"Jambands are dead! Long live jambands!" That's a bit of wordplay that my friends and I have been tossing around since sometime in the early 2000s.There is a roughly 15 year stretch -- from "Touch Of Grey" being released as a single in 1987 to the inaugural Bonnaroo in 2002 -- that represents the last era ofpeak...

This is the fifth edition of the The Barns These Are Your Jams series -- a compilation of the best music that I've been turned on to via the This Is My Jam social music sharing network. To see what this is all about,check out Volume One,Volume Two, Volume Threeor Volume Fourand for...

Huge props to phish.net, producing a venn diagram that make me proud.

Backyard Tire Fires music felt like everything a rock band should be, the songs sounding like they were written through collaboration, its three members working through the songs together with guitars cranked up to 11.At the center of the Tire Fire universe stood Edward David Anderson, the always-productive singer-songwriter lending melodies and lyrics that came...

This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of Stop Making Sense, easily one of the greatest concert films in history. To celebrate, Chicago Talking Heads Tribute band This Must Be The Band are recreating the film as a live stage act at the Pageant in St. Louis tonight. As a bit of warm-up, and a treat...

When Alex Wood wrote his review of The Mountain Goat's Saturday night show at Old Town School Of Folk music, he was quite taken by the rarities set that John Darnielle offered to the Chicago crowd.It turns out, he wasn't finished. compiling another full set of deep cuts for the second of two nights...

Contributed By: Alex WoodNeil Young performed a perfectly balanced, career-spanning set during his second night at Chicago Theater.Though the set list hardly differed from the previous evening, it was designed with such fluidity that changing wasnt strictly necessary.The first set felt deliberately somber in tone, purveying a deep melancholy that only Neil Young...

I'm always honored to feature news of this annual benefit here on the blog. April is Autism Awareness Month, and our friends at Northern Illinois Center for Autism have worked hard the last several years to cap the month with a fundraiser built around great tunes and good works.This year, the festivities move to...

So I was having my mind blown just a few blocks north on Clark Street this evening, but damned if Cubby Bear didn't also host quite the throw down as well.I recently came across a full show audio stream and download (via archive.org) of The Mantras set from the evening of March 6th, 2014....

Call it a stunt, call it genius, call it whatever but Jack White promised, and delivered, the world's fastest recording to vinyl pressing to distribution timeline in celebration of Record Store Day 2014.He performed the tune in front of a small gathering of fans at Third Man Records, pressed the acetate and delivered the product...