Even as on-again/off-again fans (let’s not talk about All That You Can’t Leave Behind), we’ve got a soft spot for U2. They were first ever rock band we saw live; the boys were barely out of their teens and we were simply enthralled. Twenty-some years later, it sounds like they’re channeling those youthful selves in … Read more
The odd-moment-out on Neko Case’s newest release is an outtake from an improvisational jam session she participated in at a cross-cultural arts conference. She threw it in, she says, to demonstrate the fluidity and facility of music-making, to invite listeners to join her in the fun. But any dreams of superstardom it might inspire are … Read more
Ghosts of country music past reverberate beautifully in the bluegrass tenor of Handsome Family front man Brett Sparks. But somewhere deep beneath the eerie echo of Appalachia, shadowing the Carter Family influence, tucked behind the Autoharps, banjos, and lap steels—somewhere there seems to be an inside joke between this husband-and-wife team. All those death-obsessed compositions … Read more
The family band is a great rock ’n’ roll institution, from Oasis to the Black Crowes to Hanson. There’s something fascinating about the unstudied flow of sibling vocal harmonies and stage presence. Los Lonely Boys, three brothers from west Texas, began as their dad’s backing band. First off, let’s take a moment to imagine touring … Read more
Jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux’s sophomore release, Careless Love, is earning high critical praise—and that’s no small feat for a musician who became best known on her first album, some eight years ago, as a twenty-two-year old who sounded uncannily like Billie Holiday. On her new album, you could say that Peyroux is going after something … Read more
The genius of Jonathan Richman is that he knows he does “Jonathan Richman” better than anyone else ever could. Normally describing a singer/songwriter as “wacky” seems to be a writer’s polite way of saying this guy is really a childish boob, not a real songwriter. Richman would be the exception. He is a goof, his … Read more
If you had to, you could call Bill Frisell a jazz guitarist, but he is really a master at seamlessly mixing a wide range of musical genres, having collaborated with everyone from Elvis Costello to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. One of Frisell’s best albums, 1997’s Nashville, was recorded with members of Allison Krauss’s Union Station … Read more
Just last month, Jamie Hook took over as executive director of Minnesota Film Arts, which is responsible for the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and the repertory movies shown at the Oak Street Cinema. In Seattle, where Hook spent much of his adult life, he was known as an unconventional and talented wild man … Read more
The Minnesota Opera vows to pump up the authentic Japanese flavor of Madame Butterfly this time around. Productions of Puccini’s masterpiece about a geisha who gets crossed by an American sailor rely too often on caricatures of Japanese culture—especially the geishas in their campy kimonos and sets festooned with rice paper. Up to now, the … Read more
Close your eyes and listen to the Jungle Theater’s reprise of Dylan Thomas’s dreamlike Under Milk Wood, which it’s staging for a fifth time to stretch through this year’s holiday season. While there’s little to see in this radio play, there’s plenty to hear—a beautiful, lyrical ramble of poetry, all spoken during a day in … Read more