Category Archives: Music

Americana kingpin Jason Isbell is always a gracious frontman and performer. But he had to stop his show with his band The 400 Unit a couple of times Tuesday at Wolf Trap in Virginia to take in what he was seeing: a nearly full outdoor amphitheater packed with fans who had been waiting as long […]

The pandemic has thrown traditional events like the National Symphony Orchestra’s annual Labor Day concert for a loop for two years running. Held for years on the West Lawn of the Capitol, it had to be broadcast last year to an audience parked at RFK stadium, watching on screens and listening to their car radios. […]

Willie Nile’s pent up energy for getting back on the road was fairly palpable in his show Saturday at the Hamilton in D.C. Originally scheduled for April 2020, it had been postponed by the pandemic to summer that year, then to April this year to finally this late summer date 16 months later.  In the […]

Elizabeth Cook could well be the best of the legion of DJs on Sirius XM. Her weekday “Apron Strings” show on the Outlaw Country channel reflects her personality, as she speaks frankly and sometimes brashly about her life, her musician friends, and everyday hard knocks in her engaging twang. She’d bring that same charm to […]

Out of all the musicians knocked off the road by the pandemic, it must have been a real strain on Bob Dylan. A guy who has essentially played one tour after another since 1988; totaling more than 3,000 shows, pausing only a few months during a health scare in 1997, he had seen nothing like […]

Rising like a shimmering fever dream in the middle of the desert, Las Vegas has always been about fakery. Magicians and impersonators continue to be top draws in showrooms, the best of them mystifying the tourist flocks. Casinos are constructed to emulate ersatz pyramids, Roman coliseums, Parisian skylines, and the whole of New York City. […]