American treasure Willie Dixon would have turned 100 this year. As it seems must be the case with even the most revered and successful blues musicians, his life had its highs and lows; sometimes those were two sides of the same coin, from having his songs covered by some of the most popular bands i…
I'm actually feeling like a pretty bad music nerd right now, because somehow I've never heard The Dream Syndicate's debut album, The Days of Wine and Roses, which the Internet seems to agree is one of the most important albums of the 1980s (and when the Internet agrees on something, you really shou…
Die Kreuzen is one of the many bands of the '80s and '90s about whom my principal awareness derives from having seen their records in the bins at my usual Harvard Square haunts (I've always been much more of a browser than a buyer, alas). Since I studied German for all four years of high school, I …
For this installment of Immigrant Songs, I was blessed to have Los Angeles group Chicano Batman live in the KEXP studios. They’ve been getting a lot of attention around the country lately, both by doing some killer opening slots during tours with Jack White and Alabama Shakes and by being on the bi…
Well, now I'm depressed. I just did some math, and it turns out that in 1990, when John Doe took a break after having released six albums as a member of the legendary punk rock band X (see here for #6) and released his first solo album - as practically an elder statesman of punk rock - he was 3 yea…
Dos, the fearsome bass duo of Mike Watt and Kira Roessler, belongs to that rarefied class of bands that I know I love without ever having knowingly heard them. Their music is played entirely on two basses, the charmingly low-key punk rock hero Mike Watt is half of the band, they seem to love what t…
The last time I posted on The Smiths in this space, I was pretty bummed about the disappearance of various local businesses and the gloomy weather. Good thing those days are behind us, right? Hahahahaha! Ha! Ha. Suffice it to say it's been a while, and there are a number of fine Smiths albums with …
I learn so much writing these blog posts! For instance, did you know that Michael Penn (whom you probably first heard about for his delightfully earwormy 1989 hit "No Myth," but has since done many serious and critically acclaimed things - not that there's anything unserious about "No Myth," that's…
In 2018, KEXP celebrated the 30th anniversary of local record label Sub Pop with a four-month retrospective, "counting up" every catalog number in their vast discography of over 1,200 releases. Dig into the archives of our catalog coverage, featuring in-depth coverage on the history of their releases.
