Though it’s been nearly two years since Alison Krauss released a record of her own — 1999’s widely acclaimed Forget About It — the prodigal bluegrass vocalist has never veered far from the country-music spotlight. Most recently, Krauss was among the brightest lights on the soundtrack to O Brother, Where…
In the liner notes to Ties That Bind, singer-songwriter Sally Shuffield’s second CD, there are antique photographs surrounded by dried rose petals and Chantilly lace — presumably, the people pictured are somehow related and dear to Shuffield’s life and experience. There’s a feeling of reflection, a reverence in the presentation…
Sometimes, Jason Janz just cannot get Marilyn Manson out of his head. “I decided a while ago that I couldn’t listen to his songs anymore. It bothered me the way they lodged in my brain. I’d sing them to my wife, around the house: ‘I don’t like the drugs, but…
Jonny Greenwood would prefer not to be here; this I know. Talking on an intercontinental phone call to yet another journalist about how great Radiohead, in which he plays guitar, is and how important Amnesiac, the band’s new record, is in the face of the cultural poverty that’s replaced the…
Those who fear that jazz is dead or dying or in a weird state of suspended animation need look no further than the Rodriguez family to find the heart of the music beating true. Ignore the bickering over styles and stances that presently keeps musicians and fans spinning their wheels:…
Pneumonia was a long time coming. Recorded in 1999, it was a casualty of the Universal-Polygram merger that killed the group’s Outpost label and left the alt-country standard-bearers in limbo for the better part of three years. The good news: Pneumonia was worth the wait. The bad news: The long…
Putting out an extraordinarily generous two-disc collection based upon a 21-year-old LP that was hugely unsuccessful at the time of its release and hasn’t moved many more copies since seems ridiculous at first — and upon closer analysis, too. But what’s likely to be bad news for Matador, the company…
Simon Joyner is a brooding, introspective singer-songwriter who neither sings nor writes songs. It would be more descriptive to say that Joyner writes poems and delivers them in a manner that approximates singing — but just barely. His voice falters at every chord as though unsure whether or not a…
Over the phone, I hear the woman present the Beta Band’s John Maclean with a difficult choice. “Would you like chocolate-covered peanuts or…pistachios?” Maclean doesn’t hesitate: It’s peanuts all the way. His thickly accented publicist asks me if I would mind giving her charge a moment to enjoy one or…
Along with Doc Martin, Christopher Lawrence, June 14 at The Church, has helped make the Los Angeles club scene respectable. Yet unlike Martin — who’s famous for his excursions into deep house — Lawrence focuses primarily on the trance genre: the techno offshoot built around beautiful synthesizer lines and hypnotic…
Yeah, Red Rocks is old — officially sixty years old this year and closer to sixty million years old in actual fact. But is there a better place to see a big concert? Anywhere? On the planet? Maybe: Supposedly those shows staged in front of the pyramids in Egypt are…
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…
It’s Friday night in St. Louis, and inside the Pageant Theater, 2,000 people are soaking up a powerful message from Fred LeBlanc, drummer and vocalist for the New Orleans-based outfit Cowboy Mouth. Sporting a T-shirt bearing a one-word caption — INTENSE — LeBlanc prowls the edge of the stage, microphone…
Why an interview with comedienne/actress Janeane Garofalo in Westword’s music section? Plenty of reasons. For one, she entered the public consciousness largely through appearances on MTV, whose long-running animated series Daria should be subtitled Janeane at 16 (Garofalo hosted Behind the Scenes at Daria for the network last year). For…
Jamaican dancehall music has always mirrored the evolution of American rap. This includes the rash of violent, hate-filled lyrics that got Tipper Gore in such a tizzy back in the early ’90s when rappers like Ice-T released diatribes against police, women and assorted other objects of contempt. Dancehall stars, too,…
Remember that weird childhood game of sitting in the dark on Halloween, passing around “human body parts” — carrots for fingers, peeled grapes for eyeballs and chilled spaghetti for guts? The mere power of suggestion (combined with too much candy corn) could make for a rollicking evening of disgusting fun…
For the record, “The Big Unit” is the nickname of Randy Johnson, pitcher extraordinaire for the Arizona Diamondbacks, whose Bank One Ballpark is just a bunt or two away from the original Alice Coopers’town in Phoenix. For Denverites who scoped the menu during last week’s grand opening of this city’s…
Although a small army of bands — Blink 182, Sum 41 and SR-71 among them — have done their best to stomp out whatever dignity’s left in pop punk, the poppy three-chord rock of the Alkaline Trio is graceful enough to excuse some of the style’s more embarrassing moments. While…
Since forming last summer, Hi-Fidelity, Thursday, June 7, at the 15th Street Tavern, with the Gravity Index and Los Federalis, has become one of Denver’s more appealing arbiters of the garage-rock gospel. Fronted by vocalist/guitarist Joaquin Liebert, the band’s live set is peppered by a batch of irresistibly crunchy pop…
Drummer Levon Helm spent a lot of years smoking a lot of cigarettes, so it wasn’t the biggest shock in the world when, in 1997, doctors told him he had throat cancer. But what the white-jacketed men and women of New York City’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center did to rid…
There hasn’t been enough laughing in classical music for centuries,” claims local guitar phenom Janet Feder. “Too much composing and performing gets caught up in itself. I spent years practicing scales and doing all that. Hopefully, I’m sort of returning the fun back to guitar playing. Because sometimes, when I’m…
On this long player, the members of Britain’s newest Next Big Thing show they might have just enough Oasis in them to avoid becoming this year’s Balaam & the Angel. Winner of virtually every UK music award in existence, the band rises and falls on the shoulders of singer/guitarist/songwriter Kelly…
