music

There are 12 shopping days until Xmas, but don’t start counting those partridges yet, not unless you’re part of the Christmas bird count. The "Twelve Days of Christmas" you hear about in song start on Christmas Day and run until Epiphany (the day the wise guys came to call). What with the proximity to the […]

Melody Walker and friends call the "Ladylike Open Mic" at Muddy’s Hot Cup "Menstrual Monday," providing fodder for all sorts of bad puns I won’t repeat here. On Monday of this week Melody was not singing at Muddy’s, nor was anyone else. She called me that evening to explain that live music at Muddy’s is […]

It’s the week after Thanksgiving, a quiet time in general, and really quiet on the local music front. One holiday down, and "Christmastime is comin’…," which means lots of parties and celebrating in the weeks ahead. Since we’re nearing the end of 2007, touring musicians are starting to go into self-imposed hibernation. After all the […]

Hey, thanks for picking the paper up on this Thanksgiving weekend, and happy Thanksgiving to you, our readers. Without you — well, I’d probably still be slaving over a hot stove and carving turkey at some local eatery. As you might guess, the Thanksgiving holiday tends to put a crimp in the local entertainment scene. […]

My co-worker Heidi asked me a question at the office the other day, something along the lines of "Do you know anything about a band from Canada coming to town? I can’t remember the name but my friend says they’re good." "Are they Quebecois?" I wondered. I’d heard about that show. She didn’t think that […]

Ritchie Havens may not be the best songwriter out there. In fact, he’s quick to defer to his peers, and he’ll tell you it took him years to get past singing other people’s songs. And he’s not the greatest guitar player — he has an idiosyncratic style that’s mostly rhythmic strumming. But he knows how […]

Czech prog/punk avant-rock band Uz Jsme Doma is making its way across the U.S. The day I caught up with the band’s keyboard player/songwriter and only remaining original member, Miroslav Wanek (Mirek for short), UJD had just played at an elementary school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “It was a last-minute substitution,” he explained, the indirect […]

Who is Thurston Moore ? As they put it semi-succinctly on the Ecstatic Peace! promo for his latest album, “Thurston Moore [above], for those of you just visiting planet Earth, has been playing music and liberating whatever ossifying standards rock ’n’ roll becomes threatened by since the late ’70s when he walked the downtown jungle […]

We seem to have a steady stream of blast-from-the-past bands coming through for shows at one venue or another, some more authentic than others. You know what I mean — iterations of Foghat and Iron Butterfly with just their drummers from days gone by, Mike Love fronting a band called the Beach Boys. Cher-Ae Heights […]