RiYL

Ultimately, The Contradictions serves as an important turning point for both its lead character and author — both, coincidentally, named Sophie. For the fictional Sophie (a college student with more than a few common traits with her creator), the road trip is a journey of self discovery. For Yanow, the book finds her hitting her stride as a storyteller and artist. Prior to the publication of her f...

Nearly 20 have passed since the last Semisonic album, All About Chemistry arrived. The band’s third LP didn’t live up to the massive popular success of 1998’s Feeling Strangely Fine, but the charts are a fickle thing. A proper reunion was never a guarantee, in spite of the fact that the trio remained close. The members moved to different cities, found new musical outlets, and, in the case of drumm...

It’s hard to say precisely what semi-retirement means for a standup comic. Kyle Kinane has been tossing the term around for a while — well before this year’s release of his fourth album, Trampoline In A Ditch. Mostly it seems to be involve taking time for himself and generally enjoying life — all good things. Though Kinane is quick to acknowledge that there’s a certain element of semi-retirement i...

There has been no shortage of deeply personal stories during Adrian Tomine’s long, celebrated career in comics. But up to now, they’ve been almost exclusively filtered through a fictional lens, from his on-going series Optic Nerve to 2015’s Killing and Dying. With The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Tomine finds himself diving head-long into autobiographical work. The book features som...

Unbeknownst to me, Van Dyke Parks is seated at his piano. This fact becomes clear numerous times during our conversation, as he tickles the ivory to punctate points. It’s not as if he requires the tool during the interview. Parks is a raconteur, above all. He seemingly has a story for everything, winding his way through fascinating avenues to make profound points about life, music, politics and ar...

A Brand-New Shade of Blue finds Chris Stamey exploring jazz music in the mold of the cool movement of the 50s/60s. Composed on sheet music, the album was finished with remote recordings amid a pandemic shutdown — a less than ideal scenario for a genre defined by in-person collaboration. The music has spent recent years exploring new horizons, mostly notably with 2019’s New Songs for the 20th Centu...

Released in 2018, American Dharma blindsided its director. Errol Morris had spend decades making some of the universally acclaimed documentaries of all time. This time, however, the press wasn’t having it, accusing the filmmaker of “platforming” his subject, Steve Bannon, or at very least, never pushing back hard enough against Trump’s political strategist. In many ways, however, the documentary i...

With Sun Piano, Laaraji returned to his first instrument. After years of eschewing the keys in favor of something more portable, the New York-based new age music finds himself reconnecting with his first love, in the first of a trilogy of piano records. It’s the electric zither for which the artist is best known. In one of 20th century music’s more charmed tales, Laraaji opened his eyes after an e...

You have 20 years to write your first record and 18 months for your second. For The Ace of Cups, the first part of the equation took roughly two and half times the conventional wisdom, but in 2016, the band finally released its self-titled debut. Four years later, the band has returned with Sing Your Dreams. Like its predecessor, the sophomore record features an all-star lineup of collaborators, r...

When publishers refused to release an updated edition of his 1975 classic of beltway bureaucracy Who Runs Congress over concerns of commercial viability, Ralph Nader did what he often does. He wrote another book. This time, the lifelong political activist took another tack entirely, trading dry political prose for a fable. The book first saw life as How the Rats Re-formed Congress, published on Na...

It should be painfully obvious from the title alone that Anime, Trauma and Divorce is a deeply personal record — and part of Open Mike Eagle’s continued evolution as a songwriter. A good punchline is never more than a track or so away, by the Chicago-turned-L.A. emcee bares his soul on his latest LP in new and sometimes uncomfortable ways. But hip-hop is just one of several outlets for the musicia...

In 2013, Fruits Bats broke up — or at least as close to a breakup as an essentially solo project can come. Frontman Eric D. Johnson was going about it on his own as EDJ. It was a short-lived venture. By 2015, the band was back together. Fruit Bats, it seemed, was too good a thing to let die. After all, the band has recently released two of its best albums to date — The Ruminant Band and Tripper. R...

“Hey There Delilah” was a turning point for Ariel Rechtshaid. The simple, stripped down pop song was a massive hit, putting the musician on the map as a producer. Since that 2006 breakthrough, Rechtshaid has become one of music’s most in-demand names, worked with some of the industry’s biggest names, including U2, Madonna, Beyonce and Adele. His work has also found him working closely with indie s...

Clocking in north of 1,100 pages (when you included the end papers, he’s quick to point out), Reaganland is the final chapter in Rick Perlstein’s massive tetralogy documenting the rise of contemporary conservatism in America through 1980.   The series offer unique insight into a history that feels both intensely relevant to the current moment and impossibly far away. It’s a sometimes-dry and frequ...

The same scene inevitably plays out at every convention Carlos Alazraqui attends. At some point someone the epiphany. Rocko the Wallaby, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, Mr. Weed from Family and Garcia from Reno 911 are all the same guy. After beating out Marc Maron and Patton Oswalt in 1993’s San Francisco International Comedy Competition, Alazraqui used his winnings to move to Los Angeles. An addition f...

In 2012, Cidny Bullens was ready to tell the world who he really was. An article published in The Daily Beast gave him the opportunity to explain the previous year’s transition in his own words — the realization of something he’d long known but hadn’t allowed himself to be honest about. This year, Bullens released his first album under his name, a major step for an artist whose professional career...

From a distance, it seems that Noah Van Sciver is able to make comics roughly as fast as most of us are able to read them. Each social media update from the cartoonist seemingly presents another project he has in the works — an admirable trait in a field that tends to attract so many procrastinators. I’ve talked to Van Sciver a number of times over the years, but this chat was designed to be a kin...

Retirement was short-lived for Matt Pond PA. The eponymous front man very publicly toyed with the moniker that’s continued to tie him to his home state, but a 20 year run like that isn’t something one walks away from so easy. Pond continues a prolific career, often teaming with producer and guitarist Chris Hansen, a core collaborator and creative life mate. This month, the duo released Songs of Di...

Forty years after forming in New York’s late-70s punk scene, the Bush Tetras are still going strong. 2018 saw the release of the Take the Fall EP, the product of a band content to release music for the pure love of it. There were rocky times, of course. By 1983, the band saw some key membership turnover, ultimately dissolving that same year. There was a short-lived stint in the 90s, but it’s this...

There’s a great video from early last year. Taken onstage at the End of the Road Festival, Ezra Furman is tasked with interviewing John Cale. You get pretty much what you’d expect from the Velvet Underground founder — soft spoken, deliberately thoughtful answers. Furman, clearly a massive fan, is far more excitable. Above all, they’re searching for a connection with the legendary musician on topic...

The last time Ryan Walsh appeared on the show was during another trip I took to Boston. At the time, he spoke of his upcoming book about Van Morrison. What, admittedly, sounded like a fairly niche examination of the musician’s time recording a legendary album became one of the year’s most acclaimed music books. Astral Weeks finds Walsh playing detective, seeking to answer some longstanding questio...

Few can rival the indie rock pedigree of Tanya Donelly. At the age of 15, she cofounded 4AD stalwarts Throwing Muses with best-friend-turned-step-sister Kristin Hersh. Seven years later, she joined forces with Kim Deal on her then-side project, The Breeders. But it was the formation of Belly the following year that really allowed Donelly to shine as both a front woman and songwriter, scoring one o...

Adapted from a podcast of the same name, Ways of Hearing explored the countless knock-on effects that play out in both production and listen when music shifts from analog to digital. The book explores similar notions as Damon Krukowski’s previous work, 2017’s The New Analog — subjects that are near and dear to him as a member of the iconic groups, Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi. In addition to the...

As a journeyman musician, Kyle Forester’s resume reads like a who’s who of indie bands from the past decade and a half. Most notably, the multi-instrumentalist has spent time as a member of Crystal Stilts, Woods and Elephant 6 mainstays, The Ladybug transistor. More recently, he played on the David Berman’s Purple Mountains LP. In 2016, Forester released his self-tiled debut solo record, following...

In 2018, Kat Edmonson declared herself an “Old Fashioned Gal,” with an LP and track of the same name. The Brooklyn based musician sings and writes songs steeped in pop-jazz stylings of another era. But her work aims deeper than simple nostalgia. This year brought followup album, Dreamers Do, a mix of Disney covers and originals. “Too Late to Dream” finds Edmonson pondering her approach to the worl...