When Jesse Elliott came to Denver in early 2013, he was only passing through. As the frontman of Washington, D.C.-based rock band These United States, he’d passed through Denver plenty of times. In fact, that group toured so much that Elliott hadn’t kept a home address for three years. But…
Why did you like Yeezus? Did you find it anarchic? Did you like how it challenged racial norms in a confrontational, blacked-out way? Did you like its minimalism? Or its maximalism? Did you find the songs to speak to a larger narrative of where Kanye West is artistically and emotionally?…
Music has always come naturally to Kate Brady. “When I was little, teachers always had to tell me to stop singing in class,” she says. “I mean, I never even noticed I was doing it.” When she was a senior at Steamboat Springs High School, a classmate asked her to…
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There was in interesting policy on trash over the weekend at Fort Collins’ biggest music festival. More on that later. Bohemian Nights is a three-day Fort Collins music festival featuring around a hundred local performances and several national headliners, all free to the public, funded by the Bohemian Foundation. It…
Press PhotoNot the worst guy ever, despite all those songs.Do you ever wonder about the positive qualities you may be overlooking in the artists you hate? Probably not. Who has time to dig through the details to find out who’s actually pretty cool, but an unfortunate victim of their own…
Planet Bluegrass is nothing if not durable. That durability became a widely-disseminated story as the ranch and music festival operation in Lyons rebuilt when a historic flood utterly wrecked it last September But this weekend’s Rocky Mountain Folks Festival proved another kind of resilience, one that relates not to backhoes…
B.o.B. brings his No Genre tour with Kevin Gates to the Gothic Theatre on Saturday, November 8, and general admission tickets ($35) go on sale on Friday, August 22 at 10 a.m. As part of its First Things First Tour, Neon Trees, along No Devition and The Moth & The…
Spread across two venues two blocks apart, four stages between them, Denver Psych Fest, in its second year, proved a memorable experience. The walk between the Larimer Lounge and the Savoy Events Center — as well as the Big Wonderful Sustainability Park between them — was easy to navigate, and…
This week’s crop of shows includes a busy lineup at the big venues, including guitar heaven at Fiddler’s Green with ZZ Top and Jeff Beck. Elsewhere, the Coathangers return to Denver after a short time away, Styrofoam Sanchez plays Rhinoceropolis and, yes, Huey Lewis and the News are in Colorado…
People throw all kinds of things at Deer Tick in order to express their love of the gritty rock-and-roll band from Providence, Rhode Island. At the quintet’s sold-out show at the Bluebird Theater in Denver, they threw half-full beers, shoes, even themselves. Even before the group, led by John McCauley,…
Deep in City Park on Saturday, past the father and son playing catch and the picnicking family, in a fenced off area, was a sea of “Keep Calm and Chive On” shirts and neon green. It was the first Chive Fest, and after several hours of music and revelry, a…
You might have thought that Beck’s Red Rocks set would be a slowpoke, folksy affair akin to his latest studio album, Morning Phase. Nope. The night was a twenty-plus year retrospective, covering everything from 1994 mega-hit “Loser” to his recent foray into Nick Drake territory…
Genre-defying five-piece dance and jam band Lotus will be playing its annual Red Rocks show on September 19. The set was originally targeted to support of the band’s most recent album Gilded Age, but after the group debuted a successful new Talking Heads tribute set, featuring Gabriel Otto of Denver’s…
Somewhere on West Colfax in Lakewood is a strip mall, virtually indistinguishable from all the others on any given stretch of the meandering 26-mile boulevard. The only thing that differentiates this particular strip mall — for music fans, anyhow — is that it is now the home of Chain Reaction…
Rodrigo y Gabriela will headline Red Rocks on Sunday, but it’s the undercard we’re most excited for: Namely, Nathaniel Rateliff, who hasn’t played his own stuff around here in a while. We’d also like to make sure you’re aware of Vail Rocks, which supports the exceedingly worthy Love Hope Strength…
Governor John Hickenlooper has always been a supporter of Colorado’s music scene in both words and action. His passion meets his willingness to laugh at himself in a new video created by his campaign wherein OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder (a Colorado native and resident) tries to teach him “Counting Stars.” It…
If there is one thing you can always blame music writers for, it’s the utterly useless proliferation of genre tags into modern cultural dialogue. The construction of a genre can serve as hot branding for certain publications — it’s why a site like Pitchfork was totally happy to nurture an…
Ed. Open Music Sessions is an ongoing collaboration between Open Media Foundation, Greater Than Collective and Westword to create videos based on regular live tapings of exceptional bands from Colorado and beyond. In our debut Open Music Session, blues-rock band Dragondeer played a sinewy set in the Denver Open Media…
Baseball fans will wear their favorite player’s name across their back, as adults, before and after Halloween. They will fill their bookshelves with histories and biographies and fantasy guides the size of the yellow pages, and they will keep them long after the actual yellow pages have been recycled or…
All told, the entire incident was more embarrassing than scary. In 2006, Rick Roberts, songwriter and singer of the country-rock-blues sensation Firefall and the Flying Burrito Brothers, stumbled on a rug in his home, sending him head-first into a kitchen island…
A week ago all nine of the surviving members of the Wu-Tang Clan returned on The Daily Show to premiere a new song from their upcoming album A Better Tomorrow. This was a bona fide, anti-cynicism Good Thing. We all love the Wu-Tang Clan, and any time they collectively decide…
