One of my favorite albums of the year is the blessed collaboration between Man Man’s Honus Honus (or Ryan Kattner, if you prefer) and Islands/The Unicorns’s Nick Thorburn: Mister Heavenly. To celebrate the album’s release this week I’ve got a two-part interview with each half of the group. Yesterday we had an interview with Honus [...]

[Read more →]

Photographs taken by me at Bonnaroo. MP3: Mister Heavenly – Pineapple Girl One of my favorite albums of the year is the blessed collaboration between Man Man’s Honus Honus (or Ryan Kattner, if you prefer) and Islands/The Unicorns’s Nick Thorburn: Mister Heavenly. To celebrate the album’s release this week I’ve got a two-part interview with [...]

[Read more →]

Not sure what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised when I got to the Merkaba house for our interview. Their well kept garden was the perfect setting- almost immediately I knew what they were about. YANP- Kurt: As far as the lyrics and just the music in general goes, in combination with everything to do [...]

[Read more →]

You’ve heard me talk about him a lot over the past few years, but now you can see what it’s like when I talk to James Friley, the man behind Idiot Glee. The review’s a bit old, so excuse the references to how the album is “going to come out” — it’s already out — [...]

[Read more →]

This is easily one of my favorite interviews I’ve done. Not only does it start with me being confused by basic American geography (there’s more than one Portland), but there’s a lot of nerdy Portugal. The Man stories, a drunken fistfight and a bit of info on how it was Kanye — not Eminem — [...]

[Read more →]

MP3: Oregon Bike Trails – High School Lover Oregon Bike Trails is the reason I started doing interviews again. It’d been months since I did one, but as soon as I heard these songs I knew I had to talk to the guy. So even though Zach doesn’t have a record label or any physical [...]

[Read more →]

So far 2011 has been a great year for discovering bands. My first new love of the year was Yellow Ostrich’s The Mistress, which combines percussion and melody in a union better than any I’ve heard since Local Natives burst on the scene. So after a lot of foot-dragging, I finally go around to asking [...]

[Read more →]

Photo by Karly Grawin I didn’t put it together until this year, but I admired Richie Follin’s work years before Cults or Guards put Bandcamp on the map. When I went to CMJ in 2006, his band Willowz opened for the Mooney Suzuki and I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately for me I didn’t follow up, [...]

[Read more →]

A few weeks ago I got an email saying that Alan from Neon Indian was going to be in Lexington for a few days and was available for an interview. I agreed without looking at a calendar and it wasn’t until the day of the interview that I realized I would have about 15 minutes [...]

[Read more →]