If a friend called one day and said, “Look, I need you to write a song for Michelle Obama,” what would you do? Likely, you’d have to stay up and work for weeks, writing and rewriting drafts to eventually send your music to one of the most famous and regal people on the planet. But Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci didn’t get that advance notice. In that way, the duo, known for the songs they write under the moniker, Garfunkel and Oates, was spared intense anxiety. But when they found out that a silly demo they’d written about a tomato had found the former First Lady, there was a moment of sheer surprise. Friend and show creator, Jeremy Konner, called to say that Mrs. Obama loved the tomato track he’d asked them to write as a favor weeks prior. But there was more good news. Mrs. Obama’s approval portended the new Netflix food-centric kids puppet show, Waffles + Mochi (out now), and Lindhome and Micucci were tasked with writing its child-friendly songs.
Read MoreAmerican roots singer/songwriter, Rhiannon Giddens, has, together with the help of her musical and romantic partner, Francesco Turrisi, written and recorded a new album during the COVID-19 pandemic that she and Turrisi have released today. The album, They’re Calling Me Home, features haunting vocals that harken to centuries past. It features banjo, guitar, flute, fiddle, and other instruments. It also features components less familiar that Giddens and Turrisi have explored throughout their decades as nuanced, precise players like Scottish or Gaelic songs. Giddens, who grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, later studied at Oberlin College’s Oberlin Conservatory for music in Ohio. Since, she’s been recognized by prestigious prizes and earned a Grammy for her work with the roots group, The Carolina Chocolate Drops.
We caught up with Giddens to ask her about her experience becoming a musician later in life (she only started playing instruments in her 20s) and writing an album with T Bone Burnett in her late 30s. We also asked her about her relationship with Turrisi, how it got started and how it manifested to now two fantastic LPs.
Read MoreDave Navarro is a guitar fanatic. He’s also one of the instrument’s most prolific and well known players. Navarro, who rose to fame in the rock band, Jane’s Addiction, has also famously played with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and numerous other all star acts. But these days, Navarro is taking time from his busy schedule to celebrate the giants of the guitar who have come before him via guest DJ sets on a limited-run new SiriusXM Guitar Greats channel, which launched Monday and will run through April 19th.
Other guest DJs include Nancy Wilson and Keb’ Mo’. Navarro, whose set will run through Sunday, will celebrate legends like Jerry Cantrell, Mick Ronson, Eddie Van Halen, Lou Reed and many more. For the guitar great, the DJ sets are especially meaningful. Navarro, who has suffered some unthinkable tragedies in his life, has used the guitar to both prosper and process deep emotions. As you’ll see below, Navarro considers the instrument to be an extension of himself, another limb.
We caught up with Navarro to ask him how his love for guitar led him to work with SiriusXM, how his relationship with Jimi Hendrix’ music buoyed him in touch times and what his relationship with the instrument is like today.
Read MoreIn a way, longtime comedian Eddie Griffin is the King of the Colloquial. Listening to the man talk or watching his new comedy special, Laughin’ Through Your Mask, which came our last week, one gets the sense that Griffin cares deeply about the (his?) idea of common sense. Griffin, who grew up first in Kansas City, Missouri, and later moved to Compton, California, has seen a lot. He’s also starred in movies like Undercover Brother and played roles in Armageddon and A Star is Born. Over the course of his life, he’s lived in dangerous areas and mansions. Doing so, one picks up on a through line to the world at large and Griffin does his best to express what he sees and what he knows of this thread.
But all that isn’t to say that it’s not brusque, at times. It’s easy to think that many in today’s culture might be put off by what Griffin has to say. But Griffin makes fun of everyone, from people who look and act like him to people who look and act quite differently. Everything is fair game because, as Griffin says below, the point of comedy is to induce laughter. Plain and simple. We caught up with the comedian to ask him how he came to the world of joke telling, what inspired his new special and tour during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what he loves most about entertaining.
Read MoreBeverly Glenn-Copeland, the Philadelphia-born multidisciplinary artist who has lived and worked for decades in Canada, is experiencing fame for the first time now at 76 years old. Glenn-Copeland, who for years identified as a lesbian woman before learning about transgender language and now identifies more accurately as a transgender man, is enjoying a new sense of fame and adoration thanks to the recent rediscovery of his nuanced 1986 electronic album, Keyboard Fantasies. New audiences are flocking to his work, which also includes writing he has done for kids shows like Sesame Street and Shiny Time Station and the records he released in the ‘70s and ‘80s. This week, on April 9, Glenn-Copeland will officially re-release his 1986 record, which, the artist says, originally came to him more as a transmission from above rather than an unearthing or physical labor.
Read MoreThe story of the 77-year-old gospel singer, Elizabeth King, is the story of a life of hard work. King, who grew up on a Tennessee plantation, started working at five years old with her father. At nine years old, she began picking cotton and chopping corn. She worked so well with her brother that they earned adultpay, $3 a day, instead of $2. Later, working for a florist in Memphis the day Elvis died, King drove back and forth from her shop to the world famous singer’s mansion delivering bouquet after bouquet. Flowers from every state in America came through her place of business.
Throughout her life, King has attended church devoutly. Her relationship to a higher power remains central to her life, even today. King, who cut singles in the ’70s, stepped away from formal recording for more than four decades afterwards. In that time, she raised kids, sewing their school’s uniforms. Now, she’s back in the public eye thanks to her new record, Living In The Last Days, out today. The debut LP boasts her timeless, remarkable sound.
Read MoreArgentine rapper, Nicki Nicole (born Nicole Denise Cucco), is a sensation, a creative dynamo and a success story. The 20-year-old artist boasts handfuls of tracks with millions upon millions of streams on YouTube alone. She is brash, stylish and snarling. She’s magnetic. As a result, Nicole has a bright future ahead of her fueled both by her obsessive passion for song and by her legions of fans that propel her to do more.
We caught up with Nicole, who speaks Spanish fluently but does not speak much English, to ask her about her relationship to music, hip-hop and what fans can next expect from her on the heels of the recent release of her hit, “No Toque Mi Naik,” which features the Puerto Rican vocalist, Lunay. Below are Nicole’s answers, given to us through a translator.
Read MoreThe thing about a diary is that it’s private. But when that diary is also the music you make, it begins to morph into a different relationship and responsibility. For Nashville-based singer-songwriter, Bren Joy, the autobiographical admissions that his music allows him is what brought him to the art form to begin with, and what has kept him there working diligently ever since. In fact, that the music he makes will have a life after he departs the earth is crucial to Joy’s appreciation for the work he does. He wants each song and each record to mark his thoughts cleanly and clearly in a given moment in time. He responds to and respects other artists like Taylor Swift who manage their work in this way, too. It’s this impulse that inspired Joy to write and release his 2019 album, Twenties, and why he decided to release the deluxe version of the album last week. In short, he had more to say about this time in his life before it grows and shifts into a new era of creativity.
Read MoreProfessional hit song maker, Starrah (born Brittany Hazzard), can trace it all back to when she was four years old. For the songwriter, who has since gone on to co-write tracks like Camila Cabello’s “Havana,” Maroon 5’s “Girls Like You” and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage,” inspiration first hit when she heard the 1994 song “Candy Rain” by the group, Soul for Real. More than the music, though, she was struck that the singing group included a kid in its ranks. This was an early light bulb moment—you didn’t have to be an adult to participate in music. Just a few years later, around 10 years old, the songs began to come. Starrah was on her way. She began recording with a rudimentary app on Microsoft Windows, recording herself over herself. Now, all of that inspiration and hard work is paying off. This month, Starrah has released her debut solo LP, The Longest Interlude, and the new album marks the beginning of yet another fruitful era in Starrah’s already illustrious career.
Read MoreChicago-born rapper, Vic Mensa, is a dreamer. But unlike many dreamers, Mensa puts his ambitions and goals and wildest creative fantasies into action. He’s a man of action, equipped with a mind rich with ideas and hopes. But, for better and for worse, there is nothing especially happy-go-lucky about the wildly successful artist, either. Mensa has seen a lot, heard a lot, felt a lot in his years growing up on the south side of Chicago. It’s one of the country’s most dangerous neighborhoods and, as such, it shapes how its residents view and react to the world. Chicago, in another way, is also something of a crossroads. For Mensa, it meant a place from which to grow into a successful artist. For others, it’s a place that’s led them to prison, both justly and unjustly.
These are the things Mensa talks about on his new album, I TAPE, which is out now. Whether it’s the heavy new single, “Shelter,” or any of the other six tracks on the record, Mensa is open to talk about pain, suffering, prison and the dearth of justice so many see on a daily basis. We caught up with the rapper to ask him about how he found music, what it means to him and what went into his latest release.
Read MoreWhen two powerful people get together to talk politics, there is often great potential for insight—even for change. Such is the case when the United States Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal hopped on the phone with the beloved television host, writer, and activist Padma Lakshmi. Jayapal, who represents the state of Washington’s 7th congressional district, wears many hats, but her work has focused largely on immigration reform and, of late, a $15 federal minimum wage. The progressive Congresswoman also made headlines when she spoke about her experience in the Capitol Building during the January 6th insurrection, after which she contracted COVID-19—a result of holding up in the chamber with several maskless U.S. officials.
As the longtime host of Bravo’s Top Chef, and more recently, her Hulu show Taste the Nation, Lakshmi has made a name bridging the topics of food, identity, and politics. The author of Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet, Lakshmi is even more passionate about socio-political reform and immigrants’ rights than she is about the history of the tortilla—though she could talk at length about those, too. So when she had the opportunity to speak with Jayapal at a critical moment for the future of the country, Lakshmi—whose family hails from Jayapal’s native Chennai, India—made sure to give us plenty of food for thought.
Read MoreWhen a band is together for thirty years, things can change in ways that are imperceptible in the moment but obvious with a bird’s eye view. Sometimes that’s behavior within a group, sometimes that’s the way bands play songs live. For the Chico-born “California soul” group, The Mother Hips, that’s often meant the way the band interprets the music it’s played for three decades when on stage. This year, the band is celebrating its 30th anniversary by rereleasing its entire 10-album discography on vinyl, one album each month. In April, the band will release the reissue for their classic LP, Later Days. And today (March 24), they are sharing an exclusive acoustic video for the titular single below. But by looking back on all this music, the band’s co-founders, Tim Bluhm and Greg Loiacono, say that while some things have changed, some things still thankfully remain the same.
Read MoreJamie Stewart, co-founder of the eerie indie rock group, Xiu Xiu, is no stranger to hardship. But thanks to the beauty of music, Stewart has long had a space where he can turn those difficulties into something new and, perhaps, especially beneficial. In that way, he can be constructive. Not the opposite.
Recently, Stewart says, about a half-dozen people he was “very close” with personally and professionally betrayed him, lied to him severely or just “fucked” him over at various recent times. For the sometimes cynical, oft-agoraphobic Stewart, that could have been the last straw. He could have pulled the proverbial blankets over his head and shut out the rest of the world. But, to his surprise, something else happened. Friends and fellow musicians began to reach out to him and ask about his state and offer their help. It was healing. And to thank them for their care, Stewart wrote and recorded his band’s new record, OH NO (out March 26), with the idea of the duet at its figurative center.
Read MoreHorns have been used throughout history, for everything from battles to birthday parties. Rudimentary horns were made from many different materials, including wood, clay and even human bone. Examples date back to 1500 B.C. in Egypt, China and Scandinavia. The Moche people of ancient Peru painted images of trumpets as far back as 300 A.D. In the ancient Greek and Roman eras, metallic trumpets were used for marching in wartime. Eventually, almost all European royalty had trumpet bands that played military fanfares, although it wasn’t until the seventeenth century that the trumpet came to be used in musical ensembles.
Read MoreIf you’re a fan of contemporary music, chances are you’ve likely heard a great deal about “cryptocurrency,” “NFTs,” and “blockchains” in the past weeks. For example, the popular band, Kings of Leon, recently announced that the band would release its most recent LP as an NFT, or a “non-fungible token.” Another popular act at the center of this moment is Grammy-winning, Portland, Oregon-based Portugal. the Man. The band recently released its cryptocurrency, PTM Coin, the first group to do such a novel thing.
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