Christian McBride has enlisted the Police’s Sting and Andy Summers for a jazzy, updated version of the group’s 1983 song “Murder by Numbers,” which serves as the lead single from his upcoming album with his Big Band, Without Further Ado, Vol. 1. The project will be available Aug. 29 from Mack Avenue. Sting, Summers and…
Jarvis Cocker formed Pulp in Sheffield in 1978, and kept the band going for about 15 years before anybody else cared about it. Over the course of Pulp’s early albums for Fire Records, though, Cocker gradually became a charismatic vocalist and a devastatingly intelligent lyricist. And piece by piece, he assembled the classic Pulp lineup:…
How can this much be left? Of the 83 songs on Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks II, an overwhelming box of seven unreleased albums (the largest drop of completed records ever?), 74 have never been officially heard. That means they didn’t make it into the first four-disc Tracks (from 27 years ago), or the generously stuffed boxes for Born to Run, Darkness…
When she was in college, Zoë Dominguez challenged herself to write a feminist rock song. She knew that assigning personal stakes to a big social issue would be difficult, but that was the whole point. “It’s hard to write any kind of feminist song,” she says from her home in Memphis, “because you run the…
Having already released an unexpected collaboration with Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold on the single “Don’t Put It All on Me,” Noah Cyrus has announced team-ups with Blake Shelton, Ella Langley and Smog leader Bill Callahan on her second album, I WANT MY LOVED ONES TO GO WITH ME. The project will be released July 11…
You hear Mary Halvorson play a guitar once—it sticks with you. Her tone, both liquid and spiky, burrows into your nervous system on contact. Using a delay pedal and digital effects, she flattens, smears, and discombobulates single notes, which creates an eerie, addictive effect. Her darting, slippery approach makes her songs simultaneously vaporous, brittle, and…
A sightless, millennial African-American who lived an itinerant childhood before finding her community in Seattle, Brittany Davis has long described herself as a vessel through which any number of musical spirits freely move. In the rock-leaning Painted Shield with mentor Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam, she’s a Swiss army knife of a vocal harmonist and…
Devo and the B-52s are extending their combined farewell outings and joining forces for the Cosmic De-Evolution Tour, which will hit 11 North American markets beginning Sept. 24 in Toronto. Lene Lovich will open. The idea to team up was hatched during the SNL 50 anniversary concert earlier this year, when the New Wave-era heroes…
Forty years ago, a well-intentioned, spontaneous group of musicians, led principally by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, produced Live Aid, the most ambitious and improbable concert since Woodstock, as two shows in London and Philadelphia, on July 13th, 1985. The objective was to raise money for the starving people of Ethiopia, victims of what was…
The 2025 Bonnaroo festival is a washout. The long-running event in Manchester, Tn., outside Nashville canceled the final three days of its programming as severe weather began creating unsafe conditions on site. Bonnaroo was to feature such headliners as Tyler, the Creator, Hozier, Luke Combs and Olivia Rodrigo, plus a loaded undercard including King Gizzard…
