Bill MacKay & Ryley Walker SpiderBeetleBee (Drag City) I came down hard on Ryley Walker’s voice on his last solo record, openly wishing for an instrumental affair—and whoa, I had no idea he had such a project up and running already. SpiderBeetleBee is the second album of acoustic guitar duets by Walker and the insanely versatile […]
Bill MacKay & Ryley Walker SpiderBeetleBee (Drag City) I came down hard on Ryley Walker’s voice on his last solo record, openly wishing for an instrumental affair—and whoa, I had no idea he had such a project up and running already. SpiderBeetleBee is the second album of acoustic guitar duets by Walker and the insanely versatile […]
Is there anything left to be said about life, death, food, money and love? Local folk-punk band The Can-Do Attitude thinks there’s always something new and delightfully weird to discover, making its case with tracks like “Popcorn” (“One day we’ll hit an asteroid and all of the corn will be popped / One day we’ll […]
To put the big into The Miho Hazama Big Band, Tokyo-born, New York-based jazz innovator Hazama assembled an 18-piece tribute to her idol Thelonious Monk in celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth. The accomplished composer, arranger, conductor and pianist was selected as one of DownBeat magazine’s 25 for the Future in 2016, and […]
Billie Piper has earned critical raves, an Olivier award for Best Actress, and she’s performed two sold-out runs at London’s Young Vic in the lead role of Yerma, written by Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca in 1934 and reimagined by director Simon Stone. The power of the biological clock looms large in this modernized version, […]
In a small town in the heart of Japan, 13-year-old Hiroya Tsukamoto discovered the banjo and taught himself to play bluegrass tunes for his dad, who was a fan of traditional Appalachian music. He went on to master the guitar, and in 1999 Tsukamoto won a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music, which brought […]
There’s something Alicia Bognanno of the Nashville-based grunge-pop act Bully wants to get off her chest. Her latest album, Losing, released on October 20 via Sub Pop, is not a breakup record. “I want to scream that to the top of my lungs,” says Bognanno, who easily could. The 27-year-old singer/songwriter/audio engineer/producer frequently screams lamenting […]
While attempting a brief vacation from being the world’s greatest detective, Inspector Hercule Poirot has been reading the hell out of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. With every page, he cackles in delight, a reaction likely based as much on the opportunity to let someone else tell the stories as on the book […]
Imagine you live in Manhattan on West 78th Street and your neighbor is a dinosaur. The problem is, no one believes you. This is the premise for Bolivar, Sean Rubin’s debut graphic novel in which a large gray dinosaur living in New York speaks English, reads the New Yorker, orders corned beef sandwiches and visits […]
Whether you fell in love with the leg lamp, the pink bunny suit or the double-dog-dare to lick a frozen flagpole, you can’t help but wait in excited anticipation for A Christmas Story to hit the holiday airwaves. The story of Ralphie, an eager schoolboy on a desperate quest to get the most magical Christmas […]
When Susan Munson was a kid growing up in Charlottesville, any time she had something to tell somebody, she’d write them a poem. She’d give it to them too, either hand-delivering the written verse or reading it to them herself. It was the earliest manifestation of Munson’s songwriting impulse, which has her writing more songs […]