based as much on the mythology of the band’s formation as on…

A friend of mine has this habit. She’s normally a very well-composed, even reserved person who hails from a finer area of Boston, likes to talk about art and uses words like fabulous without any pretext of irony. Yet she’s got more than a little distant Irish blood running through…

The last time the Flaming Lips played Denver, the band looked out on the capacity crowd at the Ogden Theatre and saw what some — okay, most — musicians might regard as a peculiar sight. The audience members were more or less doing what they normally do at concerts: watching…

Colorado Springs’ Lost Creek, Sunday, March 12, at Swallow Hill, answers the call to lead this month’s monthly jam sponsored by the Colorado Bluegrass Music Society. A traditionally composed five-piece bluegrass outfit that includes Jeff Back on mandolin and Mickey Stinnett on dobro, the Lost ones perform both strictly defined…

Fine Line Pictures is getting ready for next month’s West Coast premiere of The Filth and the Fury, a documentary on the career of the Sex Pistols. Yet for anyone who’s likely to give a spit, the story is already familiar. The band’s rise — and the oh-so-loving affair between…

Luna The Days of Our Nights (Jericho) Someone in ad land saw the commercial viability of Luna’s Dean Wareham, at least in his previous incarnation as the frontman for Galaxie 500: Late last year, the band joined Curtis Mayfield as a soundtrack provider for a national car commercial. Meanwhile, middle…

Patty Larkin is sitting in a hotel room in Grand Junction. It’s cold there, she says, but not any colder than it gets on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where she lives and, when she can, records in her home studio. The hotel of the moment is pretty typical of those she’s…

The Dismemberment Plan, with Planes Mistaken for Stars and Tanger, Thursday, March 2, at the Raven, hails from Washington, D.C. — land of a thousand emo-punks — and moves in circles with the likes of Burning Airlines and Juno. Since forming seven years ago, the band has proved to underground…

The great Seattle explosion of the early ’90s did much to reinforce the belief that geography can be an important factor in furthering a music scene. In the Emerald City, it seemed that the concentrated mix of rainy days, heroin and disgruntled people (many of them on heroin) was conducive…

Almost six months after David Fox invited a couple dozen people — and seven local bands — into his Alley Studio space in Northwest Denver for an initial round of recordings, 2000: LiveDenverComp is ready to see the light of release. The compilation is the first offering from Fox’s new…

In September 1999, local hip-hop promoter Wendy Barr invited more than a hundred of her closest friends into a not-quite-finished space on Market Street, a portion of LoDo known for its sports bars, trendy restaurants and even trendier people. It was the grand opening of Liquid, a dance club that…

In the annals of jazz lore, the story goes something like this: Dizzy Gillespie, perhaps tired from a long night of gigging, mistakenly sat on his trumpet, causing the horn’s normally straight bell to twist skyward at a perfectly right angle. Desperate to continue with the next set, Diz blew…

Over the telephone, local blues light Nina Storey has a teeny-tiny voice. It’s the soft-spoken, polite kind of voice one might expect of a florist, or a librarian, or a person who spends large amounts of time soothing animals or small children. So when she expounds on the latest wave…

In the interest of full disclosure, I must take this opportunity to let readers know that Backwash is in the midst of negotiating a merger with America Online, Time Warner and EMI, so that, like the entire catalogues from Frank Sinatra, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, everything printed on…

The all-powerful selection committee of the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference has spoken. Last week, the mighty panel announced its picks for the annual event and the results, ladies and gentlemen, are surprising. Of the more than sixty Colorado bands that gathered up photos, random press and bio…