Jason Pollock has achieved more fame making music than most people ever dream of. As a member of ’90s post-grunge rock band Seven Mary Three, he toured the world and played to tens of thousands. He co-wrote the band’s 1997 Billboard Top 100 No. 1 hit “Cumbersome,” as well as its No. 7 hit that […]
With all the ways we decorate a four-walled room, one space tends to go neglected: ceilings. “It’s kind of your fifth wall,” said Ami Smith, proprietor of Charlottesville’s Embellish Interiors. “It can be a sort of accent.” Indeed, it can be a lot of things. Here are a few ideas offered by Smith and other […]
Life was so simple when there was only one beer festival. Top of the Hops descended on the Pavilion in the fall, you put on your pretzel necklace and tried a bunch of good craft beer you’d never had before. Your liver had 364 days to recover. Then came Know Good Beer (KGB), first held […]
Set aside for a moment that eating out three times a week is perhaps excessively gluttonous, and come with me on a quick trip. It’ll be like a vacation, but you’ll get to stay right here in Charlottesville. Oh, hey, we could call it a STAYcation! Get it? No one’s ever thought of that before, […]
Jazz player and UVA music professor Robert Jospé has some pretty far-out ideas about music. But Stephen Nachmanovitch, the man who’ll join Jospé onstage for a completely improvised concert on January 24 at UVA’s Brooks Hall, makes him seem like an accountant in a conservative suit. “My early musical experiences were in the classical music […]
Two stories come out of Nashville. The first one is: The town is full of amazing singer-songwriters, and you can see one of them playing on any given night at any corner bar. The second goes like this: The stars of modern country aren’t those same singer-songwriters; they’re the good-looking young people who can put […]
When I sat down to think about the best concerts I saw in 2014, the only events that came to mind were disappointments. Don’t get me wrong. There were highlights. Joe Pug got intimate at the Southern. Shovels and Rope entranced the Jefferson. But by and large, the most highly anticipated events of the year […]
Going out on New Year’s Eve can feel like an obligation. You don’t want to be on your couch when the clock strikes midnight, so you grab a bar of soap, put on clothes that don’t have any holes and hand your money to whatever establishment has the least offensive-sounding, all-inclusive night out. We can’t […]
Jason Oliver wanted to make Devils Backbone a “brewer’s brewery.” That might seem like a terrible idea. Why would you want to run a brewery that appeals to such a small audience? But in the process of running a brewery that appeals to people like him, Oliver has unwittingly—or perhaps wittingly—turned DB into a place […]
James Wilson pulls out a copy of the new Sons of Bill record Love and Logic—on vinyl of course. “Do you have a record player? Listen to it straight through, sitting in the dark,” he said. Ha. Right. Good one. Should that be backwards or forwards? James, the Sons’ de facto frontman, is not laughing. […]