Music

There’s a fine line between “concept” and “gimmick,” and Sufjan Stevens straddles it admirably on Illinois, his fifth album and the second installment of his Fifty States project. Invoking Carl Sandburg as his muse, Stevens commemorates the Prairie State and a motley assemblage of former residents, including Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Frank Lloyd Wright, […]

Lizz Wright isn’t the first jazz singer to embrace gospel, blues, folk, and rock, nor is she the first jazz singer to tell interviewers that she’s not really a jazz singer. In fact, the phenomenal success of Norah Jones’ debut, Come Away With Me, shows thatmild heterodoxy has become, if not conventional, at least lucrative. […]

Dwight Yoakam is a purist and a reactionary, but that doesn’t make him any less of a rebel. Despite his old-school Bakersfield twang and unabashed reverence for golden-era honky-tonkers Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, Yoakam has never been a retro act, nor has he ever stooped to hokey parody or knee-jerk stylistic detours. When he […]

It’s been more than a decade since Brian Henneman first broke onto the national scene with the Bottle Rockets, his alt-country band from Festus, Mo. Through the years the group has survived record-label shuffles, band-member switches, and many other pitfalls of the music business. “We’re the last ones standing of those roots-rock bands from back […]

According to the press release for The World Is Saved, Stina Nordenstam’s sixth CD, “This is some of the most hopeful music Stina Nordenstam has ever recorded.” In a breathtaking feat of pretentiousness, the flackery is formatted as free verse, concluding with these cringe-inducing, grammar-flouting lines: “Listening to her music, reading her lyrics/Stina Nordenstam dares to […]

Little Feat may be best remembered, if it’s remembered much at all, as a kind of proto-jam band, a bunch of competent West Coast session players combining smooth, laid-back New Orleans-style R&B and light funk with Southern rock. There’s a good case for this version of history: The band has spent more time as a […]

In 1990, two average groups from the Boulder, Colo., area joined forces, and ended up creating one of the most popular jam bands to fill the void left by the decomposition of the Grateful Dead. That band, Leftover Salmon, last year gave six shows at Boulder’s Fox Theatre, then went on hiatus — perhaps permanently. […]

For the past decade, Joe Pernice has practiced the art of pop chiaroscuro, crafting sunny songs with sudden shadows and dark songs that dazzle. With its buoyant hooks, chiming riffs, and major chords, his sad-sack soft pop goes down easy, but make no mistake: it’s not easy-listening pabulum. These creamy confections are steeped in bile, […]