Donovan Leitch, who’s gone by his first name only for more than five decades, wrote and recorded hit songs like “Mellow Yellow” and “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” yet his influence as a songwriter and musician reaches beyond his own music. He inspired David Bowie, Marc Bolan and a number of other…
It’s official: Denver-based hip-hop artist Trev Rich has been signed to Ca$h Money Records. The Source has confirmed that Birdman signed the Colorado rising star a few weeks ago, a solid next step for Rich after the success of his 2016 album Rain in the Summer. Being a part of…
Donny McCaslin felt a little shy when he first met David Bowie during a rehearsal of the latter’s “Sue (or in a Season of Crime),” which would be released as a limited-edition single and on Bowie’s 2014 compilation album, Nothing Has Changed. The New York-based jazz saxophonist leads his own…
The music industry and how music is disseminated these days is quite different than when Echo & the Bunnymen released significant albums like Porcupine and Ocean Rain in the 1980s. Guitarist Will Sergeant says that everything’s changed; the whole ballpark has changed. That’s why the band, which released its twelfth…
Grande Orquesta Navarre came together in the summer of 2015 when Evan Orman, Sara Parkinson, Susan Cahill and Tom Hagerman decided to ditch the genre confines of their former tango outfit Exstasis for a more open-format band. Drawing on their mutual interest and backgrounds in classical music, jazz, rock, pop…
Mama, we’re not in Muskogee anymore. Country legend Merle Haggard is throwing his hat into the marijuana market from beyond the grave. Haggard died on April 6, 2016, on what would have been his 79th birthday. Before his death, however, he had joined forces with the Colorado Weed Co. in 2015…
The September 13, 2016 edition of NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross features an interview with comic and “Roastmaster General” Jeff Ross who produces and hosts Comedy Central’s celebrity roasts and others. During a line of questioning about changing audiences in an age of trigger warnings, Ross insists that more people want to…
Editor’s note: Twenty years ago today, influential hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur died in Las Vegas after being shot six days earlier. In his new book, Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap (out today with Hachette Books), former music…
Editor’s Note: The Denver Bootleg is a series chronicling the history of local music venues by longtime Denver cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz. Visit Krumpholz’s website to see more of his work…
The Velveteers started in Boulder in September 2014 when frontwoman and songwriter Demi Demitro started playing guitar. Demitro had been singing and making up songs from a very young age and eventually starting some kind of band seemed inevitable. “My parents have videos of us on road trips and I’d…
Tribute bands. Love them or loathe them, they’ve been big business for years now, and as nostalgia tightens its grip on music fans, they’ll likely go on and thrive. People love going out, paying $5 or so for a ticket, and catching a band playing faithful versions of songs they…
In the 1980s and ’90s, the Denver band Ironwood Rain “turned some heads,” according to former frontman Scotte Burns. He talks about his years of making music without remorse, shedding no tears when describing the fact that music is no longer a part of his life. For Scotte, navigating downtown has…
Editor’s Note: The Denver Bootleg is a series chronicling the history of local music venues by longtime Denver cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz. Visit Krumpholz’s website to see more of his work…
The great thing about writing about music for a publication like Westword is you never really know what’s going to land itself on your task list from one day to the next. Never is that more true that right now because, just as we were winding down in preparation for…
Editor’s Note: The Denver Bootleg is a series chronicling the history of local music venues by longtime Denver cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz. Visit Krumpholz’s website to see more of his work…
It’s a summer afternoon, and Joseph Olenik, better known as Partylord, is sweating his ass off. His backyard studio, which he shares with fellow artist and roommate Pickle Palmer, has no circulation, and the screen-printed beer koozies and wood cuts filling the space only serve as a sort of stuffy…
On August 17, the website Blabbermouth.net reported that Denver thrash metal band Havok had been kicked off of a tour with Megadeth, just as it was about it hit Mexico. The tour, which also features Suicidal Tendencies, Amon Amarth and Metal Church, was just the latest in a series of…
It’s been a while since music fans depended on TV channels like MTV to get their fix of new and favorite music. Today devices like Roku and Apple TV are becoming increasingly popular as people realize that the big cable companies are charging a hell of a lot of money for…
With multiple platinum albums under his belt, Josh Groban is among the most successful pop singers of the past fifteen years. He has also appeared on most prominent television talk shows, including the Oprah Winfrey Show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, 20/20, Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. (He even performed…
The Go-Go’s formed in Los Angeles in the midst of the city’s rising punk scene, three years before their debut album, 1981’s Beauty and the Beat, shot to the top of Billboard’s Top 200 on the strength of pop hits like “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat.” “When…
Editor’s Note: The Denver Bootleg is a series chronicling the history of local music venues by longtime Denver cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz. Visit Krumpholz’s website to see more of his work…
Editor’s Note: The Denver Bootleg is a series chronicling the history of local music venues by longtime Denver cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz. Visit Krumpholz’s website to see more of his work…
