The winners of the 2014 Unsigned Only Music Competition have been announced, and the Fort Collins band You, Me & Apollo won in the Americana category for its song “I Don’t Want to Be Loved.” The competition received more than eight thousand entries with a finalist group presented to a…
Now in its fifth and final year, Albuquerque’s Gatas y Vatas experimental music festival is preparing for a grand finale this weekend. Founding performer and festival organizer Marisa Demarco says that it was her experience as a performer and audience member at Denver’s Titwrench music festival inspired her to create…
Les Claypool and Larry Lalonde will be signing copies of Primus: Over the Electric Grapevine, an oral history of the band, at Tattered Cover on Thursday, September 18, at 7 p.m.. Primus is also slated to perform at Riot Fest on Friday, September 19. Formed in 1984 in the San…
Denver rapper Demario “Lil Bad” Gentry has been busy recently, releasing The Colfax District, Bad News and Shark Syndrome 2.0. He’s also played shows all over the country, from Los Angeles to Miami, and he hasn’t always found support for his home town during his travels. “This is my home,…
Paul Banker, aka electronic-music producer Real Cosby, is a homeowner. Not because his occasional live show and handful of EPs have made him any real money, but because he has a full-time job and a family and all the responsibilities associated with those things. While that same litany has been…
Allout Helter began in 2008 as a melodic hardcore band with some metal chops. In 2010, the group put an ad on Craigslist for a lead vocalist and attracted the attention of Ross Hostage. Hostage had spent the previous decade playing in Action Friend and Suburban Hostage. He brought a…
You might hear Rubedo anywhere. In its four and a half years of existence, the Denver trio has played at bars in San Diego and rallies in Civic Center Park. It has played a dance music festival in the shadow of an NFL stadium and an art festival on the…
For Joseph Pope III, who’s played in a number of local acts like Born in the Flood, the Wheel, Fairchildren and is now the front man of Miss America by Wheary, songwriting is like falling in love. “It’s like you’re in this honeymoon period, and you’re just so infatuated and…
Wolf Eyes is among the most well-known bands to have come out of the world of noise music. But the act was never strictly noise; its music, even early on, included experiments in texture and atmosphere that could terrify and inspire. What started as Nate Young’s solo project now also…
When it comes to playing the music industry game, sometimes it is easiest to take the industry out of the picture altogether and do it yourself. This is the ethos behind GravesEnd Records, a self-proclaimed old-school punk label started in 2009 by a musician and Colorado transplant who goes by…
If there is a strange request that a concert promoter can make of a musician, it’s a safe bet that Scott McCaughey has heard it. He co-founded the Young Fresh Fellows in 1983 and played with R.E.M. for close to twenty years. Lately, he’s been on tour with the Baseball…
After thirteen years together, the Fruit Bats played their final shows last November. At the time, frontman Eric D. Johnson didn’t have any immediate plans to write another album. He figured he’d keep composing film scores — something he’s done for the past three years — and continue to produce…
1. They Come From Everywhere Phish’s following will literally follow the band anywhere. Many in attendance over the weekend at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park flew in from all over the country. Some fans drove from Massachusetts and Vermont, in some cases without tickets, hoping to score some in the parking…
It didn’t take long to run into weed at the Phish show. Within thirty minutes of going into Dick’s Sporting Goods Park on Saturday, we saw concert-goers generously sharing hits on their pipes and puffs on their joints and vape pens. THC wax and shatter were also being passed around…
Editor’s note: A writer sent us this essay on her experience at one of this weekend’s Phish shows at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park — the first with recovering-addict support she’s seen since she stopped drinking six months ago. We’re publishing it anonymously to protect her privacy. When I tell people…
Phish returns to Dick’s Sporting Goods Park this weekend for its 84th, 85th and 86th shows in Colorado. I know that thanks to the meticulous documentation available at phish.net. Also thanks to phish.net, I can tell you when the band first played in Colorado (July 28, 1988 at the Roma…
“It was really cool, like completing a circle,” says Adam Revell of the first time he realized he already knew Stephen Thurston, a fellow keyboardist he’d begun to collaborate with. Years earlier, Thurston had taken piano lessons from Revell, formerly of the funk/jam colossus The Motet. Revell didn’t remember Thurston…
Joe King Carrasco has traded his crown and cape for a cowboy hat and sparkly Lady of Guadalupe shirt, but he is still just as eccentric and entertaining as he was decades ago, when a particularly wild performance got him banned from Saturday Night Live. Carrasco, who grew up in…
When MC Frontalot (born Damien Hess) coined the term “nerdcore,” which inspired his 2000 single “Nerdcore Hiphop,” he wasn’t part of a movement. But around then, when artists like YTCracker and MC Hawking became more visible alongside Frontalot and MC Chris, a phenomenon emerged, inspiring two 2008 documentaries: Nerdcore Rising…
Marni Pickens wasn’t always the easy-going bluegrass picker she is today. “I’m a rocker chick,” she says. “Even though I grew up in Colorado, I never listened to much country or bluegrass at all.” After moving from Colorado to New York City at eighteen years old, Pickens started playing bass…
In spite of a mind-boggling amount of personnel changes (including two members leaving and then returning), Corrosion of Conformity has nevertheless remained consistent for over three decades. Currently whittled down to the trio of bassist/singer Mike Dean, guitarist Woody Weatherman and drummer Reed Mullin, COC recently released IX, yet another…
Music has always come naturally to Kate Brady. “When I was little, teachers always had to tell me to stop singing in class,” she says. “I mean, I never even noticed I was doing it.” When she was a senior at Steamboat Springs High School, a classmate asked her to…
