Music

No singer/songwriter bums out more beautifully than Aimee Mann. Since her early days fronting ’Til Tuesday, she’s lanced every painful carbuncle on the dark side of romance while administering megadoses of pop narcotic. With each new batch of transcendent downers, she manages to become more and more herself, an unabashed classicist and classic depressive who […]

For a band that hasn’t existed as long as the Dubya administration, Head of Femur has carved out quite a dominion. The founding members, vocalist/guitarist Matt Focht, keyboardist/drummer Ben Armstrong, and guitarist/bassist Mike Elsener — all Nebraskans who relocated to Chicago — formed the prog-pop outfit in late 2001, while their previous group, Pablo’s Triangle, […]

Few things in life are certain, but it’s safe to say that the Kronos Quartet will never put out a bad album. It’s equally likely that you’d never hear about it one way or the other, though, because you, poor, patronized reader/consumer, aren’t supposed to care about contemporary string quartets. Never mind that Kronos has […]

The last time Marita Brake played Springfield was in 1967, and the location was the Something Else Coffeehouse, located in an old brownstone on the northeast corner of Fourth and Capitol. That time was a golden age for a generation of Beat-ish poets who trekked cross-country between Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury. Bob Dylan and Joan […]

Will Johnson is the indie-rock equivalent of Joyce Carol Oates, cranking out a seemingly endless supply of songs for his various musical personae: cerebral head-bangers for Centro-matic, rawboned alt-folk for his solo ventures, and delirious countrified pop for South San Gabriel, a band that comprises all four members of Centro-matic plus a rotating cast of […]

The Forty-Niner Bye-Bye (518 Bruns Lane, 787-4937) has a long and storied past in Springfield bar history. Now new owners are celebrating the next chapter in the colorful tale of the historic libation dispenser. Groove Daddies, a local band with quite a storied past of their own, have been chosen to herald in the new […]

Since releasing his first cassette in 1991, John Darnielle, a singer/songwriter who records as the Mountain Goats, has authored more than 400 songs, most of which are better than any number of songs you’re likely to hear. Don’t beat yourself up for overlooking his brilliance, though. For more than a decade, Darnielle hid his light […]

A paraplegic since 1983 and an acclaimed singer/songwriter since 1988, when he was Officially Discovered by Michael Stipe, Vic Chesnutt has enjoyed a long, prolific, and adventurous career. He’s cut albums with scores of supporting musicians — from countrypolitan iconoclasts Lambchop to jam-band stalwarts Widespread Panic — but no matter how dramatically his sound has […]