Goo Goo Dolls have had a long and productive career, releasing ten albums (not including two greatest hits records), fourteen top ten singles and “Iris”, the song that Billboard ranked number one on their Top 100 Pop Songs of 1992-2012 chart. Lead singer John Rzeznik took some time before going on The Tonight Show for the seventeenth [...]

Robyn Hitchcock has spent 60 years on the planet Earth, during which he’s released countless records, both as a solo artist and with his old band The Soft Boys. We asked the celebrated British singer-songwriter about his latest album, Love From London, channeling Nick Drake, what he plays when no one’s listening and more. What’s [...]

On the occasion of Donald Fagen’s latest non-Steely Dan effort, Sunken Condos, we sat down to talk about this new classic, and the previous ones. You and Walter Becker are among the few songwriters to extend the vocabulary of chords. Back in the days when they wrote standards, a lot of composers were using more [...]

When music snobs hear the term “supergroup” nowadays, the usual reactions range from stern looks of disapproval or obligatory mild interest to extreme disappointment when the band doesn’t meet fan expectations. But Diamond Rugs doesn’t need to be labeled as a supergroup to inspire stern looks of disapproval, which is why these scraggly rockers are [...]

Matthew E. White’s debut album, Big Inner, is a psychedelic gospel masterpiece influenced by the jazz of New Orleans and the rhythm sections of Memphis and Muscle Shoals. The album is the first release on White’s own Spacebomb Records, which the Richmond, Virginia-based artist founded on the classic tendency to marry recording studio with record [...]

The Dave Matthews Band sold more concert tickets than any other artist this decade. Their new album, Away From The World, debuted at #1 on the Billboard Top 200, as did their last five studio efforts – a historic first. We talked to Dave Matthews about staying inspired, battling his inner critic, and hitting the [...]

For a guy whose last two albums hit No. 1 on the blues charts and are both still sitting in the Top 10, Joe Bonamassa remains quietly off the grid. He was not mentioned in a mainstream music publication until the release of his 13th album. Despite his relentless touring schedule he somehow still has [...]

Harry Shearer is rarely himself. At least in public. He has reached a wide audience giving voices to characters like Ned Flanders and Mr. Burns on The Simpsons, as a sketch comedian on Saturday Night Live, and playing bass for The Folksmen from the film A Mighty Wind and faux rock gods Spinal Tap. The [...]

There are as many ways to approach writing songs as there are people. So it only stands to reason that there’d be at least a few songwriters out there, even fantastically gifted ones, who don’t fit the mold in terms of productivity and who can’t keep up with the album-of-new-material-every-couple-of-years pace to which the music [...]

Whenever the topic of great guitar shredders arises, Steve Vai’s name inevitably comes up, usually first. Even as a central figure in the height of the Eighties shred movement, he was always more comfortable in a supporting role, admittedly happier when driving the sound of Whitesnake and The David Lee Roth Band while the flamboyant [...]

“You’re asking questions to a person who’s long dead. You’re asking them to a person that doesn’t exist,” says Bob Dylan, ominously, in his latest Rolling Stone interview. The long-ranging Q&A with Mikal Gilmore covers everything from transfiguration to Masked And Anonymous. Here’s some of the highlights. * * * 1. On Time Out Of [...]

When it came time to record their first album in four years, Joey Burns and John Convertino – the two men behind Calexico’s diverse, Latin-influenced desert rock – left their native Arizona and resettled in New Orleans. There, they created Algiers, a cinematic album named after one of the Big Easy’s oldest neighborhoods. Burns talked [...]