Aspiring rappers could learn a few things from Dessa, and not just in the abstract sense. The Twin Cities emcee teaches hip-hop studies for a diploma program at a St. Paul school called the McNally Smith College of Music. “I teach a course on music composition that focuses on lyrics,” says the 28-year-old rapper, born Maggie Wander. “It focuses on a lot of the same principles you might find in...

Ramble John “RJ” Krohn, better known by his stage name RJD2, still remembers the moment that inspired him to begin creating the instrumental hip-hop compositions that would become his signature. “The big light bulb went off in my head the first time I bought a sampler,” says the producer. “I vividly remember the first time I made a beat and having this rude...

With some resentment, Nika Roza Danilova grew up in the wooded outskirts of rural Merrill, Wis., where adopted the alter ego Zola Jesus “and forced people to call me that to further alienate myself.” By age 16, she began recording music...

“I have an idea for a paradoxical theme album called Untitled, on which all the songs are called ‘Untitled,’” Stephin Merritt tells me. I have no idea whether he is kidding, but that’s nothing new. I never have any idea whether Merritt is kidding. In conversation and in song, Merritt has a droll, poker face of a voice, dry enough to suggest sarcasm but too stern to know for sure...

Milwaukee’s harsh winters take a well-documented toll on us physically, numbing our limbs, wearing out our backs and testing our immune systems, but they can be just as rough on us psychologically, as the blustery weather confines us to our homes, isolating us from the world. Singer-songwriter Hayward Williams’ latest album, Cotton Bell, was born of this annual seclusion. “The last couple winters have been really hard...

Ah, the fabled cabin up north. It’s rivaled only by the bedroom and Folsom Prison in the pantheon of romanticized places to record an album, conjuring restorative images of nature and solitude, as well as a whiff of man-versus-wilderness excitement. Countless musicians have made the trek up to the woods hoping for inspiration to strike, and as recording technology grows cheaper and more...

By 2000, John Forté was in a rut. Just a few years before, he’d been considered one of rap’s top talents, a triple-threat songwriter/producer/rapper who proved himself with his work on The Fugees’ groundbreaking 1996 album The Score. But Forté fell on tough times financially after his own 1998 solo record flopped and his label dropped him. For extra income he began working for...

While hardcore may not be the most female-friendly genre, there is a long history of punk bands using the stage as a sort of bully pulpit to get their fans to think about such issues as domestic abuse, rape, and sexism. As a young suburban hardcore kid...

Being the first ever electronica band from Burkina Faso, the landlocked African nation formerly known as Upper Volta, is an interesting accomplishment. More intriguing, however, is the overall career of the group’s co-founder and percussionist, Lukas Ligeti. The son of one of the mid-20th century’s singular composers, Gyorgi Ligeti (author of the spooky music from 2001: A Space Odyssey), the younger Ligeti has found...

A band’s first months are a period usually reserved for false starts, the scrapping of potential names and learning how to play together as one. Evidently, Surgeons in Heat—a 6-month-old Milwaukee transplant that’s already played more than 25 shows, recorded and tirelessly promoted itself—wasn’t aware of that. When singer and guitarist Johnathon Mayer left Appleton and relocated to Bay View in September, he and longtime friend and drummer Ryan Rougeux enlisted the help of Milwaukee bassist...

While recording her latest album, Give Up the Ghost, Brandi Carlile continually found new ways to tap the emotions that inspired her songs when she wrote them months earlier. “I would do things like wake myself up at like 6 o’clock in the morning when I was all tired and hadn’t had my coffee and I’m all bummed out and grumpy, and sing a song like ‘I Will,’ because I wanted it to sound crackly, pained and tired...

For five years, Sharon Van Etten wrote music in secret, stockpiling songs she hoped to perform under better circumstances. “I started playing open mics when I went to college, but then I took a break,” Van Etten explains. “My boyfriend at the time wasn’t very supportive of my music and didn’t think I was good enough to perform, so I had to hide it from him...

Open mic nights have long been stigmatized as forums for inexperienced musicians to play off-key cover songs to disinterested audiences at second-rate venues, but local businesses are working to change the image of open mics, and musicians are benefiting from their participation in this unsung format. Over the past three and a half years, bartender Tim “Timber” Buege...

In just the past several years, a support system coalesced around Milwaukee’s music scene, with venues, radio stations, promoters and cheerleaders offering new opportunities and a bigger spotlight for local musicians. Newly nurtured, the music scene flourished in 2009, closing the year stronger than it had been all decade. As a result, 2009 was marked with success stories...

It’s official: Spoon is the artist of the decade. The review aggregation site Metacritic made the call this month after crunching the numbers to determine the decade’s best-reviewed band. “The band topping the list was a surprise to us as well, albeit a pleasant one,” the site wrote. “The Austin, Texas, indie-rock band Spoon may not be the most prolific band of the decade, but they were the most consistently great...

No one is entirely sure of the number of albums released by Jay Reatard and his bands. His record company says it's more than 90. Wikipedia places it somewhere around 60. Reatard isn't certain of the exact number, but says that Wikipedia's discography has some...

The Lab Partners is a new group that pairs Rusty Ps rapper Adam James (known as Phantom Channel) with Milwaukee producer Brandon Birchbauer (The LMNtlyst), but the project isn’t quite the traditional beats-and-rhymes rap excursion that description might suggest. The group was born of impromptu jam sessions between the two musicians, with James laying down drums...

Making connections proved easier for Eric Blowtorch than he could ever have expected. A longtime fan of reggae and all forms of Jamaican music, the singer had been flavoring his intense brand of soulful, political rock with island influences since the early ’80s. One day in 1993 he called Kingston directory assistance, asking for Duckie Simpson of Black Uhuru...

Rivers Cuomo cannot stress this enough: He’s not trying to piss anybody off. Of all the criticism leveled at the Weezer frontman for the band’s new album, Raditude, it’s that suggestion that bothers him the most. “I get particularly frustrated when—and this has happened quite a lot—the press insinuates that I am intentionally trying to piss off our audience, that Weezer is creating music that it knows is bad and is putting it out there to make people angry,” Cuomo vents...

Camera Obscura’s latest record, My Maudlin Career, is filled with such enchanting images of seas, forests, giant redwoods and shimmering moons over exotic locales, as well as such sensual chamber-pop arrangements, that it’s easy to mistake the album as romantic. Underneath all the beauty and pomp, though, is singer-songwriter Tracyanne Campbell’s most calloused set of songs yet...

It was one of the most acrimonious breakups in the history of rock music that didn’t involve sex: Dinosaur Jr. lead J Mascis booted bassist Lou Barlow from the group in 1989, right before the underground-rock group made its inevitable leap to a major label. While Mascis’ Dinosaur Jr. thrived during the post-Nirvana alternative boom of the early ’90s, Barlow stewed in resentment, writing songs defaming Mascis and telling anyone who...

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were united by a shared love of jazz music, and the genre’s influence pervaded even their earliest albums as Steely Dan. No Steely Dan album more fully embraced jazz music, though, than 1977’s Aja, the band’s best-selling and most beloved record, an elegant and elaborately crafted fusion of warm pop and cool jazz. Becker and Fagen had long wanted to create an album like Aja, Becker explains, but it wasn’t until 1977 that the duo was able to assemble the right roster of backing musicians...

To say the least, The Black Crowes didn’t play it safe when recording the group’s new two-CD set, Before the Frost… / Until the Freeze... The band skipped the expected trip to a conventional recording studio. The common practice of recording vocals separately and overdubbing instrumental parts went out the window as well. Instead, the band recorded the new music at the Woodstock, N.Y., barn owned by Levon Helm...

Matisyahu immediately established himself as a singular musician with his 2004 album, Shake Off the Dust…Arise. To this day, there still aren’t many Brooklyn Hasidic Jews who fuse reggae and hip-hop. But in some respects, it’s only with his newest CD, Light, that Matisyahu has become his own man on an artistic level, making a CD that he says comes closer to fully reflecting the sound and range of music he wants to create...

Legendary blues pianist Aaron Moore doesn’t particularly want to talk about touring with Muddy Waters, playing with B.B. King or knowing a “good man” named Elvis Presley. At 89 years old, and as one of the few remaining survivors of the 1950’s Chicago boogie-woogie blues scene, Moore is more inclined to reminisce...