Music
Do it in the Dirt
The members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band make up one of those musical ensembles that has always defied category. For hyphen-happy reviewers, there never seemed to be enough dashes to capture the band’s ever-evolving essence...
L.A. gains appeal
Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard is all about change. The singer/guitarist, currently on tour with his bandmates in support of their seventh album, Codes and Keys, once wrote a driving, gritty, guitar-fueled pop tune about the ills of Los Angeles called “Why You’d...
Stepping outside the country box
Phil Vassar found out that country music is still a play-it-safe genre when the song “Bobbi With An I” was floated to radio as a first single off of his current CD, The Traveling Circus...
Songs to consider
Post-Louis Armstrong, there probably has not been a more influential American musician, save for Bob Dylan, than Lou Reed, who died two months ago at the age of 71, five years after marrying visionary multimedia artist Laurie Anderson in Boulder. It’s a shame that ...
Beatbox vs. symphony
The Boulder Philharmonic’s next concert (Saturday in Macky Auditorium and Sunday in Lakewood) is called “Boulder Sensations,” but the subject is rhythm...
Stepping into the spotlight
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 ...
Top 10 albums of the decade
A serviceable definition I recently came across for the word “best” was “of the most excellent, effective, or desirable type or quality.” As a journalist, the job regularly includes the hopefully tasteful, relevant use of superlatives, but incorporating the word “...
NedFest 2013: Standing strong
A year after Michigan Mike’s tie-dye-in-the-dust music fest proved it can go on without him, with a little help from his friends, NedFest still swings a pretty mean hula hoop...
Psyching out the rock
A band promising a new type of concert experience usually sounds like little more than hype...
Deep in the stuff
Dodging and weaving their way around countless hyphenated genre tags over the course of better than a decade, The Motet greet the new year with just one: funk band...
Movement towards collaboration
The creative process of a singer-songwriter can be a lonesome one. You write songs alone, rehearse alone, often perform alone. A byproduct of that solitude is total control over the final product, but when it comes time to start working with bands, the reality of ...
