RiYL

“Here’s to the next 20 years,” Emily Haines concludes with a laugh. Nearly a quarter-century into Metric’s existence, the band’s frontwoman is looking forward at the lifelong project. As many of their peers burned out or faded away, the Canadian indie-rock darlings have continued to release some of their strongest work, including 2022’s Formentera. A meditation on a rough couple of years for the w...

The pandemic hasn’t been easy, of course, but it has provided at a new way for Mary Gauthier to engage with her music. Her story songs have comfortably made the jump to virtual performances, as she’s embraced the talk show host inside. Earlier this year, she released Dark Enough to See the Stars – her 11th album overall and the first in eight years made up entirely of her own songs. The album foll...

Every so often, he makes a fist and gently punches his hand, trying to stave off a yawn. I don’t take it personally. It’s less than two days after the 24 hour Best Show marathon, and Tom Scharpling is exhausted. It was, by all accounts, a moment of triumph. The marathon marked both the paperback publication of his 2021 memoir, It Never Ends, as well as a kind of return to form for the beloved radi...

Nothing last forever in the music world – breakups least of all. In February of this year, Frog Eyes’ Carey Mercer announced he was getting the band back together after a four year hiatus. Two months later, the beloved Victoria, BC-based band released its comeback record, The Bees. It was a triumphant return for a band that never really went away, so much as temporarily morphed into a new project,...

“If anybody has someone in their past that you would still like to maintain some sort of relationship with,” Rory Phillips explains, “but you have some traumatic event that you’ve never talked about, I highly recommend getting a couple of microphones and talking about it.” Fresh off the breakup of The Impossibles, Philips was pair with Jamie Woolford – himself having recently left fellow ska-punk...

Twelve albums in, Laura Veirs is ready for a fresh start. Emerging from a breakup album dealing with the detachment from her husband and longtime producer, Found Light arrives this month like a jolt of light night. It’s been a strange and fascinating journey to get here. After studying geology and Mandarin, she threw herself into music full-time and never looked back.nAs a songwriter, she’s wildly...

For their many downsides, the past few years have offered an opportunity to reflect and reconnect with friends, family, projects. For Wayne Kramer, 2022 represents a full-throated embrace of a specter that’s loomed large for decades. This year, the musician released the first new songs under the MC5 banner in more than half-a-century. It’s a reinvigorated collective that culminates next month’s ar...

There are birds chirping. Shaun Fleming is making the most out of this beautiful spring day in Los Angeles, taking the call from the front porch. We get into a little lore about some parrots that have colonized Pasadena. Things get personal quickly, as they tend to with these conversations. And while he’s quick to note that his latest record, With People, arrives under the Diane Coffee monitor, it...

Fresh off the release of a new record and suddenly unable to tour, Joan Osborne got the work. The musician dug through the closets in her Brooklyn home, pulling together live recordings from across her 30-year career. The resulting compilation, Radio Waves, paints the picture of an evolving artist often paying homage to the decades’ most influential artists, from Sky and the Family Stone to Bob Dy...

“I’ve always been in more than one band,” Janet Weiss notes. Even during the nearly two-and-a-half decades she spent as one-third of Sleater Kinney, she’s kept busy. Since 1993, she’s been half of Quasi and had overlapping stints with Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks and Wild Flag – to make no mention of the albums she’s performed for indie rock darlings like The Shins and Bright Eyes. When we sat do...

Ambient music helped me survive the darkest moments of the pandemic, and David Toop’s 2001 classic, Ocean of Sound, gave me the context to fully appreciate what I was listening to. He is a rare bird, with dual careers as both an accomplished musician and historian/cultural critic. In a world where artists are so often concerned about overthinking, Toop revels in it. I reached out on hearing that a...

Our Little Secret isn’t an easy book, but it’s an important one. In her first-ever graphic novel, Emily Carrington delves deep into her history and self-conscious, to explore her childhood abuse and the resulting trauma. It’s story Carrington has waited half her life to tell, searching for the right way – and medium – to tell it. It’s a powerful debut from life-long painter, exploring the ins and...

Wild Tales begins at an impasse. At the tail end of the 60s, Graham Nash writes, his time in The Hollies had seemingly run its course. A trip to the U.S. to visit his then-girlfriend, Joni Mitchell, found him harmonizing with a pair of musicians who had recently left their own iconic groups. That particular story has a happy ending, of course. Crosby, Stills, Nash (and sometimes Young) played a ce...

The transition into the 70s wasn’t an easy one of for The Rascals. But it had been an extraordinaire run before the wheels came off, penning several songs that helped define what could reasonable be called pop music’s greatest decade. Throughout it all, Felix Cavaliere never stopped working. It’s a rich and fascinating career, he eagerly narrates in the recently published, Memoir of a Rascal. He h...

Niineta opens unexpected. A call from inside the penitentiary. It’s a cousin of Joe Rainey’s – but one he considers close enough to call a brother. It’s a striking opening for a striking album that explores the traditional indigenous songs he grew up singing at Pow Wow, set to modern production. The music is both faithful and new. It’s a celebration of the communities carrying on these musical tra...

The last time we chatted was on stage in October 2019, not long before the world changed. Simon Giertz had recently dealt with some health struggles, chronicling her successful battle with a brain tumor in a very public way. Over the years, her wildly popular YouTube channel has served a number of roles for its creator, as she’s chronicled her builds from the functional (turning her Tesla into a p...

Life off the road is a strange thing after 18 albums and 30 years , but Anton Newcombe is thriving. After decades in San Francisco, he settled in Berlin with a wife, kid and a dog – the whole deal. He calls me from Germany, giving me a makeshift tour of his home, as he holds his phone to his face. We speak mostly of world events. It’s kind of inevitable, these days – the pandemic, politics, the in...

Facing an indeterminate period of isolation, Lyrics Born did what any rational person would: he started a podcast. While he’s quick to note that the last two years offered a period of reflection and a rare moment to catch his breath during an impressive 25-year career in hip-hop, Mobile Homies was, ultimately, less about working than connecting. The show offered an opportunity to connect with fell...

In 2019, Paul Cauthen gave the world a breakup record. That’s not to say that Room 41 didn’t offer hints of what would come next. “Cocaine Country Dancing” offered the hint a brashness its title suggests. But two years into a global pandemic, the Texas-based singer-songwriter comes out of the gate swinging on Country Coming Down. “Country as Fuck” leads of an LP littered with titles like “Champagn...

As I type this, Bob Mould has jumped back in with both legs. He’s quick to point out that he managed to get a handful of dates in at the end of last year, but the his solo electric distortion tour spans three months and finds him hopping between the U.S. and U.K. It took the world grinding to a screeching halt to get the musician off the road for a while, though he’s kicked 2022 off with a bang. T...

His voice echoes as he speaks. The walls are entirely empty ahead of a big move, but Jonathan Meiburg has carved out enough time to sit and speak. We get into the subject of caracaras fairly quickly. They’re strange little birds in the same family as falcons – though they sport personalities more in line with a crow or a raven. Meiburg was so taken by the creatures he devoted several years to penn...

He quotes his therapist when describing his latest album. It’s a conflict of external vs. internal wanderlust. Ramesh Srivastava spent the last several years exploring the former, but Eternal Spring charts his time with the latter. His second solo record since the dissolution of indie darlings Voxtrot finds the singer getting deeply personal in a way that didn’t come naturally in his earlier caree...

The album-making process has always been somewhat contradictory for Beach Fossils. Front man Dustin Payseur has never suffered from lack of inspiration, with hundreds of unreleased songs to his name, but releasing an album has always been about getting things just right. The Brooklyn-based band has released three LPs of original songs in its dozen or so year existence. The strange and seemingly un...

At the height of social distancing, David Christian (nee Feck) went solo. After 29 years as the chief wrangler of the ever-morphing indie pop act, the musician went to work on For Those We Met On The Way. It’s been strange couple of years for the singer – as it has for most of us. Christian and family left London for the pastoral French countryside. A mostly quiet life, as he describes it, with th...

As we’re about to start, Scott runs to the kitchen to check on dinner. He’s making chicken, breaded with Shake ‘N Bake. He’s up a few more times during the conversation, once to proudly present the final product to Zoom call. Scott Thompson and Paul Bellini see each other a lot, these days. They’re prepping for a rare live performance in Philadelphia and spending the rest of their time writing. In...