It always takes something a little extra special to feature media of an event that didn't take place in Chicago. How's this? When one of our favorite Midwest bands made it out to Portlandia, archivist Mark Burgin recorded the entire show with multiple high quality cameras and edited the footage to create what has to...

This was an interesting little visualization, courtesy of The Atlantic, which notes the top ten metro areas, ranked by number of bands originating from there who performed in officially listed showcases at the 2013 South By Southwest conference. Chicago just edges into the top 10 with 36 bands.The second set of plots is equally as interesting. Marked...

With the NCAA tournament starting up again, the blogosphere has been lit up with brackets of all sorts and our corner of the music world is not immune. I was intrigued with the drama and thrilling upsets last year's tournaments, but there's even more this March. Here's five jamband brackets, some thoughts on how last...

Buzzfeed recently reported on a curious feature that Google offers as a part of its Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) product. Many spreadsheet jockeys have been known to start a series in the first two cells of a worksheet (e.g. Days Of The Week, Months of the Year, etc.) and use the autofill feature...

Contributed by @WeirScrewedThe songs of some artists are snug like a warm blanket. Todd Snider is a prime example. He has worn the role of traveling stoner troubadour quite well over the years and the packed house at SPACE on Saturday night attested to this. Judging by how much of the crowd was singing along...

Night two is in the books. Audience requests, dedications and covers all made their way back into the song list on Thursday for Jeff's set at the Vic.There's a six song video playlist below... the version of Casino Queen and the hilarious Q&A beforehand are must hears.Jeff TweedyMarch 14, 2013Vic Theater, Chicago, ILVia...

This is just so cool in so many ways. Let's start at the beginning and work our way to the end...1. Somebody identified what he considers to be the 100 most essential riffs of all time -- spanning seven decades of rock history2. This person can play every single one in a convincing manner3. He has...

Jeff Tweedy returned to the Vic for the first of two mid-week solo shows. According to reports, this was an extremely "loose" show and from the setlist below (sourced from viachicago.com), you can tell he mixed it up with interesting covers, "spoken word" versions of tunes and other interesting touches (dedication to Pope Francis!)....

It was with certain amount of amusement, and shameful delight, that I watched the "reviews" roll in for the Umphrey's McGee "Chicago tourist anthem" last spring. Admittedly I was excited to hear a band that I liked pay tribute to the city I love, but the final product was a bit of a head-scratcher.It...

The weekly Dead jam is back in Chicago!Each Wednesday, Terrain Flyer brings a host of the best Dead-loving musicians from all over the city to jam out at Abbey Pub.They promise to cover a new full album the last Wednesday of each month (next up is Skull and Roses on 3/27). For their first...