If Sam Beam ever went to Sunday school, he must’ve been the teacher’s worst nightmare. The Iron & Wine frontman has been filling his songs with religious iconography for more than a decade, but you wouldn’t file them alongside tunes by Michael W. Smith or DC Talk. There’s always been something different about Beam’s references [...]

Listen to all of the songs on our Top 50 list on Spotify (with a few exceptions) by clicking the button below. View our Albums Of The Year list here. 50. Smith Westerns: “All Die Young” These Chicago art-rockers smirk at the intensity of young love, but only out of fear and maybe even awe. [...]

After years of study, I’ve developed something I’ll call, for lack of a pithier term, the Margolis Music Festival Axiom, which is: They’re always hit or miss. Not only who you hit or miss, that is, but whether the artists you do catch manage to connect with their audience or fail to light a fire. [...]

  There’s nothing like a free stream of an amazing rock festival. Unless it’s two simultaneous streams at once. Right now if you head to The Austin City Limits Music Festival channel on YouTube, you can choose between sets from Cold War Kids or Foster The People. Cap off your evening with sets from Coldplay [...]

Since breaking everyone’s hearts in the Irish music film Once, Marketa Irglova has won an Academy Award, appeared on The Simpsons, toured and recorded as one half of The Swell Season, sang with Iron & Wine, and helped put together the Broadway rendition of the movie that made her famous. Now the 23-year old Czech-born [...]

Bonnaroo 2011: The Backstage Studio

The Year Of The Buffalo “Turn it up! Turn it up!” That’s what fans chanted at the beginning of Buffalo Springfield’s set. The sound issues were eventually addressed, and the legendary ’60s band was off to the races, turning a set that was alternately mellow and invigorating. When Stills and Young made their guitars talk [...]

Leave it to The Head and The Heart, Seattle’s newest indie-folk export, to bring an oversized crowd to the first show of the day. Kicking things off at noon – which, after four days at Bonnaroo, is the real-world equivalent of 6 a.m. – the band sounded confident and genuinely grateful, thanking the crowd multiple [...]

The year of the Buffalo.

Day 5. A song you hear when you’re shopping. Iron & Wine, “Tree By The River” I dunno what kinda deal Sam Beam has made with the devil, but over the last six months or so, I’ve heard this song in a few different stores… in a movie theater… I think I heard the voice [...]

We recently spoke with Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly. The veteran emo-rocker told us about Thursday’s latest album, No Devolución (Epitaph), and gave us the run down on his new approach to songwriting, and discusses his old gig writing letters to Penthouse, being influenced by the Beat writers, and how to stay true to your principles [...]

“I saw sinners making music/And I’ve dreamt of that sound,” Sam Beam declares in “Walking Far From Home,” the epic opener on Iron & Wine’s latest album, Kiss Each Other Clean. With help from his bandmates, Beam spends the record defining that sound, shaping it, until the quicksilver light that beckons in his poetry pulses [...]