[The Guardian]

Published in November, it will cover everything from Smith’s childhood to her rise as a punk rock star and later retreat from public life

Patti Smith has written a memoir that her publishers are describing as her “most intimate and visionary work” yet, which is due out this autumn.

Bread of Angels will cover everything from Smith’s childhood in working-class Philadelphia and South Jersey to her rise as a punk rock star and her subsequent retreat from public life.

“It took a decade to write this book, grappling with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime,” Smith said. “I’m hoping that people will find something they need.”

The singer won the 2010 National Book award for nonfiction, a prestigious US literary prize, for her previous memoir, Just Kids, which she had promised the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, her longtime partner and friend, that she would write.

Bread of Angels will be published on 4 November, in the gap between the Europe and US dates of Smith’s 50th anniversary tour of her first album, Horses. The date is “especially meaningful” to the artist, as it is both Mapplethorpe’s birthday and the anniversary of her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith’s death.

As well as Just Kids, which documented her relationship with Mapplethorpe, Smith has written four other books including memoirs M Train, about her relationship with Smith, and Year of the Monkey. The latter focuses on 2016, when Smith’s friend, the producer, manager and rock critic Sandy Pearlman, died, and the musician was confronted with grief for him alongside fears about the rise of populism, the climate crisis, and her impending 70th birthday.

“Patti Smith is a living legend,” said Alexis Kirschbaum, head of Bloomsbury Trade, which will be publishing the book in the UK. “While her lyrics and music have inspired generations of listeners, her books have made her one of the most cherished and influential writers of the last 50 years. Bread of Angels confirms her position as a writer.”

As well as music and literature, Smith has also created visual art and photography, which has been exhibited globally. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, and has been the recipient of numerous awards including the ASCAP Founders award, Sweden’s Polar Music prize, the PEN/Audible Literary Service award, and France’s Légion d’honneur.

[See Rock Live]

By Matt Bergman

Jonathan Richman is a national treasure. The Massachusetts native may not always be a household name, but to those who know him, he is in a class of his own. Without Jonathan, it’s safe to say that artists like David Byrne and Ian Curtis might never have existed at all.

The response from the sold-out crowd at the Concert Hall on Sunday, March 2, made it clear that Richman has a unique connection with his fans. The show was organized by legendary veteran promoter Gary Topp, renowned for bringing original punk acts like The Ramones to Canada in the 1970s and beyond. Even in 2025, Topp continues to excel in his craft.

Jonathan performed an eclectic mix of songs in multiple languages, including English, French, and Italian. Accompanied by his drummer, Tommy Larkins, he created an atmosphere of natural storytelling, engaging with audience members and taking requests in an unparalleled manner. At times, Richman had full conversations with fans in the sold-out 1,200-person venue. The audience was clearly familiar with his style, treating the event like an annual tradition. His innocent delivery and almost childlike attitude brought a warm and inviting energy to the room. It was remarkable to witness a solo artist with an acoustic guitar command such a large crowd.

Richman sprinkled in hits like his solo classic “Lesbian Bar” and The Modern Lovers’ iconic “Pablo Picasso,” alongside a variety of worldly songs performed in different styles and languages. His dynamic stage presence included dancing and full-body performances that encouraged the audience to join in and move around.

Initially uncertain about what to expect from the show, I walked away with a deeper appreciation for Richman’s artistry. While I am a fan of The Modern Lovers, I knew this would be more of an acoustic experience. Now I understand why he performs this way—it gives him total creative freedom to explore any direction he pleases. Larkins seems to intuitively follow Richman’s lead as if they share a single creative mind. Their synergy was impressive and truly special.

This event left me an even bigger fan of Jonathan Richman. He embodies the true meaning of the word troubadour, performing with a storytelling style that is entirely unique and impossible to replicate. There is only one Jonathan Richman—and how fortunate we are to have him.

[NPR]

[Aquarium Drunkard]

“I’m trying to convince people that I’m a wizard and she always helps,” Richard Dawson chuckles, over Zoom, acknowledging the presence of his adorable and aptly named cat Trouble, who has cozily curled herself around the crook of the songwriter’s neck, perfectly poised like a luxurious scarf. She mostly remains in that position while Dawson speaks about the various themes and influences that provided a strong foundation for his excellent eighth studio album, The End of The Middle . . .

Read full article here.

[Pop Matters]

Trailblazing guitarist and Wilco secret weapon Nels Cline is back with a bracing new jazz quartet recording and joined by similarly forward-thinking musicians.

By Chris Ingalls

or over 20 years, guitar wizard Nels Cline has successfully straddled two slightly different, yet equally enviable musical lines. An accomplished guitarist in the punk, jazz, and experimental music worlds since the early 1980s, he was invited to join alt rock icons Wilco in 2004, in an intact, reshuffled lineup. While Wilco is the band that introduced him to a far wider audience, he is still churning out compelling experimental jazz recordings as a solo artist, with his latest, Consentrik Quartet, focusing on original material as part of an exciting four-piece combo.

On Consentrik Quartet, Cline is joined by tenor and soprano saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Chris Lightcap, and drummer Tom Rainey. As a solo artist, Cline tends to veer off in a variety of directions: he’s explored the cacophony of free jazz with drummer Gregg Bendian on their 1999 tribute to John Coltrane‘s Interstellar Space, delved into a chamber orchestra take on the Great American Songbook with the sumptuous Lovers, and split the difference with records like the eclectic Macroscope (credited to his prolific band the Nels Cline Singers).

With Consentrik Quartet, there’s something for everyone, although it leans heavily toward hard bop – a genre perfected by the Blue Note label on which the record appears. While Cline is credited with composing the album’s 12 tracks, the quartet does a splendid job of interpreting the music and its varying styles and tempi.

“The Returning Angel” opens the record with grace and a slight undercurrent of tension, with Cline’s steady guitar lines complementing Laubrock’s horns beautifully. But things get a little rowdier with the freewheeling syncopation of “The 23”, executed with a rock-like motion that includes plenty of generous soloing to keep it steadily in a jazz lane, followed by the even jazzier rhythms of “Surplus”.

Described in the press by Cline as a love letter to the Brooklyn improvised-music scene, Consentrik Quartet sees Cline and his three co-conspirators as continuously adventurous, moving effortlessly and imaginatively. There are floating, ethereal moments on tracks like the airy “Allende” and the mysterious “Inner Walls” (the latter seeing Cline implementing some haunting backwards guitar figures). However, there’s also a nihilistic energy to songs like “Satomi”, with a punk-like defiance in the riffs, before the ensemble shifts to a darker, more deliberate mood.   

Other highlights include the slinky, playful “Down Close”, the raucous, lively, percussive vibe of “The Bag”, and the multifaceted, shapeshifting bop of “Slipping Into Something”. On the final track, “Time of No Sirens”, Cline and his trusty co-conspirators bring things to a relatively gentle conclusion, reminiscent of the warm swells of Lovers. However, the languid tempo is deceiving as the four musicians remained committed to bringing odd, unique bits of flavor to what might be drab or unimaginative in lesser hands.

Like many of the best musicians, Nels Cline approaches his music with a curious, imaginative, and energetic ear. Even when working in tried-and-true genres, he always pulls something fascinating out of his hat. With Consentrik Quartet, he’s joined by similarly forward-thinking musicians who can bring these intriguing ideas to light.   

[Guardian]

By Jim Farber

The frontman of the J Geils Band has had an extraordinary life, living and working with celebrities along the way, detailed in a fascinating new book

During the peak of the pandemic, when many musicians spent their time writing songs, Peter Wolf did nothing but read. During that prolonged period of isolation and uncertainty, he comforted himself by devouring shelves full of books, including memoirs penned by other musicians. “After a while all those memoirs started to seem the same,” he said. “And I came to the realization that, unless you were a huge fan of that musician, the details of their story wouldn’t seem particularly captivating.”

Such thoughts had a major impact on Wolf when he was approached to tell his own story. As a result, his new book, titled Waiting on the Moon, threads the outlines of a memoir – highlighted by his years fronting the hit group J Geils Band – through a host of colorful anecdotes about what he describes as the “artists, poets, drifters, grifters and goddesses” he met along the way.

One such goddess happened to be Faye Dunaway, to whom he was married for five tumultuous years in the 70s. Initially, Wolf was so reluctant to include any details of his personal story that he didn’t even want to mention his band, which topped the charts in the 80s with songs like Freeze-Frame and Centerfold, or his marriage to one of Hollywood’s biggest and most controversial stars. It took the combined force of his editor and agent to throw cold water in his face. “They told me it would seem odd if I left those things out,” he said. “It would only wind up bringing more attention to them.”

The balance Wolf eventually struck makes much of his book read less like the work of a memoirist than that of a raconteur, eager to revel in the quirks of the characters in his orbit. “In writing the book I found that people reveal themselves best in the little details,” he said. “That’s where you see what they’re really like.”

The more unexpected the detail, the better – like discovering upon meeting Fred Astaire that he was utterly entranced by the dancers on Soul Train. Or observing that Aretha Franklin, with whom Wolf cut a duet in the 80s, would only speak to him in a British accent due to her love at the time of the delicious bitchery of Joan Collins on Dynasty.

The book begins as conventional memoirs must, with Wolf’s childhood. But unlike the legion of rockers who rebelled against their square parents, Wolf echoed their love of the arts as well as their countercultural politics. During his childhood, his parents’ leftist affiliations were pronounced enough to put them under surveillance by the US government.

“When we got a TV, which was a really exciting thing for a kid in the 50s, it wasn’t for entertainment,” he said. “It was so my parents could watch the McCarthy hearings.”

As a child, Wolf was so hyper-active his mother used to tie a leash around him to stop him from running wild. “I remember how horrified the neighbors were by that,” he said with a laugh.

His parents encouraged his interests in both music and painting, which soon attracted interesting company. As a teen, Wolf took his paintings to Washington Square Park, where he wound up meeting Edward Hopper, who would stop by to chat. “Here was this great artist,” Wolf said, “but at the time he was considered passé because it was the age of the abstract impressionists.”

Wolf’s parallel obsession with music led him to early shows by Bob Dylan soon after he arrived in the Village in the early 60s. The visionary scope of Dylan’s work convinced Wolf that this wasn’t just a great artist but a seer. He was so convinced that one day he cornered Dylan with a demand to know “what is truth?” The question elicited from Dylan a pitched screed about the unknowability of all things, which Wolf recounts in two burning pages in the book. “I think I got what I deserved,” the author said with a laugh.

To develop his painting skills, Wolf attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where his first roommate turned out to be a young David Lynch, who also aspired to an art career. “There was no talk of cinema whatsoever then,” Wolf said. “We were truly the odd couple. David came from the preppie world and was into the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons while I was this debauched person from Greenwich Village who listened to Thelonious Monk.”

Despite Lynch’s buttoned-up demeanor, elements of his future feel for surrealism poked through one day when he was brushing his teeth. Unfortunately, Lynch had failed to notice that a dead cockroach had become entangled on the brush, resulting in a rash of insect remains strewn across his teeth.

During his time in Boston, Wolf began to perform with an R&B band called the Hallucinations, who opened shows for idols of his like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. Wolf and Waters became especially close. “Muddy came from a totally different culture, but here he was sitting on my futon telling me that as a young man he sang the songs of [country legend] Gene Autry,” he said. “To me, that was mind-blowing.”

Besides Howlin’ Wolf’s genius, Peter Wolf was drawn to his determination to sustain a career with little financial reward. “He stayed in these cheap hotels with yellow window shades and beds that sagged like you see in noir films,” he said. “But he still kept going.”

Wolf was with Waters that horrible night in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, a night that also happened to be the blues legend’s birthday. “While Muddy was blowing out his candles, sirens blared in the background,” Wolf said. “The whole country was on edge.”

By that time, Wolf had begun working as a DJ at WBCN, which became the city’s best champion for cutting-edge music. In that capacity, he began to receive a steady stream of anonymous notes that begged him to “play more Van Morrison”. Only after befriending the Irish singer a while later did he discover that the notes were written by Morrison’s girlfriend and sometimes by the man himself. “He signed them Mongo Bongo,” Wolf said. “I still have them.”

That was during a fraught time in Morrison’s life when he was hiding out in Boston to escape a rash of legal issues with his record company in New York. “Van had absolutely no money and was feeling so lost,” Wolf said. “I provided a shelter for him.”

At the same time, Morrison was developing the revolutionary sound of Astral Weeks, an album that would become a gamechanger not just for him but for music itself. As much affection as Wolf brings to his descriptions of Morrison, he also captures the famously difficult side of him, replete with random outbursts and last-minute refusals to go on stage. Rather than label him difficult, however, Wolf sees him as “moody”. “Van doesn’t deal with bullshit,” he said.

The tolerance Wolf had for such things would come in handy when he met his future wife, Faye Dunaway, another artist known for her fast-moving moods. A mutual friend introduced them after a J Geils show in 1972. By that time, she’d become a gigantic star, having broken through five years earlier with her role in Bonnie and Clyde. By contrast, Wolf’s band then drew a cultish crowd. As stark as the power imbalance was between them, Wolf recalled the 70s as an era “when all movie stars wanted to be rockers, and all rockers wanted to be movie stars”.

Moreover, Dunaway was a huge Otis Redding fan and she adored hanging out with the band and crew, regardless of their sometimes ratty circumstances. It helped that she could drink them all under the table. “She really was two people,” Wolf said. “There was Dorothy Faye [her birth name], who was this sweet southern girl, and Faye Dunaway, this very cultured actress.”

The book chronicles her moods without judgment but, in a new documentary about the star, she herself ponders on camera the possibility that she might be bipolar. “That term didn’t exist when we were married,” Wolf said. “But when people are graced with an artistic gift, there are things that come along with that. Maybe I just have a gift for being able to deal with those things.”

However, even he could reach a breaking point, like the moment during the filming of Chinatown in 1974 when Dunaway and co-star Jack Nicholson met to talk about the film, with Wolf in tow. At one point, the movie stars excused themselves to go upstairs for what Wolf eventually realized was an impromptu assignation. Though that made him far from happy at the time, he now advises readers to consider “the era in which this was happening. The climate was ripe for that.”

Soon after the ensuing blow-up, the two reconciled and, out of nowhere, Dunaway proposed to him. As exciting as their subsequent marriage was, it was far from stable. Several years into it Dunaway left him for photographer Terry O’Neill.

Meanwhile, Wolf’s band continued to coast commercially, despite the mountain of critical respect they’d amassed. The songs J Geils cut in the 70s, captured most searingly on their live album Full House, forged an entirely new brand of R&B, fired by hard rock power and delivered at the speed of a runaway train. However, their contract with Atlantic Records was so onerous that profits were nearly impossible to realize. Their turnaround didn’t occur until they moved to EMI Records in the early 80s, resulting in a No 1 album for Freeze-Frame. With that win came an invitation to open a Stones tour that also featured the first stadium appearances by a young Prince. Shockingly, the purple one often got booed off the stage. “It wasn’t a racial thing,” Wolf said. “It was just that seeing Prince sing songs like Jerk U Off in a trenchcoat was just too outlandish for the generic AOR rock fan of the day.”

Though J Geils went down well with that crowd, their success caused most of the band members to want to lean further into the slick, synth-driven sound that gave them hits. By contrast, Wolf wanted to use their new exposure to lead the audience back to their core R&B sound. At an impasse, the band unceremoniously fired him in 1983.

In the years since, Wolf has released eight solo albums, all of which finely balance his root R&B style with more mature and poignant lyrics. (He’s in the process of recording a new solo album now.) He brought that same mature perspective to his book. If the anecdotes he offers along the way often outweigh the personal details he reveals, the end result makes a powerful point: sometimes the story of who we are can best be told by the things we love.

“The work of all those people I’ve admired so much has defined a lot of my life,” Wolf said. “Because I was lucky enough to spend so many private moments with them, my mission was to be an observer and to share all that I got to see.”

• Waiting on the Moon is out on 11 March

12am – CVC @cvcband_

11:10pm – Cardinals @cardinalsband_

10:20pm – Monobloc @monobloc.online

9:30pm – Mary In The Junkyard @maryinthejunkyrd

8:45pm – Case Oats @caseoats

8pm – Joelton Mayfield @joeltonmayfield

@antonesnightclub

Artwork by @dwschwab

[New York Times]

Starting in the early 1970s, the organist, singer and songwriter was a creative anchor for Tom Petty. On a new solo album, he explores what comes next.

By Bob Mehr

Reporting from Los Angeles

• Published Feb. 27, 2025Updated Feb. 28, 2025

Ninety pounds, the approximate weight of a Farfisa organ, nearly kept Benmont Tench from his destiny.

It was late 1971, and Tench, a native of Gainesville, Fla., was home from college for Christmas. His favorite local band, Mudcrutch, was playing a five-set-a-night residency at a topless bar called Dub’s, and they’d finally invited him to join them onstage. He started to load his gear into his mother’s station wagon, hoisted his Fender amp onto the tailgate and then went to grab his organ.

“I picked this thing up and it was so damn heavy,” Tench recalled. For a moment, he considered blowing the whole thing off. Instead, he heaved the Farfisa into the car. That night, he played with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell for the first time, forging a musical bond and forming the nucleus of what would eventually become the Heartbreakers. “But it almost didn’t happen,” Tench said in a recent interview, shaking his head at the memory. “I mean, it was that close.”

More than half a century later, the Heartbreakers themselves are a memory: The group ended abruptly after Petty’s death in 2017 from an accidental drug overdose. But Tench, 71, continues to make music. His second solo album, an elegiac collection of songs titled “The Melancholy Season,” will be released on March 7.

The album follows a 10-year period that included a second marriage for Tench, to the writer Alice Carbone, the birth of his first child and the loss of Petty, his longtime friend and band leader.

“Tom died, and our daughter was born three months later,” said Tench, sitting in the living room of his home in the Los Feliz neighborhood. It was a late winter afternoon, and the fine-boned, soft-spoken Tench — his neck wrapped in a blue silk ascot, his head covered by a white Borsalino — was sipping tea as sunlight passed through a large picture window and onto the lid of a 1928 Mason & Hamlin piano.

“The band, the main focus of my life since I was 19 years old, was gone,” he said. “Losing Tom was a terrible event that blew everything up. But I was damned if I wasn’t going to make another record.”

Tench’s former bandmate Campbell, now fronting his own group the Dirty Knobs, understands his dilemma. “The Heartbreakers had intentions of making more records, playing more shows, we would’ve gone on forever,” he said in a phone interview. “Even now, the grief is still there — but I have to keep making music, because that’s my lifeblood, and it’s the same with Ben. This is a whole new part of our lives that we didn’t choose.”

More recently, Tench has faced serious health issues. In 2023, he learned that his mouth cancer — the disease he had been dealing with for more than a decade — had spread to his jaw. “The doctors took half my jaw out,” he said, “took a piece from my leg, muscle and bone to rebuild it.”

A series of surgeries and treatments followed into 2024, delaying the release of “The Melancholy Season.” “I’ve been letting everything heal, doing a few therapeutic exercises and trying to learn to speak more clearly, and to sing again,” Tench continued, dabbing at his mouth with a handkerchief.

“It’s funny, if I go to the Heartbreakers clubhouse, our old rehearsal space, after an hour or so at the piano singing, my pronunciation is much better. It just goes to show that, in my life, the answer to everything is to play.”

ON A WALL in Tench’s stylish 1920s Tudor, there’s a large framed photograph: a post-show snapshot of a joyous Petty and the Heartbreakers, after their final gig — a sold-out concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2017 that capped the band’s 40th anniversary tour.

The group was driven by the force of Petty’s personality and songs, but it was the Heartbreakers’ interplay that elevated the music and the band’s fortunes. Campbell and Tench, in particular, could turn Petty’s raw melodies and chord progressions into soulful symphonies.

“That was the beauty of Ben and I,” Campbell said. “Also, Ben had a technical musical knowledge that Tom and I didn’t have. He could fill the space between us.”

After Petty’s death, Tench sought refuge in his family and in the studio, working on albums for friends like Ringo Starr and Jenny Lewis. Though he’s now revered as one of rock’s greatest and most prolific session musicians, for the first five years of the Heartbreakers, Petty barred him from doing any outside recording. “It was the law for the whole band,” Tench said. “Tom felt like the Heartbreakers had a specific sound, and he didn’t want other people’s records sounding like us.”

Read full article here.

[Flood Magazine]

With the Seattle art-rock project’s fourth album out now via Sub Pop, Jessica Dobson and Peter Mansen share how Gang of Four, The Walkmen, Wilco, and more shaped their vision.

By Mike LeSuer

Over the past 15 years, Jessica Dobson has dedicated her Deep Sea Diverproject to standing out among an ever-widening field of indie-rock outfits in her native Pacific Northwest and beyond. Joined by drummer Peter Mansen and synth player Elliot Jackson, the outfit’s fourth album Billboard Heart feels like their most intuitive—it’s the work of road-tested musicians following their instincts, fueled as much by the music they consume as by each other. “Sometimes we need reminders to not take ourselves seriously and the good stuff comes out,” Dobson shares in the band’s breakdown of the LP, signaling the more carefree rock-and-roll feel of their Sub Pop debut in contrast with 2020’s folkier Impossible Weight.

Joined by her partner Mansen in the track-by-track writeup, the duo cite everything from the urgency of The Walkmen to Tom Skinner’s specific percussional tones on the first LP from The Smile, the tight post-punk energy of Gang of Four to the improvisatory looseness of Wilco’s Summerteeth (not to mention the indirect influences of David Bazan’s bookshelf and Pearl Jam’s arena-sized audiences to which Deep Sea Diver recently played). Billboard Heart is clearly the work of artists fully unclenching for the first time, a cathartic second take when the first one may have been a little overthought. “Sometimes you have to be willing to demolish what you think is precious to get to the better stuff,” Manson notes, echoing Dobson’s earlier sentiment.

With the record out today, stream along below as Deep Sea Diver break the whole thing down track by track. The band will also be embarking on a headlining tour a month from now, kicking things off in their home state of Washington—check out their full list of dates here.

1. “Billboard Heart” 
Peter: “Billboard Heart” was written after a fight between Jessica and I. We were trying to write and nothing useful was coming out and we began bickering and I left in a huff and she continued playing. From upstairs, I immediately felt the energy change in the house, and what Jessica started playing was so inspired—every note for about an hour and a half. My jaw was on the floor as she was creating puzzle pieces out of thin air and everything just worked—almost like a miracle. Some songs have natures—like people—and the song “Billboard Heart” was extremely giving through the whole process. Anything we tried worked—any noise, any experiment. In the studio, we jammed the outro for five minutes and it felt good the entire time. Making the video was the same, everything about the song was generous.  

2. “What Do I Know” 
Jessica: This is the first song where I recorded almost everything in my home studio. I was listening to a lot of The Smile’s first album and was inspired by the drum sounds, so I rented a couple microphones and went to town. Everything about this song made most sense when it wasn’t overthought. Gut impulses and first takes were usually key to capturing the free spirited punk energy. While writing the song, Peter told me to play the dumbest thing I could think of—and I started playing a little musical noodle that’s now one of my favorite guitar parts on the album. Sometimes we need reminders to not take ourselves seriously and the good stuff comes out.

3. “Emergency”
Jessica: This is our unabashed rock song. I was messing around with my pedals one day and mindlessly playing guitar and this little lightning bolt riff came out. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but it was discovered about a year later on an iPhone video. We really leaned into our love for Gang of Four and the frenetic energy of a lot of Walkmen songs for this one. It had to feel urgent. I love the squelchy synth sounds that Elliot played on this one. There are certain songs where the essence is the lyric, or the vibe, or the instrumentation, and some where the essence is the riff.  This song is about the riff, and it needed to be turned up to 11. I actually had a pedal designed, and from that pedal we recorded the craziest and most chaotic guitar parts on the song.  

4. “Shovel”
Jessica: I ran into Dave Bazan from Pedro the Lion at a coffee shop and he recommended a book called Writing Better Lyrics. At first I thought, “The author should’ve read a book called ‘writing better book titles,’“ but it unlocked something in me and freed me up to write lyrics more freely. “Shovel” came out of a writing exercise that I showed to Peter, and he was so moved by it he was in tears. We wrote and demoed the song immediately and it was filled with noisy guitars, drum machines, and raw emotion. Peter had the premonition that we’d play it in arenas—and a few months later we were road testing it in arenas opening for Pearl Jam before finally recording it in the studio.  

5. “Tiny Threads” 
Jessica: I think this is my favorite song on the album. It felt like a mysterious spark from the get-go, like a kind of voodoo. We didn’t know what to do with it for about a year, but resurrected it and it was pure magic. There are some songs that feel alive, and this one feels like it has its own spirit.  And it didn’t allow for much—many of the overdubs or parts that we tried to write for it to layer it made the song feel awful—but it was mostly in taking away that it felt the best.

Read full article here.

Photo credit ABC/Randy Holmes

Last night, Nathaniel Rateliff & Gregory Alan Isakov performed an inspiriting rendition of their brand new duet “Flowers” on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, marking Isakov’s late-night debut—watch here. The set was produced by For I Play Different Productions with creative direction from Taylor Mcfadden and set and screen design by Lavinia Jones Wright. 

The song released Monday, you can listen/share here. 

The collaboration and performance is a full circle moment—longtime friends who rose through the Denver-Boulder scene together, the pair initially crafted “Flowers” as a demo around Rateliff’s 2020 solo album And It’s Still Alright. However, the song remained unfinished for five years before the two revisited it recently.  

Rateliff shares, “In the moment, because so much time had passed, it was hard to remember who had written what – our words becoming each other’s. Now, listening back, I remember lines Gregory offered and others I did, but it truly is a work of us together, as one.” Isakov reflects, “My longtime friend Nathaniel Rateliff brought some pieces of a song by the farm a little while back and we finished it and tracked it late that night. We ran around the studio tracking instruments and ideas thinking we might re-track it all later, but just loved how the first take came out. Hope you love it as much as we do.” 

Rateliff & Isakov will perform togther again at Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats’ landmark Madison Square Garden show on March 27, part of their milestone first ever arena tour around the critically acclaimed fourth studio album South of Here, out now via Stax—listen here. 

[Fader]

The English singer-songwriter, prone to medieval flights of fancy and celestial metaphors, spends his new album, End of the Middle, embedded in life’s minutiae.

By Raphael Helfand

Richard Dawson’s bent folk music has never been entirely of this earth. The Newcastle singer-songwriter has always had a flair for the fantastical, painting even the most modern of problems with coats of medieval mysticism. His characters are rich and lived in, but they rarely exist in the here and now.

“As I rode to your house I was beaten and robbed / By a band of moon-faced vagabonds,” he begins on “Black Dog in the Sky,” a song from his 2012 LP, The Magic Bridge. “They were rifling through my pockets and untying my shoes / When the air began to boil.”

On End of the Middle, his attackers are rendered more concretely, given names and faces so detailed they leave us wondering whether they’re autobiographical or fictionalized. “After what happened in PE / I didn’t wanna go back,” he sings at the start of “Bullies.” “But it turned out so much worse than I would… have thought it could.” He goes on to describe being “blanked by his best mates” and “punched in the face on the bus.” The lead bully, Anthony Pape, leans over and spits on him as he lies on the ground. “I don’t want to remember anymore,” he sings before a skronky clarinet enters, fracturing the sorry scene.

Back at school, Anthony gets expelled “for something else entirely,” and the term rumbles on. The narrator does badly on his exams, but a kindly teacher named Mrs. Kovacic helps him manage an “A and a B in English,” at least, and he puts his head down, working in the library during lunch on his submission to a short story competition.

The clarinet returns, then fades away into a backdrop of moody acoustic guitar, and we’re shoved forward in time. Grown up now, our protagonist gets a call at work from his son Joshua’s school, telling him to come right away. (When the call comes, he’s “in a Zoom with one of our most important clients, Majestic Wine.”) Joshua, it turns out, has “been scrapping again, broke a lad’s jaw,” and is now suspended. “What’m I gonna do with this kid?” Dawson wonders. He goes to the school — the same institution where he was once bullied, it turns out — and asks after Mrs. Kovacic, who he’s told is “taking some well-deserved leave.” After a week of strained silence between him and Joshua, they go to a soccer game, and he tells his son he knows his heart is good.

A past Dawson might have told this story obliquely, taking his time to develop all the forces at play — his last album, The Ruby Cord, begins with a 41-minute track called “The Hermit.” But “Bullies” is less than five minutes long, even including the arguably unnecessary details (the English grades, the Zoom call) that test the limits of effective realism. The mirroring of the bullied narrator and his bullying son isn’t subtle, but it feels completely natural. Dawson is inherently clever, but on End of the Middle, it never feels like he’s trying to be.

“Bullies” is the most straightforward tale in Dawson’s new collection, but its eight other tracks are also based in quotidian granularities, even when their subject matter extends into the unusual. In “Bolt,” he creatively describes the moments before and after a house is struck by lightning, but the song’s parameters are strict — deal only in detailed observations; show, don’t tell.

In “The question,” the narrator’s sleepwalking daughter Elsie sees a recurring apparition in the hallway. Later, the family discovers matter-of-factly that the ghost is the house’s former owner, a station master who was “a relatively young man and a brand new father when he took his final step in front of a train.” Still, Elsie moves past these night terrors and becomes something of a prodigy, attending Cambridge on a scholarship. She now works as a research analyst at the London School of Economics, “trying with a wayward husband to keep a happy home and bring up her boy.” Then, one night, she sees the ghost again.

These family scenes — sometimes banal, sometimes otherworldly, jumping from one hyperreality to the next — are the beating heart of End of the Middle. We’re constantly time traveling between generations, learning what’s changed and what hasn’t through simple juxtaposition. On “Removals Van,” we hear about the narrator and his brother’s shared childhood climbing trees and building “great cities of LEGO” in a house that “backed right onto the old tramway.” Then, suddenly, the house is all boxed up, and he and his partner are “having a curry on crossed legs, surrounded by boxes,” WhatsApping drunken selfies to relatives.

American listeners, myself included, might struggle to untangle the web of British reality TV show references presented on “Gondola,” but we can still appreciate the way he weaves them line by line into the domestic dramas that play out in front of the screen. Between “Piers on Lorraine” and Cash in the Attic, the narrator drinks cheap liquor and goes to work for her dad at the jewelry shop, regretting that she never went to university. Near the end of the song, she worries again about her mounting regrets, her dreams deferred, the ever-depleating supply of summers he has left. She pledges to take her granddaughter on holiday, to make more memories “before it’s all too late.”

Musically, End of the Middle is the most spartan album Dawson has made since his 2007 debut, Richard Dawson Sings Songs and Plays Guitar. Gone are the dissonant guitar battles of his breakout record, Nothing Important; the discomfiting choral drones of his art-song suite The Glass Trunk; the detuned strings and clapped Qawwali percussion of his 2017 masterpiece, Peasant; the proggy arrangements of Henki, his recent collaboration with Circle. Even 2019’s 2020, though much more accessible than his previous work, is baroque in comparison to this one.

The simplicity of the new album’s instrumentals — unadorned acoustic guitar accompanied by Andrew Cheetham’s barely present drums, for the most part — is a disarming tactic, making deviations from the norm scratch like sandpaper on raw skin. On “The question,” for instance, sections of unnerving guitar playing punctuate the track’s singsong verse-chorus structure, as does Faye MacCalman’s clarinet on “Bullies” and elsewhere. The chorus of “Polytunnel” is appropriately light as a green-thumbed hobbyist walks us through such beloved activities as “pulling up the turnips,” “tying on the sweetpeas,” and “mucking out the chickens,” but there’s a hint of something less buoyant in the oddly angled verses.

Read full article here.

[Stereogum]

By Rachel Brodsky

Chicago-based rapper McKinley Dixon has announced a guest-stacked new album called Magic, Alive! coming in June via City Slang. Its lead single “Sugar Water” (out now) features Quelle Chris and Anjimile. Elsewhere on Magic, Alive!, Dixon loops in Pink Siifu, ICECOLDBISHOP, Blu, Shamir, and Ghais Guevara.

Magic, Alive! also features production from Sam Yamaha and Sam Koff (who contributes trumpet), instrumentation from trombonist Reggie Pace, harpist Eli Owens, guitarists Sarah Tuzdin (Illuminati Hotties), and El Kempner (Palehound).

Of “Sugar Water,” which has Tuzdin on guitar, Dixon says: “‘Sugar Water’ is a discussion on how to make fleeting moments last forever, and how to carry those not here with you through time and space. It raises the question ‘what’s the price to pay for an eternal life lived through others’ memories?’”

Listen below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Watch My Hands”
02 Sugar Water (Feat. Quelle Chris & Anjimile)
03 “A Crooked Stick” (Feat. Ghais Guevara & Alfred.)
04 “Recitatif” (Feat. Teller Bank$)
05 “Run, Run, Run Part II”
06 “We’re Outside, Rejoice!”
07 “All The Loved Ones (What Would We Do???)” (Feat. ICECOLDBISHOP & Pink Siifu)
08 “F.F.O.L.” (Feat. Teller Bank$)
09 “Listen Gentle”
10 “Magic, Alive!”
11 “Could’ve Been Different” (Feat. Blu & Shamir)

[Line of Best Fit]

By Tyler Damara Kelly

Nashville-based guitarist/composer William Tyler has announced his forthcoming album, Time Indefinite, alongside the release of the first three pieces of music: “Cabin Six”, “Concern”, and “Star of Hope”.

All three pieces are accompanied by short films compiled entirely from William Tyler’s old family home movies. In November 2020, on a family trip to Jackson, MS to clean out his late grandfather’s office, Tyler spotted an old tape machine, still sealed among the flotsam. He took it back to Nashville, to longtime friend and producer Jake Davis, and they began using it to create tape loops that conjured the vertiginous feeling of that unknown moment.

In early 2020, as the world teetered at the edge of unrest still unimagined, Tyler left Los Angeles for Nashville, where he’d lived most of his life after his parents left Mississippi. Most of his gear stayed in California, awaiting what he presumed would be a rather rapid return. It, of course, wasn’t. So as he dealt with the depression, nerves, and questions of those endlessly tense times, he began recording little ideas and themes with his phone and a cassette deck, resigning himself to the distortion inherent in those devices.

William Tyler was in early talks to make a record with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, and some of these bits felt like test cases for what they might do together. As that collaboration crept in other directions into what would become the staggering, lauded Darkness, Darkness / No Services, Tyler magpied other sounds. He soon asked Davis to help stitch them together, and in the end, they unintentionally made a record that reflected those times and these—uneasy, damaged, honest.

[The Guardian]

Singer will visit US, UK and Europe later this year alongside members of the original band who recorded the classic punk text

Patti Smith is to perform her classic album Horses in full on a tour to mark the album’s 50th anniversary.

Playing gigs across the US, UK and Europe, Smith’s band will feature guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, each of whom played on the original recording. The tour includes two UK dates, at London’s Palladium on 12 and 13 October, with Dublin, Madrid, Bergamo, Brussels, Oslo and Paris also featuring on the European run. The US tour will visit Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia.

Horses was Smith’s 1975 debut album, and came to be seen as a foundational text in New York’s punk scene, although Smith rejected the term punk, instead describing Horses as “three-chord rock merged with the power of the word”. Featuring a portrait by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe on the cover, Horses has long been regarded as one of the decade’s great albums, and is included in the National Recording Registry in the US Library of Congress.

Horses will also be commemorated with a tribute concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall on 26 March, featuring stars such Michael Stipe, Kim Gordon, the National’s Matt Berninger, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O and Sharon Van Etten who will perform album tracks backed by a band including the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea.

Smith has weathered bouts of ill health in recent years, including on tour. In January she collapsed while on stage in Brazil after experiencing a migraine over several days. In December 2023, she was hospitalised while in Italy and cancelled tour dates there after being told by doctors to rest.

But her live performances remain as spirited and distinctive as ever, with the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis describing a June 2024 concert as “moving, powerful and unexpected, a perfect reminder that, 12 years after her last album, Patti Smith is still in constant motion.”

[Rolling Stone]

Band hits the road for first trek together in eight years starting this July

By Daniel Kreps

Following the Alabama Shakes’ surprise reunion in December, the band has announced their first tour together in eight years.

Singer/guitarist Brittany Howard, bassist Zac Cockrell, and guitarist Heath Fogg ended their lengthy hiatus at a Tuscaloosa benefit concert six weeks ago and, since then, announced a gig at the Minnesota Yacht Club festival, which suggested that Alabama Shakes would hit the road in 2025.

Those plans were confirmed Friday as the group mapped out a massive reunion tour, which kicks off July 16 in Chicago and circles the country before concluding September 27 in Irving, Texas.

“Last year, Heath, Zac, and I started chatting about how much fun it would be to make music together and tour again as Alabama Shakes,” Howard said in a statement. 

“This band and these songs have been such a source of joy for all of us. It is crazy that it has been 10 years since we released Sound and Color and eight years since we played a show. But, we didn’t want this to entirely be a look back. We wanted it to be as much about the future as the past. So we have a bunch of new music that will be released soon. We just can’t wait to experience that ‘feeling’ when we start playing those first few notes of ‘Don’t Wanna Fight’ or ‘Gimme All Your Love.’” 

As Howard noted, Alabama Shakes have been working on new music, with the band working alongside longtime collaborator and producer Shawn Everett in the studio for the follow-up to their 2015 second album Sound & Color. 

Shannon and the Clams, the Budo Bands, El Michels Affair, and Y La Bamba are among the artists that will serve as opening acts along the tour.

Alabama Shakes Tour Dates
July 16 – Chicago, IL @ The Salt Shed-Fairgrounds 
July 18 – Minneapolis, MN @ Minnesota Yacht Club Festival
July 19 – La Vista, NE @ The Astro Amphitheater 
July 20 – Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre 
July 22 – Bentonville, AR @ The Momentary 
July 25 – Nashville, TN @ Ascend Amphitheater 
July 26 – Birmingham, AL @ Coca-Cola Amphitheater 
August 8 – Albuquerque, NM @ Isleta Amphitheater 
August 9 – Las Vegas NV @ BleauLive Theater
August 10 – San Diego, CA @ Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre 
August 14 – Berkeley, CA @  Greek Theatre
August 16 – Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena 
August 17 – Bend, OR @ Hayden Homes Amphitheater 
August 20 – Bonner, MT @ KettleHouse Amphitheater 
August 22 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre 
August 24 – Kansas City, MO @ Starlight Theatre 
September 4 – Milwaukee, WI @ Miller High Life Theatre 
September 5 – Rochester Hills, MI   Meadow Brook Amphitheatre 
September 6 – Toronto, ON @ Budweiser Stage 
September 8 – Cleveland, OH @ Jacob’s Pavillion 
September 9 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Stage AE (Outdoors) 
September 11 – Louisville, KY @ Bourbon and Beyond Festival
September 14 – Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway 
September 17 – Forest Hills, NY @ Forest Hills Stadium 
September 18 – Philadelphia, PA @ TD Pavilion at The Mann 
September 19 – Washington, DC @ The Anthem 
September 23 – New Orleans, LA @ Saenger Theatre
September 25 – Austin, TX @  Moody Center
September 26 – Houston, TX @ 713 Music Hall
September 27 – Irving, TX @ The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory 

[Spin]

The indie poppers re-released their 10 year old Wildewoman and it inspired their next album

By Vanessa Salvia

Indie band Lucius’s Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe recently ended a 22-date string of shows with the National and The War On Drugs. Jess played many shows at 8 and 9 months pregnant and Holly and some of the other band members had kids on board too.

The family atmosphere extends to their tour experiences, including time with close friends like The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, who contributed vocals and guitar to their new single, “Old Tape,” part of an expanded version of their second studio album, Wildewoman, released 10 years ago.

Lucius’s lyrics from 2023’s single “Stranger Danger”—“Covered up / with a nice warm melody / put the kettle on / sit and watch the TV”— tell the story of much of their music, a sound that often feels comforting and familiar yet exciting.

“It feels like coming back to ourselves in a lot of ways,” says Holly. “We made Wildewoman just as a band, and when we were amidst re-recording that and feeling that energy with us as a core band, we wanted to do that again. We recorded it ourselves, and kind of got back to the heart of it.”

Jess says, “We’ve made a lot of music with so many incredible people, as collaborators and different producers that we admire and love. Especially given where we are in our lives and how we’ve seen the world and how much collaboration we’ve done, it feels very close to the chest. It feels very much like we’ve reconnected with our roots.”

Cory Henry for Best Roots Gospel Album for his album Church

Dan Wilson and Jon Batiste for Best Song Written For Visual Media for co-writing “It Never Went Away”

Tank and The Bangas for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album for The Heart, the Mind

[NOLA]

Jon Batiste, jazz pianist Sullivan Fortner and R&B singer Lucky Daye were also winners on Sunday

• BY KEITH SPERA

Tank and the Bangas, the genre-blending New Orleans band that intermingles R&B, funk, jazz, hip-hop and spoken word, finally has its first Grammy Award. 

During the pre-broadcast portion of Sunday’s 67th Grammy Awards, the Bangas’ “The Heart, the Mind, the Soul” was voted the Best Spoken Word Poetry album. Bangas vocalist Tarriona “Tank” Ball wrote poetry and participated in spoken word “battles” before the band’s formation. She has incorporated her poetry background into the Bangas’ output and has now won a Grammy for it.

Tank and the Bangas earned a Best New Artist nomination at the 62nd Grammy Awards. The band’s “Red Balloon” was nominated for Best Progressive R&B Album at the 65th Grammy Awards. But Ball and her bandmates came away empty-handed those years. 

They fared much better on Sunday. 

Three other winners on Sunday have strong ties to New Orleans.

Jazz pianist Sullivan Fortner, a New Orleans native and graduate of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, later earned degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. He was a longtime member of bands led by vibraphonist Stefon Harris and trumpeter Roy Hargrove. Fortner released his debut album as a leader, “Aria,” in 2015.

On Sunday, Fortner won Best Jazz Performance for his collaboration with singer Samara Joy on the song “Twinkle Twinkle Little Me.” 

The Samara Joy album that included “Twinkle Twinkle Little Me,” “A Joyful Holiday,” won for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Fortner is featured on several songs on that album but wasn’t listed as a nominee. His album with singer Kurt Elling, “Wildflowers Vol. 1,” was also nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Album.

Fortner’s own “Solo Game” was nominated as Best Jazz Instrumental Album but lost to “Remembrance” by Chick Corea and Béla Fleck.

Lucky Daye, whose “Algorithm” was nominated for Best R&B Album, was born David Brown in New Orleans. He moved to Texas, then Atlanta following Hurricane Katrina, and is now based in Los Angeles.

He launched his career in Atlanta by competing on season four of “American Idol.” He went on to write or co-write songs for Mary J. Blige, Boyz II Men, Ne-Yo, Keith Sweat, and Beyoncé while also guesting on dozens of songs. He released his debut full-length album, “Painted,” in 2019. His 2021 EP “Table For Two” won the Grammy for best Progressive R&B Album, an award for nontraditional R&B singers.

On Sunday, Daye’s “That’s You” won for Best Traditional R&B Performance.

Jon Batiste’s Album of the Year Grammy Award in 2022 represented the highest profile win for any musician from the New Orleans area.

Neither Batiste nor any other act with local ties made the list of 2025 nominees in the major categories.

Batiste’s documentary “American Symphony” earned two nominations, including best music film. “It Never Went Away,” a song in the film by Batiste and Dan Wilson, won for Best Song Written for Visual Media.

He’ll be back in his hometown to sing the national anthem at Super Bowl LIX in the Caesars Superdome on Sunday.

The odds favored a New Orleans, or at least a Louisiana, winner in one other category.

Four of the five nominees in the Regional Roots Music Category were native to south Louisiana: Big Chief Monk Boudreaux & the Golden Eagles featuring J’Wan Boudreaux, the New Breed Brass Band featuring Trombone Shorty, The Rumble featuring Chief Joseph Boudreaux Jr. and Sean Ardoin & Kreole Rock And Soul.

But the fifth nominee in the category, the Hawaiian artist Kalani Pe’a, ended up taking home the trophy.

[New York Times]

By Jim Farber

The British group with Caribbean roots stopped performing in 1974. Its slow-rolling comeback is realized on Friday with a new album, “Renascence.”

By Jim FarberJan. 27, 2025

In the late ’70s, when the star hip-hop producer Prince Paul was just 10 years old, he heard a song that stopped him cold.

“Bra,” by a little-known British funk group named Cymande (pronounced “sih-MANH-day”), had become a staple at the New York park parties Paul attended, a place where D.J.s were creating the new art form of hip-hop. “‘Bra’ was one of the first breakbeats I ever heard,” Paul said. “The bass in the track is what drew me first. It hits your spirit so deep, it pierces the soul.”

Small wonder that when Paul became a producer years later, he used the interplay between the pinging bass of “Bra” and its shimmering guitar as the bedrock of De La Soul’s classic 1989 track “Change in Speak.” “Just a one-bar loop was enough to be incredibly impactful,” he said.

He was hardly alone in his discovery. Other artists and producers also began seizing on Cymande samples for records by Gang Starr and the Sugarhill Gang, among others. Over time, more than 40 acts anchored their tracks on the trippy guitar and mysterious bass from another Cymande song, “Dove,” including Wu-Tang Clan, EPMD and, most successfully, the Fugees, who made it the foundation of the title track from their smash album “The Score.”

The band’s bassist, Steve Scipio, didn’t find out about his group’s second proxy life until it reached full boil in the ’90s, when his son, a rap fan, tipped him off. “I had no idea for the longest time,” Scipio, 74, said with a laugh.

The group had stopped performing in 1974 and, a few years later, its two primary members — Scipio and the guitarist Patrick Patterson — left the United Kingdom to enjoy successful new careers as lawyers in the Caribbean, from where their parents had emigrated in the 1950s. Scipio rose to become the attorney general of Anguilla, a position he held for seven years.

But with their subsequent financial cushioning and rising hip-hop profile, they began reviving Cymande in fits and starts over the next few decades. On Friday, their slow-rolling comeback will finally reach full speed with the release of “Renascence,” Cymande’s first widely available new album in 41 years; an LP with a more limited release arrived in 2012.

“We always believed that, at some point, we would continue the mission we started,” Scipio said. “We just didn’t think it would take so much time.”

The protracted delay mirrors the many obstacles the musicians faced as migrants to the U.K. decades ago. While the pair now live in Anguilla, for the interview, conducted by video, Scipio spoke from his children’s home in Kent, England, while Patterson, 75, spoke from his kids’ place in London, three miles from where the two grew up, in Balham. With joy, they recalled their early days in Guyana, which has strong cultural connections to the Caribbean.

“At the time Guyana was still a colony and most of the high-profile jobs were taken by English people,” Scipio said. “But we were kids, so we weren’t aware of that.”

Their families, who were friends, came to London when Scipio was 13 and Patterson 8, seeking further education to advance their careers. But their children’s experience at school had a negative effect. “Guyana had the best educational system in the whole Caribbean,” Scipio said. “I was far more advanced than the other kids in my London class. But, instead of encouraging that, my teachers made me sit idle in the back of the room.”

At the same time, the musicians’ parents found their opportunities for advancement limited. Though Caribbean immigrants had been strongly encouraged to come and help rebuild postwar London in the ’50s, they found themselves demonized by the ’60s, fueled by anti-immigrant rhetoric. “Suddenly, politicians said, ‘There’s too many of them, let’s send them back,’” Patterson said.

Playing instruments, which the two friends learned on their own, became the most positive force in their lives. In 1971, they formed Cymande, taking the name from a calypso term for dove. The other members, including the supple singer Ray King and the spirited conga player Pablo Gonsales, also had immigrant roots, in Jamaica, St. Vincent and Nigeria, giving the group ties to a wealth of Afro-Caribbean styles.

The lyrics they wrote either celebrated their culture or commented on the racism they faced because of it. In “The Message,” they stressed the power of group resistance (“Remember, you’ve been told / together, we can go”), while in “Changes” they soothed the community’s wounds (“No love has been displayed out here / and common pains have brought us near.”)

“We felt it would be a dereliction of duty if we didn’t write about those things,” Patterson said.

The band’s music proved equally purposeful. Though it has a funky pull enlivened by multiple layers of percussion, the play between the instruments remains light and elegant, with lots of space left for dreaming. “Patrick’s guitar symbolizes the subtleness of the sound,” Scipio said.

Prince Paul likened the sensual relationship between the band’s guitar and bass to “a perfect conversation, where no one talks over each other.”

The singularity of Cymande’s sound intrigued the producer John Schroeder, who got the band a record deal resulting in three impeccable albums cut in London, including a self-titled debut in 1972 (which features “Bra” and “Dove”). Still, its music had its greatest initial impact in the United States, where songs like the mid-tempo groove “The Message” earned enough airplay to make the charts, leading to an invitation for the group to open a Stateside tour for Al Green, and to play dates with acts like Ramsey Lewis and Patti LaBelle. When Cymande returned to England, however, it got no love.

“They would accept Black music from America, because it was from far away, but not Black music from Britain,” Patterson said.

Discouraged, the group disbanded, and Scipio and Patterson retrained as lawyers, encouraged by family members in the legal profession. They said racism limited their path, which precipitated their return to the Caribbean.

The group’s reformation began in earnest in 2012, resulting in “A Simple Act of Faith,” an album that wasn’t well-received and is unavailable on streaming. Cymande is in far finer form on “Renascence,” despite the fact that Scipio and Patterson are the sole original members on it. (The others were sidelined mainly for health reasons.) The album comes on the heels of a documentary about the band, “Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande,” released in 2022. To further spread the word, an American tour starts in February.

Though “Renascence” continues the band’s tradition of socially aware lyrics, the album varies its classic sound by adding some strings and guest artists, including Jazzie B, the British producer, Soul II Soul founder and longtime Cymande fan who, through his parents, also has roots in the Caribbean. “Those guys are from the same community that I grew up in,” he said. “But our styles are so different. My songs are driving and theirs are silky, so it creates something new.”

Having the chance to create fresh combinations with its music, while seeing its vintage work embraced by a new generation, has affected Cymande deeply. “To us, it’s a total vindication for what we set out to do in the ’70s,” Scipio said. “It proves we were doing something of substance all along.”

Congratulations to High Road artists Elizabeth Moen, Jake Xerxes Fussell, Kate Bollinger and Squirrel Flower on making NIVA’s third annual Live List!

The list highlights 49 must-see artists who’ve made waves on independent stages across the United States.

NIVA, The Black List, and SARA Live in partnership with Paste Magazine aggregated anonymous votes from more than 1,000 NIVA members consisting of independent music and comedy venues, festivals and promoters to discover the most exciting up-and-coming live acts and established artists who toured in 2024.

Read the full list here.