RECENT ARTICLES

With one listen through each of the two records, it’s clear that the late Fela Kuti’s musical family tree remains both strong and fruitful.

On February 5th, Fela’s son, Femi, and grandson, Made, will each release their own forthcoming studio albums on Partisan Records, Femi’s Stop The Hateand Made’s For(e)ward. The achievement carries with it much significance. It’s rare that any father and son are able to share in such a prominent co-release. It’s also a sign that the genre of music that Fela invented, Afrobeat, is alive and well in the voices and instruments of his lineage and beyond. But the albums, outside of any historical context, are also just quite good. The music empowers, emboldens and reaffirms a connection with what the Kuti family has always kept in mind: the hands, the head and the heart. The songs offer important messages, the kinds that have and will stand the test of myriad future societal evolutions. They are timeless.

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For Nathaniel Motte and Sean Foreman, co-founders of the Boulder, Colorado-based band, 3OH!3, it was love at first sight. The two then-aspiring artists, who’d already spent years dabbling in making songs individually, met in a mid-level physics class at the University of Colorado years ago. A “bromance” quickly brewed. On that fateful day, Motte had noticed that Foreman was wearing a very obscure but very tasteful band t-shirt and a conversation ensued. Ever since that meeting in class, the duo has created a great deal of music together. First the idea was to mess around and make beats and freestyle but that soon turned into a more realized project. Motte and Foreman, who started 3OH!3 from humble Colorado beginnings, have since collaborated with the likes of pop star Katy Perry and rapper Lil John. This year, the band has released new songs, including the latest single, “I’M SO SAD,” and, they say, a new record is in the works and is expected later this year.

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With the lead track of the band’s first new record in four years, Kings of Leon front man, Caleb Followill, asks a simple but meaningful question—“One more night, will you stay here?” It’s a lovely query for a pop song from a popular band. But the idea carries with it more significance than just that. Over the band’s prodigious and prolific history, they have asked much of their fans along the way, including to withstand a four-year layover between the newest LP, When You See Yourself, and the band’s 2016 release, Walls. But fans of the group, both stalwart and casual, will likely feel pleased with the highly anticipated 11-track project—set for release in March. With its first refrain, Kings of Leon have offered an open door, a reconnection after what might have felt like a lifetime away. But what would you expect from a band so rooted in the messiness and brilliance of triumph?

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The songwriter-bard, Bob Dylan, once wrote, “Take what you have gathered from coincidence,” in the famed poetic song, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Well, if a lyric could have offspring, the children of that line would be the dream pop band, Still Corners. The group’s founding two members met by chance on a train platform in London and later started to collaborate in song. Since then, the band’s history has been saturated in organic surprises noticed from the corners of their eyes or ghost lyrics plucked from the ether and woven into verse.

The duo’s newest record, The Last Exit, which is set for release Jan 22nd, is rooted in the myths and mysticisms of the open road. The visions seen when the mind starts to lose its tight grip on reality. When the highway is a river. There is much to learn when looking out the windshield. So, Still Corners, put it all in song in a new 11-track LP.

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Over the past few weeks, Kings of Leon has teased a handful of new songs on social media, coming on the heals of their March 2020 acoustic release of “Going Nowhere,” which has already amassed two-million views on YouTube.

The band recently announced that they will be releasing two new tracks on January 7th—“The Bandit” and “100,000 People”—along with news about a new 11-track LP, the band’s first since 2016.

But for those needing more evidence of a forthcoming release, ten KOL super-fans announced on social media that they each received a one-of-a-kind t-shirt from the group with a different set of unreleased lyrics screen-printed on the inside.

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Just before the proverbial ball drops and music fans can watch 2020 wash away into 2021, the music world gets one more piece of tremendously bad news. The great emcee, MF DOOM, has passed away, according to his wife, Jasmine, who posted this information on social media. He was 49-years-old.

MF DOOM, who rose to prominence in 2004, with the album, Madvillainy, which he made with the famed hip-hop producer, Madlib, had been performing publicly since 1988. The rapper, who was born Daniel Dumile on January 9th, 1971, in London, England, the son of Trinidadian mother and Zimbabwean father, moved to Long Island, New York, as a child. In 1999, he released his debut album, Operation: Doomsday.

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There’s an old saying: man plans, god laughs. The idea, of course, is that no matter how precisely or consciously human beings chart a course for the future, it can be upended in a moment. A flash flood, an earthquake or a global pandemic can shift entire blueprints. This year, married couple, Tekla Waterfield and Jeff Fielder, learned this lesson over and over again. The two had made strong considerations to move from their Seattle homestead to Nashville to pursue the connections Fielder has amassed in the industry over his years playing with folks like Mark Lanegan and the Indigo Girls.

Sometimes change can be good – or, at least, salvageable.

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It was 40 flights from the lobby to Jay Z’s New York City office. But the members of the five-piece sibling band, Infinity Song, ascended in the elevator together. The members’ father, John Boyd, a songwriter and former choir leader who’d raised his nine children with music as prevalent as water in their household, joined them, his progeny. All their hard work was paying off – yet again. Infinity Song was on the way up to the office of maybe the most famous and influential person in the world. At the top floor, watched by some 70 people comprised of Jay Z’s staff and friends, Infinity Song sang, poised. Soon after, the band, successful in its tryout, signed to Jay Z’s Roc Nation label and, this month, the group has released its debut record, Mad Love. Now, the sky – well past a mere 40 flights – is just the beginning.

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The gig was so good that Ednah Holt thought she would die when it was done. That’s at least what she told herself as she was experiencing the glee and creative joy on stage and in rehearsals with the Hall of Fame rock ‘n’ roll band, The Talking Heads, for what would become their standard-setting concert film, Stop Making Sense. The live performance, released nationally on October 18th, 1984, has become a cult classic and is shown on movie theaters decades since. Beyond the band’s lead singer, David Byrne, two of the show’s stars are Holt and fellow backup singer-dancer, Lynn Mabry. The two are mirth incarnate, magnets for eyeballs. For Holt, though, the gig almost never materialized. But when it did, she had the time of her life. So much so that she thought her life might have crested right then and there.

“I thought I was going to die doing this gig,” Holt says, with a laugh. “I thought, I just can’t have fun every night! We had fun every night. We had a ball. Honest to goodness, I thought I was going to die when it was done.”

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Legendary musician, Miles Davis, would often exhaust the songs he played. He never performed the same piece the same way twice. It’s why he would change time signatures, song lengths and even keys when he would perform the cuts off his world-famous records live. It’s also why he changed genres so effortlessly, frequently and masterfully. The trumpet player, who burst on the scene with his smooth, cool, muted sound, would later evolve into one who did stadium tours, performing with distorted rock musicians and their fuzzy guitars. Indeed, Davis was far-reaching. And the artist’s most recent (posthumous) release, Rubberband, hit stores in 2019 (and soon after number-one on the Billboard contemporary jazz chart). The record is the latest in a seemingly never-ending string of songs from the musician who touched so many with his extensive sound.

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For Idyllwild, California-based songwriter and former American Idol contestant, Casey Abrams, music can often induce a good cry. Just the other day, the artist was driving and tears filled his eyes as he listened to Sixpence None The Richer’s “There She Goes,” The Beatles’ “Yesterday” and Iron & Wine’s “Naked as We Came.” Once the emotions have run their course, Abrams says, he feels renewed, refreshed. Ready. For the musician, much (if not all) of life is about vibrations. We are vibrations. Music is vibrations. Light is vibrations. So, to be alive is to engage in the interplay of vibrations. And these waves can summon passionate emotions and feelings, just like in his latest single: a reimagined cover of “Eve of Destruction,” which features the legendary songwriter, Cyndi Lauper, and is out today.

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In art school as a college student, Sam Herring, front man for the Baltimore-based post-wave band, Future Islands, studied sculpture and stage performance. He was a conceptual and performance artist. But – maybe it was laziness, he says, maybe it was the Mary Jane – his work wasn’t taking him where he wanted to go. His sculptures weren’t of Michelangelo’s caliber. But he had a revelation. Herring combined the two subjects. He began to, in a philosophical manner, consider himself to be his clay. The body was the sculpture. He adopted a bombastic stage persona, “Art Lord,” striking Shakespearean poses (or jokingly doing the “Robot” dance). He started a band with good friends. He gesticulated wildly. It worked. The local bars – and then the world – noticed. Now, his group is set to release its highly anticipated sixth LP, As Long As You Are, on October 9th.

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For Stone Gossard, co-founder of the Hall of Fame rock ‘n’ roll band, Pearl Jam, there is magic in music. And especially so when that music is forged in a group setting. Gossard, who recently founded the new rock project, Painted Shield, with the acclaimed Honolulu-born songwriter, Mason Jennings, appreciates when the sum of the parts in a band transcends the specific individuals. When that happens, Gossard knows the joyous-yet-unexplainable mystery of great music is present. For decades, this dynamic has been the guiding light for the former grunge icon. Now, Gossard and Jennings are bringing that same buoyant, collaborative sensibility to their new rock band, which will release its debut self-titled record on November 27th.

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When singer-actor-artist, Bethany Thomas, left Chicago to drive to California’s Mojave Desert to collaborate with singer-actor-comedian, Tawny Newsome, to record the music that would soon become the new co-produced LP, Material Flats, her home city of Chicago was on fire. It was the first week of June, a city tired of quarantine and systematic racism erupted – along with many others across the globe. But when Thomas met up with Newsome, the two planned to write a new record together, using the energy and insight borne from creative lives existing amidst unprecedented unrest. The two got to work, efficiently and effectively. They will release their debut LP – a mere four months after those fires – on October 9th.

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In many ways, it’s a miracle Love-Lore, the new, five-track, 35-minute LP from the San Francisco-borne band, Deerhoof, exists. To begin with, the album is an intricate amalgamation of dozens of songs and bits of classical or pop culture – from the Knight Rider theme song to Kraftwerk, B-52s and Sun Ra covers – woven together like a woolen scarf of musical history. To knit the 40-plus songs together takes the kind of skill and inspiration a single lightening bolt strike induces on the psyche. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, if you ask the band’s members, it’s astounding humanity as we know it still exists today despite shoddy politics, greed and unfulfilled social promises.

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