Music Features

In March, Steven Wilkin was among the millions of American who lost their primary source of income. Wilkin makes music under the name Adult Bodies; he supplements that money by working for Uber and Lyft, as well as doing other odd gigs. When wide swathes of the economy started to …

Arriving the day after Donald Trump told us all we’d all feel better if we just went and shot some bleach into our bodies, here’s a little anti-Trump invective we definitely need right now. Roots-rock icon Lucinda Williams just released Good Souls Better Angels, arguably her best album since her …

It was just one day after Testament returned home from a five-week European tour earlier this month that the thrash-metal band’s frontman, Chuck Billy, started to feel ill. “I had an achy body, headaches, coughing, tight chest, I lost my sense of smell and taste — the whole thing,” he …

After scoring a Best New Artist Grammynomination, Black Pumas had a lot of big plans coming up. The Austin, Texas psych-soul band were scheduled to be on the road this month and next, both here and in South America. But, of course, all those shows have been postponed, and the …

Stephen Malkmus has been on quite a creative roll as of late. In 2018, he released Sparkle Hard, one of his best albums to date with his backing band, the Jicks, and last year, he took a detour into synth-pop with Groove Denied. Now, he’s putting out another solo set, …

In our new series, we look at eight cities where live music has exploded — from legendary hubs like New Orleans and Nashville and Chicago, to rising hot spots like Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Portland, Maine. Our latest: Detroit, where pressing plants, innovative studios, and offbeat festivals make it one of …

L izzo knows that security guard was checking her out. It’s a crisp November evening in downtown Los Angeles, and she just breezed through a Sam Ash music store to see if they had a flute-studies book by Danish composer-flutist Karl Joachim Andersen; she wants to get back to practicing …

As Fred Goodman makes clear in Why Lhasa de Sela Matters (University of Texas Press), the late world-music troubadour never made it easy on anyone. Start with her music. Lhasa (as she called herself professionally) was born and raised in America but became a one-stop global musician: Goodman accurately describes …

Long before Donald Trump was our omnipresent, problematic president, he was New York City’s omnipresent, problematic gadfly. He flexed his supposed billions to attend any number of events around town, from WWE WrestleManias at Madison Square Garden to baby-boomer rock concerts. In 2008, he went to so many Neil Young …

When Yes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, the surviving members of the band lined up behind a podium at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and delivered the sorts of speeches you’d expect from veteran musicians who had waited decades for this moment of …