Maia Sharp has released several albums during her time in Los Angeles, but has been better known as a “songwriters’ songwriter,” penning tunes for the likes of The Chicks, Lisa Loeb and Trisha Yearwood. After moving to Nashville, Sharp looked up guitarist Joshua Grange to record the tracks a…
On May 14, Mouth For War will be sharing their brand of crushingly heavy, metallic hardcore with the world. Their new album, Life Cast in Glass, will be released on CD, cassette and on all major streaming services via 1126 Records. The album, the band says, has created a healthy outlet for i…
Amy Whitesell and her husband George have been staples of the Colorado Springs blues community for nearly two decades. In 2003, Amy was one of the founders of the nonprofit Pikes Peak Blues Community, which supports blues and American roots music along the Front Range. In 2006, she parted wa…
Arguably one of the most maudlin songs in pop music history, Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” has consistently ranked high on critics’ “Top 10 Songs That Make Us Cringe” lists. With its melodramatic vocals, orchestrated arrangement, and pretentious lyrics about conspiring with The Muse to…
Since leaving Carolina Chocolate Drops for a solo career in 2015, Rhiannon Giddens has boldly stretched with each successive album, not only redefining Black American traditions, but adding flourishes of the avant garde to the result. Her first collaboration with Italian multi-instrumentalis…
2021 was obviously not the best of years for musicians, venues, or anyone else involved in the live music industry.
Blindworm Guitars has been an instrument manufacturing and repair shop since 2008. Founder Andrew Scott has been known for his extremely intricate woodworking skills and incredible instrument designs. After a year of worldwide pandemic and some health issues, Blindworm will continue, but wil…
In 2014, Jamie Stewart told the Indy that his Xiu Xiu project was dead. Yet the ensuing seven years were among the San José band’s most prolific, even if Stewart at times felt like he and collaborator Angela Seo were simply phoning it in. The last Xiu Xiu album, 2019’s Girl With Basket of Fr…
Colorado Springs has been home to a number of artists who’ve received widespread recognition, but none more so than Stephen Scott.
As we’ve been seeing, show announcements are starting to pop up in the next few months, and we are starting to see some more local bands slowly crawling out of their rehearsal studios to get on a stage near you. On May 8, The Black Sheep will be hosting a special, free local event with Lette…
Montreal’s avant-classical ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor has made apocalypse its business over six studio albums stretching from 1997. The seventh instrumental outing, G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! (Constellation) may be the most complex and unrelentingly bleak. But one is reminded of Bap…
When live shows shut down last year it affected so many people. For local bluegrass group Tejon Street Corner Thieves it halted their lives, since shows were the band’s main way to make a living. They had to cancel over 100 shows in 2020 — but 2021 is a new year and vaccines are more readily…
Back in the pre-Covid era, more and more touring musicians began stepping off the live-music industry treadmill and venturing into the up-close-and-personal realm of intimate living-room shows.
Listeners have gotten spoiled in the decade since Oakland musician/puppeteer Merrill Garbus formed the duo tune-yards with longtime collaborator Nate Brenner. Each studio outing can careen in any direction, and sketchy (4AD) is no exception.
This may sound like an April Fool’s Day joke, but I promise you it isn’t.
The first person signed to David Geffen’s Asylum Records in 1971 wasn’t Jackson Browne or Joni Mitchell, but the waifish-looking intellectual Judee Sill, who hid a life of armed robberies and needle drugs behind her innocent bespectacled eyes. Her two albums were ignored by most, and she die…
It’s hard to believe it has officially been a full year since live shows came to a halt and venues, bars and restaurants had to temporarily close. Though these venues have been able to open back up, musicians are still waiting patiently to take the stage again. A year is a long time to go wi…
For more than 25 years now, KRCC host Vicky Gregor has made her living by sharing her love for music.
Hasaan Ibn Ali was a session pianist with Max Roach, who influenced John Coltrane’s “sound sheets” methods. Roach talked Atlantic Records into reserving Ibn Ali studio time in August-September 1965, but the project was shelved following the pianist’s incarceration on narcotics charges. The m…
Most times, a band is known for their live performances, which pushes them to keep playing in pursuit of excellence in their craft. While it seems like we’re inching closer to live performances, we still aren’t quite there yet. However, artists aren’t letting good creativity go to waste. Som…
‘WON’T YOU BE MY neighbor?” The children’s television host Fred Rogers used to sing that at the beginning of every show. And for many who grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he seemed more like a neighbor than the ones who lived next door. For some, he still does.
Leave it to electronica acts Blanck Mass and Mouse on Mars to offer speculative works on artificial intelligence, cyborgs and the future of humanity. Benjamin John Power, half of dance duo Fuck Buttons, records solo as Blanck Mass. His fifth release, In Ferneaux (Sacred Bones), consists of t…
While live music is still hibernating, bands keep releasing new material and some are taking fresh approaches.
Julien Baker may be the youngest of the three women in folkie supergroup boygenius, but was first to release a debut album in 2015, at age 20, and the only one to play Colorado Springs to date. The Tennessee singer often takes a backseat to Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers, however, maybe beca…
On the evening of Monday, Feb. 23, 2021, the Colorado Springs music community and the world lost a great person, Ian Wilcox.
Search “music documentary” on Amazon Prime and you’ll get back nearly 10,000 results. To put that number in perspective, it’s five times what turns up when you search “hamster accessories,” ten times more than “tiny robots.” It would take 1.7 years to watch all of them, and that’s without ba…
Craig Finn has been insanely busy through Trump and pandemic years, alternating between introspective solo albums and strident anthemic works with his band, The Hold Steady. So it’s not surprising that the two styles leak and recombine into each other. Their songs and live performances once …
Colorado Springs sits on a densely creative stretch of highway, in between artistically and musically rich Denver and New Mexico, and sometimes these scenes merge and work closely with one another. Excruciatingly heavy sludge outfit ORYX, originally from Las Cruces, New Mexico, was used to t…
Sometimes Valentine’s Day just isn’t enough. While a recent Florida newspaper headline called it a “glorified sex holiday,” that claim has proven to be, if anything, overly generous. In fact, the market research company Statista found that less than a third of Americans planned to have sex o…
When Clap Your Hands Say Yeah launched its debut album in 2005, critics offered acclaim for lyricist Alec Ounsworth’s DIY ethos and the band’s enthusiastic style. After two mediocre follow-up albums, the world turned against Ounsworth’s plaintive high tenor. Yet he persevered through two mor…
We’re already into another month of 2021, More new releases are coming out, and people are starting to feel creative and eager to learn again. This week we will talk about some great new releases and the value of learning how to play instruments.
In what came as a surprise to many, the final months of 2020 saw an unprecedented number of high-profile artists selling off their song catalogs to the highest bidders.
Dave Grohl, founder of Foo Fighters and former Nirvana drummer, wins accolades for his integrity, activism and curation of odd bits of music history. Occasionally, you might hear a quiet mumble that “if only Foo Fighters’ albums were as consistently interesting as Grohl.”
Anthony “Dub” Welch is no stranger to the Colorado Springs music scene. He has played for several decades in metal bands Gripped, Erased, 7 Year Coma and many more. Welch still plays in bands The Dub Project, Planetary 27 and even a Beastie Boys cover band called Sabotage.
It’s easy to picture Brian Eno as a man of few words.
Was it really 30 years ago that the shaved-head teen Ani DiFranco burst on the scene with her punk feminist ethos? Everyone’s grown older; fans know DiFranco shifted to a jazz-centric style that sacrifices nothing in radical positions, while evolving the author into the role of transcendent …
Releasing music in a physical form can be a long process. 2020 brought out a lot of creativity, but this year we will start to see some of that art in its final form. Starting things off, I get to do a fun switcheroo! The torch has been tossed and now I get to write about former Reverb colum…
Last winter, the Brooklyn singer-songwriter Evan Zwisler offered some seasonal advice for musicians eager to hit the road. And while his blog’s title, “Tips for Touring in the Winter (Hint: Don’t),” may have been tongue-in-cheek, its descriptions of snowbound touring’s occupational hazards —…
With a few exceptions like Norah Jones or Sean Lennon, children of famous musicians who turn to music can face a hard path. Lilly Winwood, daughter of Traffic founder Steve Winwood, has been banging around Nashville a while, raising eyebrows with a stunning 2017 EP and her “Higher Love” duet…
In March of 2020, it was clear that COVID-19 was here to stay for a while. Restaurants, venues and bars were all told they needed to close down for a period of time to slow the spread of the virus. When places were able to open again a few months later, some did, some just didn’t reopen at a…
Four years ago, the British protest singer Billy Bragg rewrote Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to convey a less-than-optimistic take on the direction America is heading.
Kelly Hogan, a backup singer for Neko Case and former Rock*A*Teens guitarist, has an intense fan base impatient with the pace of her infrequent solo work. Four years ago, Hogan teamed up with fellow Chicago vocalist Nora O’Connor, Scott Ligon, Alex Hall and Casey McDonough to form The Flat F…
There’s one important part of a band that often gets overlooked, yet is a major component of the music’s aesthetic — the artwork. From show flyers, to album covers, band logos and T-shirts, the proper artwork can actively describe someone’s music. From just the art alone, Molly Hatchet and M…
New York’s legendary punk-rock venue CBGB used to bill itself as the “Home of Underground Rock since 1973.” But while the Lower East Side club served as the launching pad for numerous underground bands, the venue itself was, like most venues, located at street level.
In early 1971, rock critic Sandy Pearlman suggested to the Long Island band Soft White Underbelly that they change their name to Blue Öyster Cult. Pearlman and fellow producer Murray Krugman turned BOC into “intellectual hard rockers” through cryptic lyrics and collaborations with Patti Smit…
We are just a few weeks into the new year and the creativity keeps flowing. There will be a full year of material coming out, and it excites me! It may very well be 2021, but if you listen to the newest album from Voltaic, it will make you feel like you’re in another place in time.
Given the rapid-fire acceleration of whatever it is we’re going through at this moment in history, it’s anyone’s guess what America’s collective mood will be from hour to hour, much less week to week.
Judging by the number of live albums appearing in the last weeks of 2020, it felt as though musicians were worried about stimulus checks arriving and hoped for quick revenue. Not that many were superfluous. For The War on Drugs, Live Drugs (Super High Quality) represented the first non-bootl…
The year 2020 is behind us and 2021 is starting to look promising. Congress has included the Save Our Stages Act in the newest stimulus package. The bill, signed by President Donald Trump Dec. 27, allocates $15 billion in funding for venues, bars and theaters affected by the pandemic, and es…
