Category: Artists

If you’d have checked in with Marty James, the mastermind behind Scapegoat Wax, a year ago you’d have found him in one of two places: making beats and recording in his bedroom, or playing a college house party somewhere around Chico State. Since signing with Grand Royal things haven’t changed much; he’s spent the last…

After years of blazing trails for reality based rap, elevating hard-core hip hop to a high art, and earning millions of dollars and fans around the world, Scarface has decided that it is time to take his music to a whole new level by returning it back to the people who inspired him to create…

“I have a feeling people are never really gonna know who I am,” Bob Schneider says. Fair enough. And a 1500 word bio is rarely enough to convey an artists’ life and music anyway, but in Bob Schneider’s case it seems particularly tough. How do you package a tale that bounces between Germany and Texas,…

Pop music has exploded, in an edgy, sexy, supremely tuneful commotion – thanks to the uncommonly brilliant sounds of the Scissor Sisters. Creative sparks first ignited five years ago, when a then 19-year-old explosion of energy called Jake Shears was introduced to a multi-instrumentalist who goes by the title of Babydaddy. Both fired up by…

“It’s hard to put a level on my music, like jazz of fusion”, says guitarist John Scofield. “It’s instrumental music that has one foot in the jazz tradition and the other in the popular traditions, especially rhythm and blues. You know, jazz musicians don’t live in a vacuum where they only hear jazz”. A veteran…

Scritti Politti will be ringing in the new millennium with Anomie & Bonhomie, the band’s first full-length album in over a decade. Anomie & Bonhomie (which roughly translates as “despair and delight”) contains 11 new songs, all of them written, arranged and performed by brainchild and sole survivor Green Gartside. The album was recorded in…

Some people think that this rock ‘n roll thing is a laugh, a bit of cheeky fun to be had until the royalties come pouring in. Those who have lived it aren’t quite so sure, however. Take Seafood. In 2001, the London-based four-piece were sent to Mission Sound studios in New York to record their…

“I was able to create the perfect conditions to stimulate great productivity. It was like breaking a code, opening up a valve. I’m in the midst of the most creative period of my life and I think you can hear it on this album.” After five years away, Seal is back with his new album…

The arrival of any new trend in popular music inevitably will produce both leaders and followers, innovators and imitators. Such a musical wave will leave some performers stranded on shore even as others sail on to new, uncharted territory. Amid the so-called “Latin pop explosion” in contemporary music, the music of Jon Secada has already…

In the ’90s, Henry Rollins emerged as a post-punk renaissance man, without the self-conscious trappings that plagued such ’80s artists as David Byrne. Since Black Flag’s breakup in 1986, Rollins has been relentlessly busy, recording albums with the Rollins Band, writing books and poetry, performing spoken-word tours, writing a magazine column in Details, acting in…