No night carries as much pressure as New Year’s Eve. If the previous year pissed all over you, you still have one night to make up for it. If the previous year was a banner one, you feel pressed to end it with a bang for fear of not rolling…
2016 has been an awful year for music fans. David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, and too many others left us far too soon. Though those titans of creativity can never be replaced, it is a blessing that we live in an era where countless musicians are striving to do just…
It seems like every few years, Hollywood tries to sell us on the idea that musicals deserve a comeback. Whether it’s Moulin Rouge, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, or Into the Woods, it never really brings back a renaissance of those MGM days. While computer technicians are able to make…
Jason D. Shaw encounters an obvious question an awful lot at his bar, Cash Only, the new Fort Lauderdale spot for which he’s marketing director. Patrons waddle to the bar, a guilty look on their faces, and ask the bartender whether the place accepts any type of payment other than…
The phone interview with Anthony Dewar, one-half of the twin-brother lounge-rock band the Dewars, started off kind of stilted. Midway through the conversation, Anthony explained why: “We’re filming a documentary about the tour. Kevin [a filmmaker] is filming me being interviewed right now.” Suddenly I, the interviewer…
Though it’s been close to 40 years since it snowed down here, you can’t accuse South Florida of not getting in the holiday spirit. Everywhere you look, there is a party, concert, or event filled with cheer. So whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Festivus, here…
Commercial radio gets a lot of flak from music snobs. Elitists like music journalists at free weekly newspapers will whine and moan about the repetition of the same tunes played every hour, the quality of those songs on repeat, and even the fact that the stations have too many commercials…
If you put the songs of Amanda Palmer’s solo career into a random playlist, you will hear a beautiful hodgepodge of piano ballads, ukulele folk songs, and even electro Krautrock parodies. She got her first shot at notoriety as a pianist/songwriter in a punk-rock Tori Amos blender with the Dresden…
With 2016 almost in the books, we’ve been wanting to look back nostalgically at the twelve months that just passed. The past year saw legends headline arenas, local bands stretch out their wings, and lots and lots of spring breakers congregating for a festival. With 2017 lurking around the…
Though he’s recently had albums titled Global Warming and Globalization and has an upcoming one called Climate Change, Pitbull has not lately been the most political of rappers. His verses in “Timber” had nothing to do with deforestation, and “Give Me Everything” makes no mention of where he comes down on tax rates…
Though some musicians might feel awkward watching people listen to their recordings, Sam Rosenthal says he will feel no such anxiety when Deja Vu Audio South hosts a listening party for These Fleeting Moments, his band Black Tape for a Blue Girl’s double album. “At a listening party, I don’t…
Riptide Music Festival bills itself as the “biggest two-day alternative and classic hits music festival to ever land on the beaches of Fort Lauderdale.” It not only takes advantage of the beach but is also bringing a lineup impressive enough to keep our eyes off those tan lines. Here are the…
Though they perished thousands of years ago, the Vikings leave a legacy that lives on in TV shows, American football, and, oddly enough, music. “It gives you a sense of being on a long ship sailing across the sea, ready to pillage and burn,” singer and guitarist Greg Moir explains…
Andy Leo sums his band up like this: “We’re the Backstreet Boys of the metal world.” It’s a sort of half-joke, but the five handsome members of Crown the Empire do look a bit like what would happen if you gave a boy band some strong whiskey and a fistful…
Few people on this planet know their way around a guitar like Steve Vai. He’s recorded with Frank Zappa, Whitesnake, David Lee Roth, and even Mary J. Blige, but it is his solo career where he’s been able to write musical compositions that allow him to noodle around the guitar like no…
Thanksgiving is all about spending time with the family. While this is wonderful in theory, in practice it can be stressful as hell when between bites of cranberry sauce, you have to defend to Aunt Gertrude or Tio Raul where exactly your life went so wrong. Fortunately, there…
Writing three autobiographies might seem like overkill. When you played bass for two of the 20th Century’s more significant bands as Peter Hook has, though, there can never be too many memoirs. It doesn’t hurt his cause that interviewing Hook is reminiscent of those…
When Bob Dylan recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature, it caused a lot of controversy. Do songs count as literature? According to the Swedish Academy that decides the prizewinners, they apparently do. This could open the floodgates to rock-and-rollers being championed in Stockholm. In honor of Bob Dylan…
Okeechobee Music & Arts Festival has announced the 2017 lineup for the four-day camping bonanza to be held Thursday, March 2, through Sunday, March 5, at Sunshine Grove in Okeechobee. Among the more than 70 acts confirmed were Tennessee rockers Kings of Leon, R&B superstar Usher accompanied onstage…
Give Le Youth a time machine, and it’s clear where he’ll go. “There was something cool about the ’90s. the California-based, Ohio-born electronic musician, DJ, and producer says. “I think everyone knows what I am talking about.” His bio describes his music as a “?’90s sounds refracted through a thoroughly…
They say it’s not what you know but who you know. Nothing proves this quite like the number of successful musicians who have famous parents. While many of the people on this list have considerable talent, there are scores of starving brilliant musicians out there who will read this and…
When Coral Springs resident MC Jumanji and his manager Sergio Mendes didn’t hear the music they liked in South Florida, the pair decided to do something about it. They recently founded the label American Grime, named after their favorite strain of hip-hop. “Grime was a way for the London underground to…
