Malachi guitarist Dathan Lythgoe is the first to describe his band as dark, sad and overwhelmingly pessimistic, but, he says, all that bleakness serves a greater purpose. "I think that it's a reminder that there's a lot of bad things in the world," Lythgoe says. "It's easy to just live your life every day in your little bubble, so it's good to just be reminded that there's a lot of strife in the world, and that you shouldn't forget that you're lucky to be where you are, living where you are-that other people in the world might not have...

Each April, singer Al Jarreau begins using a familiar greeting he knows will take him through the end of the year. "I love to say 'Merry Christmas' to the lady at the bank and the folks at the grocery store," says Jarreau, 68. "When you're in the music business, that's about when you start thinking about Christmas anyway, because soon you will be practicing if you're in a choir or recording if you're a professional. And then it will be Halloween and then it will be Thanksgiving and then Christmas will really be here." "Merry Christmas" was how...

Mac Lethal is a prick. Of course, that's kind of his appeal. A curmudgeonly white rapper with a waning hairline and a sad, protruding belly, Mac Lethal riffs like an incensed insult comedian about the many things that piss him off-Christians, vegans, scenesters, Ben Harper-filling the funny, irate rapper void left when Eminem lost his sense of humor. On 11:11, his debut record for the prestigious Rhymesayers label, Mac Lethal deems himself "a rapper who doesn't like rap," and though that isn't quite true, he voices the frustrations of everyone...

The music is the same, but the context is so much different. Juliana Hatfield's still-girlish voice has deepened with age, and gone is the whimsy of "Spin the Bottle." It has been replaced by something more raw and confessional, and ultimately that much more sad. If you listen closely to Hatfield's new album, buried in that chipper jangle pop, you can hear the time. In the minds of her fans, perhaps, Hatfield's only struggles over the past 15 years have been the adolescent foibles and satiric disasters in her lyrics. But in the last few months, Hatfield has revealed herself with the...

A lot has changed in the six years since The Etiquette released its only EP, very little of it in the band's favor. In 2002's bullish music market, labels were still feverishly signing bands, particularly garage-rock bands with names that started with "The." On the strength of Ages, a hyper-hooky EP that however accidentally coincided with the era's rock revival, The Etiquette captured the interest of music managers and promoters, and found support on college radio and at CMJ magazine. It was, in hindsight, a rare window of opportunity for the Milwaukee band, one that frontman Eugene III (he prefers to keep his last name private) admits he was slow to seize. "I think about it all the time," Eugene says. "We were...

Rise Against is used to being misunderstood. To begin with, the group is widely tagged as a political band, a label that bassist Joe Principe says is too limited for the lyrics that singer/guitarist Tim McIlrath writes. "I kind of like to say it's more like we're socially aware," Principe says. "Tim, the way he writes is very broad. He has political songs, because he writes all of the lyrics, and then he also has social songs and even songs about his personal relationships. That's why I don't think we like to be pigeonholed as a political band." Some even consider Rise Against a leftist or radical...

As much as Tom Morello enjoyed his stint with Audioslave, the post-Rage Against the Machine band he founded with Chris Cornell, Cornell’s scorching, introspective arena-rock left Morello hungry for the activism of his previous band. Since Cornell wasn’t providing him with the political material he craved, Morello began writing his own. Though styled after Woody Guthrie’s acoustic folk, the staid songs that Morello began to churn out with increasing speed were every bit as loaded as Rage’s thrashing screeds. But he knew he couldn’t perform them live under his own name without misleading concertgoers...

The 2004 presidential election and the prospect of twin George W. Bush terms mobilized not only the expected musician activists, bands like Pearl Jam and the Dixie Chicks, but also a new crop of recruits, performers that had never before immersed themselves in politics so deeply. Apolitical bands like No Doubt contributed to anti-Bush albums; for the first time in his career, Bruce Springsteen made an explicit endorsement, and even Eminem shelved his flippant shtick for a dire song rallying youth to vote Bush out of office...

There are many things that Magnetic Morning is good at. Naming things is not one of them. Until a mere month before the group's debut EP was scheduled for release, the team of Swervedriver/Toshack Highway frontman Adam Franklin and Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino took the moniker "The Setting Suns." Unwittingly, they had taken the moniker from another band-the already-existing Setting Sun-who desperately wanted it back. More recently they had naming issues with their brooding...

Gambit is summarizing the namesake for his 12member rap group, the Marvel Comics crossover epic House of M. “Basically, there’s this character, the Scarlet Witch, who can change realities and probabilities,” he explains. “She has this big mental breakdown, and she ends up changing the whole Marvel world. It’s up to all the superheroes in the Marvel universe to band together and get the world back to normal. As his X-Men-derived alias suggests, Gambit has a passion for comics in general, but this particular story line has special relevance for him. “It symbolizes our group,” he says.

When Stephen Kellogg talks of live shows being the lifeblood of his band, The Sixers, he could simply be repeating one of the classic clichés of rock 'n' roll. Or he could be referring to the very real fact that the group makes much of its living on the road, playing 200-plus dates a year. But what Kellogg is really saying is that he feels the concerts are where he and The Sixers truly shine and offer something genuinely unique to fans who have discovered the Massachusetts-based band. "I think what we're doing that's unique is we're giving people music that's not silly music, but we're giving them a light evening," Kellogg says. "You get to go hear cool music...

Few bands seem to have more contempt for the structural formality of sheet music than San Francisco's Deerhoof, a trio whose rhythms waver with all the precociousness of lead singer Satomi Matsuzaki's schoolgirl voice. So it was with some irony that the first taste of Deerhoof's latest work was a single released as sheet music well before a recorded version surfaced.

Though his band's name seems pretty self-explanatory to him, Dead Confederate bassist Brantley Senn is amazed at how often it's misinterpreted.   "We're supposed to play this show sponsored by a cigarette company that rhymes with 'mammal,' and they refused to even put our name on the tickets," Senn says with a sigh. "They had a writer that refused to even write about us, because he said the name was racist. How dumb is that? We're Dead Confederate. It's not like we're Alive and Well and Retired in Florida Confederate."

Peter Hammill first made a name for himself in the 1960s as the singer-songwriter for prog-rock innovators Van der Graaf Generator, and since that band broke up in the 1970s has gone on to record literally dozens of shape-shifting solo albums, including his most recent, 2006's Singularity, his first since a Van der Graaf Generator reunited in 2005, and also his first since a near-fatal heart attack. The Shepherd Express' Mark Krueger interviewed Hammill this September, in advance of Hammill's Oct. 5 concert at Shank Hall.

   Our conversation is painful, marked by enough long pauses to fill an entire season of "The Office." Pharrell Williams, the singer and public face of N.E.R.D., is normally the chatty one, but right now he's so disinterested in my questions that he's making his less talkative bandmate Shay answer them from a third phone line. Though he struggles to be polite, Shay prefaces many of his short answers with a barely disguised sigh.  "Hey, P, you still there?"

Though he cautions that two of his band mates who once lived there might disagree with him, Andy Kavanaugh doesn't have many kind words about Green Bay. "We went up there in the middle of winter to record our latest album," he says of his band, The Goodnight Loving, "and it was just kind of a sober experience.

After years of vetting vintage R&B records at his Riverwest store, Lotus Land Records, and spinning rare funk 45s at his monthly "Get Down" event, Andy Noble says he's pinpointed the qualities that make a song stand the test of time. "I'm in touch with how music ages," he explains. "There are certain elements of music that hold up, like rhythms. Good dance rhythms hold up forever.

You aren't anybody if you aren't recording with the Black Keys. Producer Rick Rubin, himself a somebody, recently tapped the band to back Billy Gibbons for a few songs on ZZ Top's next album. Gibbons and Rubin join R&B legend Ike Turner and super-producer Danger Mouse on a growing list of The Black Keys' recent collaborators.

Almost seven years ago to the date, on Sept. 14, 2001, The Flower Kings, now arguably one of the world's leading progressive-rock bands, played what just might rank among Shank Hall's most memorable and cathartic shows.

Almost seven years ago to the date, on Sept. 14, 2001, The Flower Kings, now arguably one of the world's leading progressive-rock bands, played what just might rank among Shank Hall's most memorable and cathartic shows. "I remember that gig, and I remember those days vividly," says guitarist, vocalist and head Flower King Roine Stolt, when reminded that the Swedish band was on a rare U.S. tour as the tragedy of 9/11 unfolded. The Flower Kings opened their penultimate show of that tour with "Last Minute On Earth," the lead track from . . .

Mark Waldoch had saved up the necessary money, prepared himself emotionally to leave behind Milwaukee, his home of 15 years, and was ready to start a new life in New York. What he hadn't planned on, though, was developing a kidney stone the size of a golf ball shortly after his arrival. "I was in and out of the hospital for two months, put under anesthesia and all that," Waldoch shudders. "It was rough. I mean, talk about insane, they put a laser up my wang to blow up the kidney stone. I had to wear a catheter." With no health insurance to fall back on, Waldoch quickly exhausted his savings. In considerable debt, he returned to Milwaukee . . .

It's a stirring story, one that wraps Justin Vernon's album into a neat package. It starts when Vernon's first band breaks up, and it ends in the Northwoods. Jobless and sick, with nowhere to live and a desire to be alone, Vernon stayed (rent-free) in his father's hunting cabin through the winter. He chopped wood, brooded for a while, and then created a spectacular solo debut. Vernon's For Emma, Forever Ago doesn't merely capture a desperate Wisconsin winter, it captures a man resigned to its snowy, woodland loneliness. That's the true-to-life legend of Bon Iver-the dreariness of life expressed through an album full of dreary optimism, written by a man whose stage name is a play on the French words for "good winter." At least, that's the true-to-life legend that people keep telling . . .

One would think that a 64-year-old blues musician who performs sitting down due to ongoing recovery from a hip broken in 2000 wouldn't be hard to track down. But it took several weeks and numerous trans-Atlantic phone calls before Johnny Winter finally surfaced in a club in a suburb of Rome, Italy. Winter and his three-piece backup band were on the last leg of a southern European tour, having just finished a late-night set performed before what the Albino blues guitarist thought was a fairly reserved crowd . . .

The Supersuckers are the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world. It says so right on their Web site. And album covers. And merchandise. "At least 25% better than the next best band," says Rontrose, the band's one-named guitar player, tongue firmly in cheek. Some time around Thanksgiving, Rontrose and crew will celebrate their 20th anniversary as punk's answer to hedonistic, cowboy-hat wearing, meat-and-potatoes American rock 'n' roll. Twenty years is long enough for the band, born in Tucson, Ariz., to have moved to Seattle before the grunge movement took full steam . . .

Katy Perry’s single “I Kissed a Girl” has just topped the Billboard pop chart, and the 23-year-old’s schedule for the day is booked solid. Later today she’ll be shooting an insert for Blender magazine, doing an interview with Rolling Stone, signing autographs for an hour and a half, then performing as part of the Warped Tour. Right now, though, she’s doing phone interviews through an earpiece as she sits in pajamas and hair curlers, getting her nails done in a St. Louis strip mall. “I didn’t even care where we went,” she says, amused by the unglamorous salon. “I was like, ‘I’ve just got to get these cuticles cut!’ ”