Each year we write, create, build and perform a large summer pageant-play-extravaganza. These performances last about an hour, include an ensemble of professional musicians who create an original score of... Read More →

Capping off a fruitful 12-year long solo career, David Bazan resurrects both the moniker and mindset of his profoundly influential indie rock outfit, Pedro The Lion. The band’s new album and Polyvinyl debut, Phoenix, marks a return to form as the follow up to their 2004 opus, Achilles Heel. Phoenix maps out the emotional intricacies of growing up in Arizona with the songs themselves a darkly hopeful introspection into home and what it means to go back, if you ever can. Since their formation in 2001, mewithoutYou have become a standard-bearer for their genre. Across six full-length albums and a handful of EPs, the Philadelphia band— alternately labeled experimental punk, post-hardcore, indie rock, etc.—have long put a premium on progression, never anchoring themselves to a single sound and instead gracefully wandering across stylistic lines. It’s that same spirit that informed the band’s upcoming seventh album , their second for Run For Cover Records, as well as its accompanying EP . Pedro The Lion links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Music mewithoutYou links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube

For a guy whose career has evolved more by serendipity than design, Ben Dickey’s professional journey has turned into one heckuva ride. It’s not every day an obscure musician’s famous actor/director friend hands him the lead in a passion-project indie film, and he not only winds up sharing the screen with one of his musical heroes, he also wins a Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize for Dramatic Achievement in Acting – and a Variety magazine “for your consideration” plug for a Best Actor Oscar nomination. 

Dickey’s acting debut in Blaze, Ethan Hawke’s biopic about doomed Texas singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, has already led to more roles, including their pairing as bounty hunters in The Kid, a western directed by Vincent D’Onofrio. But just as exciting, as far as Dickey’s concerned, is the opportunity it provided to record with that musical hero, longtime Bob Dylan guitarist Charlie Sexton (who played Blaze’s other troubled Texas songwriting legend, Townes Van Zandt). After they did the film’s original cast recording (on Light in the Attic Records), Sexton produced Dickey’s solo album, A Glimmer on the Outskirts. That inspired Sexton, Hawke and Blaze executive producer Louis Black to form SexHawkeBlack Records, a new Austin-based imprint under the umbrella of Nashville’s Dualtone Records. Dickey’s March 7, 2019 release is the label’s first. It’s hardly Dickey’s first recording foray, however. In fact, he says, he preferred the idea of forming a label to shopping for one because he’d been signed before – and still bears scars from watching the dream morph into a momentum-sucking nightmare. But SexHawkeBlack president Erika Pinktipps happens to be friends with Dualtone’s founder; that connection quickly turned into an actual alliance. “We’re all doing this together,” Dickey says, “ a group of people who all care about each other and have similar artistic arrows pointed in the same direction.” Dickey was 10 when his artistic arrow started pointing toward music; that’s when his grandfather handed down his 1935 Gibson L-30 archtop. “He was a magical fellow, and his guitar is, too,” Dickey says. “So I wanted to be magic, too.” 

Within a year, his grandfather was gone. The magic, fortunately, stayed. But conjuring it wasn’t always easy for a kid growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, far from his dad – a college football star who’d moved to Georgia after the parental split, when Dickey was 4. Ten years later, Dickey’s mother left, too – following her friend and boss, Bill Clinton, from the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion to the White House. Dickey moved into his grandmother’s basement – and became one more angry, disaffected teenage rocker. 

He formed his first “real” band, Shake Ray Turbine, at 16, made his first record at 17 and began touring at 18, ditching Little Rock Central High (most famous students: the Little Rock Nine) for an $850 Ford van. When the founder of their D.I.Y. label, File 13 Records, headed to Philadelphia for college, they followed. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify

Inara George and Greg Kurstin, alias the bird and the bee, are an army of two. They listen to everything, and answer to no one. Over the course of 3 years, they whiled away scattered afternoons in Greg’s studio in Echo Park, California, sequestered in a little world of their own making, and creating the ten sunshine-drenched, semi-psychedelic ditties you hold before you. Were these compositions intended for public consumption? Inara and Greg never gave it any thought; they made music together simply for the joy of it. the bird and the bee, their self-titled debut for Metro Blue Records, an imprint of Blue Note Records, is a labor of love. If you know anything about the backgrounds of Inara George and Greg Kurstin, the accomplishments of the bird and the bee might not seem quite so casual as all that. Both are blessed with extraordinary intuitive musical abilities, which have been bolstered by years of practice. Multi-instrumentalist Greg was a jazz piano prodigy by the time he started shaving; he moved to New York specifically to study with leftist Jaki Byard, a jazz icon best known as Mingus’ pianist. He returned to Los Angeles and became one of the city’s most well respected musicians, lending his skills to the likes of Beck and Robert Moog, as well as writing with and/or producing The Flaming Lips, Peaches, and Lily Allen, to name a few. As for Inara, she grew up in Los Angeles in a musical household, the daughter of Lowell George, frontman of the eclectic ’70s Southern rock band Little Feat. For several years she was in different bands in the Los Angeles area until she began her solo career releasing 2005’s critically acclaimed All Rise. During the making of that record was when Greg and Inara first met. It was through mutual friend and All Rise producer, Mike Andrews, that Inara and Greg made a connection. “I like to sing standards, and Greg likes to play them,” recalls Inara. “He was working on my record, and one day, after a rehearsal, we hung out near a piano and, for three or four hours, played all the old songs we knew.” When they ran short of material, it dawned on them to augment the repertoire with a few originals and put their own stamp on the traditions established by the greats who had gone before. Like the Tropicalia revolutionaries of ’60s Brazil, who both revered and reacted against the traditions of bossa nova, the bird and the bee wanted to put their own spin on classic pop conventions. Although they composed as a team, Inara was responsible for vocals, while Greg oversaw almost all instrumental parts. Neither party assumed a secondary role; in the creative process, it was purely give-and-take. “Melodies would dictate chord progressions, or sometimes vice-versa, depending on where the vocal part wanted to go,” recalls Inara. “The writing was almost improvised in nature.” This was a change from many of their other gigs, especially for Greg; there was no pressure to deliver a hit song, or capture a signature sound. With the bird and the bee, any idea was fair game. The first song the duo collaborated on, “Again & Again,” became a template for the material to come. Handclaps and tambourines, a bumblebee bass line, and Inara’s beguiling vocals blend together in a summery concoction. Each of the songs that follows similarly and slyly unveils its own unique charm. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

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Online applications are now available for the 2020 Emerging Artists Grant Program. The Emerging Artists Program (EAP) is a project grant program that provides financial support to developing or established... Read More →