Brendan Kelley

"Yeah, I jumped off a cliff, but let's talk about something else," Elliott Smith told me back in 1997. It was shortly after the release of his breakthrough album on Kill Rock Stars, Either/Or, and Smith had recently tried to commit suicide by throwing himself off a cliff, suffering only...

764-HERO, while still at peace in the relative obscurity of the underground, is no longer the sort of new phenomenon that can be judged one release at a time. After two full-length albums (Salt Sinks, Sugar Floats and Get Here and Stay), an EP (We're Solids) and a brilliantly conceived...

Various Artists Post Marked Stamps (Tree Records) Sometime in early 1996, a young man in Chicago named Ken Shipley conceptualized a series of two-song, seven-inch singles to release on his label, Tree. The series was called Post Marked Stamps, and the songs were built around the concept of long-distance lovers...

True hidden treasures in the music industry are few and far between. Sure, industry monoliths occasionally dredge up a "lost" Beatles single or recover masters long forgotten, but the reality is that these situations rarely occur. And when they do, it's often only to the benefit of the multinational corporations...

Joan of Arc Live in Chicago, 1999 (Jade Tree) Joan of Arc's third disc is not a live album, as the title would have you believe. Rather it's the materialization of the members' collective artistic expressions while living in Chicago circa 1999. Tim Kinsella, frontman and mastermind of the threesome,...