May is, by sheer volume, the year’s biggest month for music yet, with long-awaited new releases from Carly Rae Jepsen, Vampire Weekend, and Flying Lotus leading the pack. YG, The National, Mac DeMarco, and Charly Bliss all return as well, alongside promising debuts from Ian Noe and Pronoun. That’s not to mention…

There’s a unique kind of intimacy to sitting in a theater with 974 other people in total silence, no one so much as checking the time on their phones for fear of being kicked out of the venue. That’s the aura inside New York’s Walter Kerr Theater when attending a Springsteen On Broadway performance, a fact I am lucky…

There’s a single line that’s tossed off midway through Jeff Tweedy’s new memoir that effectively sums up the entire book: “I just like writing songs.” Those five words come in a chapter in which the Wilco frontman discusses his writing process. He constructs the music first and then adds gibberish to help discern the…

Riot Fest 2018 was an oddly muted affair. No big reunions or “one time only” performances of the kind that have so thrilled festivalgoers in times past, like Jawbreaker getting back together last year or L7 in 2015. Instead, there was a comforting procession of longtime stalwarts (Bouncing Souls, Andrew W.K.) and…