Music

Rusty Anderson has been an unsung hero of popular alternative music in the last 20 years. He’s been Paul McCartney’s right hand man and lead guitarist since 2001. He’s worked with Willie Nelson, Elton John and Regina Spektor. He even contributed the now-famous guitar...

Erykah Badu is just about a month into her Out My Mind, Just in Time Tour with rotating opening acts that so far have included N.E.R.D., Bilal, Lupe Fiasco, B.O.B. and Maxwell. But for most of the tour, including the Denver show at the Fillmore Auditorium on June 16...

When you look at it, it’s called a ‘bluegrass festival,’ but it’s a wide-open music festival,” says mandolin great Sam Bush. “I’ve seen everything from Little Feat to Paco de Lucia to Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson to Bill Monroe to Ralph Stanley. Just last year they ...

  Concrete Blonde are that rare animal, an alt-rock band with staying power. The group’s first, self-titled album got the band’s career rolling in 1986, but it wasn’t until 1990’s Bloodletting, featuring the singles, “Joey,” “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)” and “...

Backstreet Boys, older, still getting shrieked at There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love the Backstreet Boys and those who hate them. And whichever group you fall into, you can’t avoid the reality that this group of boy wonders helped ...

When I initially received a disc of Live in New York! by The Two Man Gentlemen Band, I had severe reservations. Novelty music is the slipperiest slope a group can climb. When it’s good it’s as funny as the greatest standup comics, but when it’s bad it’s more annoying...

Fourteen years, give or take, is a long time to be the guy off to one side, but Dave Rawlings, the guitarist/songwriter who’s been accompanist to Gillian Welch since the mid-’90s, is a studiously pragmatic musician. Welch’s voice and restless fluency in any ...

In the summer of 2006, I was drumming in a fledgling San Francisco psychedelic indie-rock band called The Love X Nowhere when we played to a sparse West L.A. crowd along with a bluesy young opening act called Mania, made up of scruffy UC Santa Cruz kids. “Mania...

Karen Elson on being the musician who is Jack White’s wife Karen Elson is not Jack White’s wife. Well, technically she is, but the famous model-turned-musician lives under a looming shadow of attachment to The White Stripes that seems a bit unfair. Perhaps ...

What Paul Simon is to Vampire Weekend, The Beatles are to The Young Veins. On their debut Take A Vacation! the band serves as a throwback machine that incessantly pumps out song after song of fun and catchy retro-pop in the same — well — vein of the music that made ...

  You might be surprised that Lyons, best known as a national center for folk and bluegrass with its RockyGrass and Rocky Mt. Folk festivals, the RockyGrass Academy and dozens of other events through the year, has now become the home of a classical chamber music ...

Don`t get him wrong: Australian multi-instrumentalist Nicky Bomba loves drumming with his brother-in-law John Butler’s trio, which plays Red Rocks on June 4...