Category Archives: Music

Before it was so rudely interrupted, Bob Dylan’s annual touring regimen took on a recurring pattern, playing the same towns the same times of the year. His last time in Washington, D.C. was the first week of December 2019. The final show in that leg of the campaign that he never called the Never Ending […]

Add to the list of necessary roadie skills that of leaf blower. He’s the guy who scampers on stage at a Flaming Lips concert to inflate a series of transparent plastic bubbles surrounding lead singer Wayne Coyne — or similarly blow-up giant rainbows, or swaying pink robots, as required.  Decades ago, Coyne developed the idea […]

Chuck Prophet is always cheery and maybe a little goofy on stage. But Sunday at Jammin’ Java out in Vienna, Va., he seemed cheerier than usual. “I don’t know if you noticed, but we’ve been gone,” he said by way of explaining the pandemic that wiped out more than a year and a half of […]

One plus of The Jayhawks playing the mid-Atlantic is that their former bandmate, guitarist Stephen McCarthy, often drives up from Richmond, Va., to rejoin the Minneapolis band, adding some extra country twang and bringing added authenticity to the classic albums the Long Ryders member made with them, 2006’s “Rainy Day Music.”   His appearance with […]

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 […]