You wouldn’t know it by the way the Scottish songwriter offers up his heart for all to see as part of the epic-sounding Frightened Rabbit. Or by the way in which the unassuming frontman hops from interview to interview throughout a seemingly endless routine of press for his band’s second LP, The Midnight Organ Fight, […]
The media area at Chicago’s Lollapalooza feels a lot like Brazilian Carnaval. One side of the enclosed vicinity is lined with small tents, each wallpapered with countless logos of their respective outlets. MTV banners might bump up against the WXRT radio tent, which could border the Fuse broadcast booth, and so on down the seemingly […]
It’s two hours before Ben Kweller’s Chicago gig in mid-October, but the singer still has quite a bit to do. With sound check having just wrapped up, he has a pair of interviews to squeeze in between dinner and a meeting with the band to determine the evening’s play list. The January release of his […]
A half-hour before Girl Talk’s performance at this year’s Lollapalooza, there’s a girl sitting within earshot of the stage, leaning against a small fence. As the size of the Sunday night crowd doubles – then triples – in anticipation for the laptop artist’s slot, she rests cross-legged about 50 yards from the speaker towers. For […]
A lot of great music has been recorded since 1967. But until a fundamental shift in his own group only a few years ago, Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes hadn’t noticed. “[Barnes] finally began to listen to music made after 1967 about the time he was making [2004’s] Satanic Panic in the Attic,” Of Montreal […]
It’s a rainy Sunday night in Chicago, and about 2,000 people are filing out of the Belmont Arts and Music Festival. At 10 p.m., the two-day event on Chicago’s North Side has all but wound down. The vendors that range from local artists to restaurateurs have closed their booths. The auxiliary stage at the east […]
It’s almost noon on this particular day in mid-May, but Rhett Miller nevertheless is still animated when he talks about his previous night’s gig: an on-ice performance in between periods of an NHL playoff game for his beloved Dallas Stars. Although it’s something that Old 97’s has done in the past (the frontman has also […]
There’s urgency in Ade Blackburn’s voice when he gets on the phone the final day of April. The Clinic front man’s tone is rushed, like that of somebody trying to pleasantly wrap up a chat before they’re late catching a bus. Or maybe he’s just distracted, the way one can get splitting attention between talking […]
Jamie “Hotel” Hince is inside what seems to be a stone warehouse in Birmingham, England. “I can’t fucking hear a fucking thing,” the British half of The Kills says as he hops back on his cell after it dropped the first call mid-conversation. “This place is so fucking loud. Everything is echoing, and my tour […]
About two dozen questions into what would become John Lennon’s final interview before his assassination, Playboy writer David Sheff asked why it was “so unthinkable that The Beatles might get back together to make some music.” It was an honest question, one that Lennon undoubtedly had been asked a thousand times, and in 1980 there […]