RiYL

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....

A trip to India changed everything for Sonia Kreitzer. It’s the kind of cinematic-style quest for knowledge so many seek out and so few actually achieve. For the singer, who opted the stage name Doe Paoro, the trip came at the most vital of times. Struggling to make ends meet as a part-time singer and full-time waitress in New York, Kreitzer was attempting to make peace with her plan to throw in t...

Eight albums into her career, Marissa Nadler is still discovering aspects of her musical life. For My Crimes finds the Boston-based musician fighting impulses to overthink and overdo. The metaphors and endless layers of music are stripped away for something that cuts even closer to quick. Of course, the ethereal melancholy that has defined much of her work is still present, and the the record find...

After that first breakup, the press tends to regard everything as a reunion show. As Matt Pryor and Jim Suptic are quick to note, however, The Get Up Kids have been around as long in their current iteration as they were the first go-round, at 10 years a piece. Reforming has clearly given the legendary emo band a second lease on life, however. This year, the group released Kicker, its fist album of...

The van is running late. Never underestimate the traffic in from D.C. When Malka Spigel and Colin Newman do finally arrive, they’re both a bit wiped. Another late night on tour, getting in after last call, but the couple are both excited and slightly melancholy to play the final show of the tour. It’s Immersion’s first in the U.S., celebrating their first LP in a decade and a half. Spigel and Newm...

The Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, three top 10 solo hits and one of the defining voices of his generation — but through it all, Michael McDonald has remained utterly humble. He didn’t feel he had the chops to make it as a full time studio musician, he tells me toward the beginning of our chat, so he sought a different path. Plan B gave the world “What a Fool Believes,” “I Keep Forgettin’,” “Takin’...

A few hours before the kickoff of the Posies’ 30th anniversary show at the Bowery Ballroom, Jon Auer is feeling reflective. It’s the perfect moment for the musician to examine a long and fruitful career that’s found him performing as the member of a half-dozen bands, producing countless records and spending 17 years playing guitar for the final iteration of the legendary group, Big Star.  But The...

It seems Matt Costa has a guitar within arm’s reach at any given moment. As I fumble around setting up my recording rig, he pulls the acoustic out of the case and begins strumming, absent-mindedly. Prior to this year’s release of Santa Rosa Fangs, it had been a full five years since Costa released an LP under his own name. But it’s clear that music is never too far from his mind, as he fiddles aro...

When she arrives, Lizz Winstead is quick to note that she’s a bit frustrated at having missed Trump’s latest impromptu press conference. Not so much for the content — not rational thinking person could make that argument — just for the Twitter jokes. The comedian has made a career out of poking fun at the political, from co-creating The Daily Show, to cohosting an Air America radio show with rappe...

Backstage at the Murmrr theater, the band is about to sit down to eat some fancy local Brooklyn pizza. It’s a strange space — a plush 700-seat theater that also serves a synagogue, the occasional Star of David on the wall the remind you that you’re a holy place. Damien Jurado seems eager to talk, in spite of being at the tail end of his East Coast tour (in a few days, it will be the same thing all...

Released in June, Shannon in Nashville finds the singer embarking on her own for the first time, after a half-dozen albums with backing band, The Clams. But Shannon Shaw still had plenty of support. The singer/bassist’s solo debut was produced by Black Key Dan Auerbach, who played on the album, alongside an all-star cast of Nashville studio musicians. But Shaw’s smoky vocals and dreamy songwriting...

Asked how long he’s been Alexander Orange Drink, Alex Zarou Levine pulls a packet out of his backpack and tosses it on table in front of him. “That’s my orange drink,” he says. The musician laments for a moment that the name is no longer a secret, because it’s 2018 and secrets don’t exist anymore. But Levine and his Brooklyn-based band of brothers, The So So Glos have never been afraid to wear the...

When Richard Elfman laughs, he commits his entire body to the act. It’s deep, hearty and infectious. The consummate entertain and raconteur, Elfman pours us both a glass of scotch, describing his last big barbecue and inviting me to his next, should I pass through the parts again. A number of recent guests also happened to appear his his upcoming film, Hipsters, Gangsters, Aliens and Geeks. It’s w...

In 2016, Tony Millionaire drew his final Maakies. For nearly a quarter of century, the strip ran weekly in alternative papers like The New York Press, LA Times and Seattle’s The Stranger. While he’d flirted with the idea of doing it for as long as he was still able to hold a pen, the newspaper industry imploded around him, leaving him with too few places to syndicate the strip. During its life, th...

I can count on one hand all of the cartoonist whose work has unfailingly made me laugh out loud. Ivan Brunetti’s strips are up toward the top. You don’t always feel great about belly laughing at the material, but it’s never not hilarious. For the past several years, however, Brunetti has been conspicuously absent from the comics scene, save for a pair of kids titles for Francoise Mouly’s Toon Book...