RiYL

It’s hard to say precisely what semi-retirement means for a standup comic. Kyle Kinane has been tossing the term around for a while — well before this year’s release of his fourth album, Trampoline I…

There has been no shortage of deeply personal stories during Adrian Tomine’s long, celebrated career in comics. But up to now, they’ve been almost exclusively filtered through a fictional lens, from …

Unbeknownst to me, Van Dyke Parks is seated at his piano. This fact becomes clear numerous times during our conversation, as he tickles the ivory to punctate points. It’s not as if he requires the to…

Released in 2018, American Dharma blindsided its director. Errol Morris had spend decades making some of the universally acclaimed documentaries of all time. This time, however, the press wasn’t havi…

With Sun Piano, Laaraji returned to his first instrument. After years of eschewing the keys in favor of something more portable, the New York-based new age music finds himself reconnecting with his f…

You have 20 years to write your first record and 18 months for your second. For The Ace of Cups, the first part of the equation took roughly two and half times the conventional wisdom, but in 2016, t…

When publishers refused to release an updated edition of his 1975 classic of beltway bureaucracy Who Runs Congress over concerns of commercial viability, Ralph Nader did what he often does. He wrote …

It should be painfully obvious from the title alone that Anime, Trauma and Divorce is a deeply personal record — and part of Open Mike Eagle’s continued evolution as a songwriter. A good punchline is…

In 2013, Fruits Bats broke up — or at least as close to a breakup as an essentially solo project can come. Frontman Eric D. Johnson was going about it on his own as EDJ. It was a short-lived venture.…

“Hey There Delilah” was a turning point for Ariel Rechtshaid. The simple, stripped down pop song was a massive hit, putting the musician on the map as a producer. Since that 2006 breakthrough, Rechts…

Clocking in north of 1,100 pages (when you included the end papers, he’s quick to point out), Reaganland is the final chapter in Rick Perlstein’s massive tetralogy documenting the rise of contemporar…

The same scene inevitably plays out at every convention Carlos Alazraqui attends. At some point someone the epiphany. Rocko the Wallaby, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, Mr. Weed from Family and Garcia from …

In 2012, Cidny Bullens was ready to tell the world who he really was. An article published in The Daily Beast gave him the opportunity to explain the previous year’s transition in his own words — the…

From a distance, it seems that Noah Van Sciver is able to make comics roughly as fast as most of us are able to read them. Each social media update from the cartoonist seemingly presents another proj…

Retirement was short-lived for Matt Pond PA. The eponymous front man very publicly toyed with the moniker that’s continued to tie him to his home state, but a 20 year run like that isn’t something on…

Forty years after forming in New York’s late-70s punk scene, the Bush Tetras are still going strong. 2018 saw the release of the Take the Fall EP, the product of a band content to release music for t…

There’s a great video from early last year. Taken onstage at the End of the Road Festival, Ezra Furman is tasked with interviewing John Cale. You get pretty much what you’d expect from the Velvet Und…

The last time Ryan Walsh appeared on the show was during another trip I took to Boston. At the time, he spoke of his upcoming book about Van Morrison.

What, admittedly, sounded like a fairly niche exa…

Few can rival the indie rock pedigree of Tanya Donelly. At the age of 15, she cofounded 4AD stalwarts Throwing Muses with best-friend-turned-step-sister Kristin Hersh. Seven years later, she joined f…