RiYL

A lifelong Oklahoman, Ryan Lindsey is a happy Tulsa resident, these days. Half of Broncho resides in the Sooner State’s second largest city. The other two are a two hour drive away in Norman, the college town where the band got its start. It’s a Tulsa warehouse, however, that the band truly calls home. Before Broncho moved in, the spot was used to manufacturer hot tubs, and left some nasty chemica...

A few minutes into our conversation, Hannibal Buress injects mid-question, “How is it my first interview in Nigeria is with a white dude?” busting up mid-way through. The whole scene’s admittedly odd. We’re seated across from each other in my Lagos hotel room. My wheeled suitcase is flipped upside down on the coffee table, with my recording setup gingerly placed on top. The comedian hasn’t slept t...

When Penguins arrived late last year, it was the latest in a long line of projects from a seemingly restless artist. The Fantagraphics book found Nick Thorburn taking the plunge into comics for the first time, amid a long career as a critically acclaimed indie musician. His first published work is a remarkably adept one, showcasing a keen knowledge of the subtle art of wordless story telling. It’s...

A move to Los Angeles may have mellowed Matthew Murphy out a bit. The warm weather and sunshine has tends to have the effect on people, and the results have certainly begun to manifest themselves on The Wombats’ fourth album. But as the title Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life, clearly indicates, for all the talk of slowing down, the biting sarcasm that has come to define the Liverpool group’s o...

In 2014, Drawn & Quarterly published Over Easy. It was a story that had been percolating for decades in cartoonist Mimi Pond’s mind, but life, family and the daunting task of actually sitting down to write it got in the way. By the time the cartoonist was ready to pitch the story, the publisher insisted on breaking it up into two volumes. In 2017, the second part, The Customer is Always Wrong, arr...

In a career spanning four decades, screenwriter Ed Solomon has worked on some of Hollywoods biggest titles, from X-Men to Charlie’s Angels. But it’s his film, co-written with longtime collaborator Chris Matheson, that may well be his most iconic. 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure remains one of the most wholly original major studio films in recent memory. The 1991 sequel, cowritten by Solomo...

A lot can happen in six years. It’s the entire lifetime of some prominent bands. John Vanderslice has certainly been through plenty, including the death of a close family member and what might well have been the end of his own music career. In April, however, the musician with return with The Cedars, a sonically complex and emotionally rich new record, inspired by personal upheaval and a recent ob...

Unhappy as a creative director at Nickelodeon during the heady days of Ren and Stimpy, Lu Olkowski left the board room and offices behind to pursue her long time passion for public radio. The major career change found her starting over from scratch in a related, but still completely foreign field. Inspired by shows like This American Life, Olkowski entered the world of public radio as intern, redi...

Relentless optimism may well be Michael Franti’s defining characteristic. It’s a rare trait, especially in these days of ideologically-driven, social media-fostered detachment. But for all the positivity of a record like Stay Human Vol. II, Franti and Spearhead never avoid the harsh light of reality. In fact, the album doubles as a soundtrack to the Franti-directed documentary that finds the music...

Prior to Shades, music had never been a full-time pursuit for Vera Sola (Danielle Aykroyd). Splitting time between New York and Los Angeles, voice acting was her primary gig, until things went pear-shaped. Sick family members, the ends of relationships and myriad other issues knocked her flat. But encourage from peers helped instill confidence, first as a touring musician with indie folk singer El...

It’s never quite clear where the memoir ends and the fairy tale begins in Passing for Human, and for Liana Finck, the distinction is incidental at best. Growing up, her home life was spent in a fantastical house built by her architect mother, provide a warm escape from the sometimes harsh realities of school life. These days, the artist is far more social, with a pool of friends in New York City a...

Due out in February, Post Earth is only their second full length, but the members of FEELS going way back. A quartet of of Los Angeles natives, the members have been playing together in various iterations for well over a decade. And it shows. All four are crowded around a microphone, sometimes speaking in unison, as they discuss how their Tim Green-produced album became a kind of accidental politi...

When Douglas Rushkoff asks you to chat, you say yes. We’ve spoken to the visionary media theorist a dozen times over the years, and each opportunity always yields fascinating new results. These days, Rushkoff is peddling Team Human. What began as a weekly interview show with a wide range of subjects is now a book — a kind of manifesto for socializing in particularly bleak times. Along with uncanny...

After years of writing about music, Taleen Kali decided to create it. She began performing live sound collages, before heading in a more rock oriented direction with the quartet, TÜLIPS. Last year, the musician released her first solo record, Soul Songs on local Los Angeles label, Lolipop records. She also keeps busy as a yoga teacher and the driving force behind the literary publication Dum Dum Z...

In 2012, Georgia Webber stopped talking, save for 15 or so minutes a day. The act of vocalizing had simply become too painful. A year later, she began to serialize Dumb, the story of her struggles as a vocal abuser (the official diagnosis). The work follows the young cartoonist as she struggles to adjust to living without speech, concocting methods for communicating with friends and family and oth...

You’d think you’d have your fill of a man with four concurrent podcasts. And yet, John Roderick always seems to bring something new to the table. The Long Winters frontman has made a second career of sorts as podcasting’s great indie rock raconteur, cohosting Roderick on the Line, Road Work, Omnibus and Friendly Fire. The medium has proven an ideal fit for an entertainer happy to impart personal s...

Best know to many for guest starring roles on popular show like Park and Recreation and Girls, Jon Glaser has been a mainstay in the alternative comedy scene since landing writing gigs on the Dana Carvey Show and Late Night With Conan O'Brien. Glaser has long called New York his home, becoming a mainstay in the city's comedy scene and writing and starring in a trio of TV series: Delocated and Neon...

One of the more memorable spots in recent memory, "Wu Tang In Space Eating Impossible Sliders” does pretty much what it says on the tin. The web series created to promote vegetarian burgers at White Castle eschews the traditional ad trappings, in favor of a genuinely entering series of videos starting the RZA, GZA and Ghostface Killah. It’s the latest in a long line of high profile collaborations...

Sabrina seemingly came out of nowhere, only to land on the top of nearly every best of 2018 list. Nick Drnaso’s second book-length work (following 2016’s collection, Beverly) perfectly captures feelings of isolation in an always-connected world. It’s a tale of fake news and online conspiracy custom made for the age of Trump — a world that took an emotional toll on its author during the creation pr...

It’s a familiar refrain. The 15-year itch. It’s the perfect time to look back and how far a group as come — and wonder aloud how much gas is left in the tank. The More I Sleep the Less I Dream is a 15-year album. The fourth LP from a band whose lineup has remained remarkably consistent since forming to perform at a high school talent show. It finds the group searching for the magic that helped cat...

You don’t get to choose your audience. Especially when you’re playing a free to the public show at South by Southwest to promote your first record. It was, quite possibly, the worst showcase for a quiet voiced singer-songwriter. But the bad show gave birth to NPR’s Tiny Mix Tapes. The show’s producers quite rightly believed that Laura Gibson deserved a better showcase for here soft-spoken gifts. T...

Fresh off a hike up Mount Kilmanjaro with his fiancee (now wife) and a ritualistic beard shaving, Taylor Goldsmith sits down to talk about Dawes’ latest, Passwords. The new record finds the band diving into the political and personal in ways not found on past records. Goldsmith is clearly in a good place, halfway through the band’s tour opening for pop-rock legends, ELO. He’s making the effort to...

RE/Search’s North Beach office more closely resembles a library or museum. It’s a wonderfully crammed space that also serves as publisher V. Vale’s home, standing as a small monument to self-publishing and serving as a slightly melancholy reminder of all of the books we’ll never have time to read. Not that Vale isn’t trying, of course. The San Francisco mainstay is several decades into a lifelong...

Somewhere along the line Chris Barron quite literally lost his voice. The condition, vocal cord paralysis, left Spin Doctors frontman barely able to speak, let alone sing. It was, he confesses, a dark time — one that left him wondering whether a return to music was in the cards at all. It slowly returned, thankfully, and Barron, with the help of doctors and a vocal coach, was able to learn how to...

In an age of uncertainty, This Modern World has remained a rare consistent. For nearly 30 years, the strip has offered a staunchly leftist take on the week’s news, outlasting many of the world leaders its lampooned, along with most of the alternatively weeklies that carried it. Back in 2015, artist Tom Tomorrow celebrated the strip’s 25 anniversary with an ambitious Kickstarter-backed collection....