“Milwaukee is a great city, with all these great clubs,” says Trapper Schoepp, “but unfortunately it’s really hard to play out a lot when the frontman of your band can’t even buy a drink at a bar.” It’s a sentiment shared by many underage musicians in the city, but Schoepp seems to feel it particularly deeply. As you’d expect from a songwriter whose latest album...

Since his alt-country band West of Rome slowed down toward the end of the decade, Milwaukee singer-songwriter Chris DeMay has reinvented himself as an eager free agent, recording a 2007 solo album, I Won’t Be Me, playing shows with songstress Michelle Anthony, joining the Americana ensemble Juniper Tar, co-founding the annual Neil Young...

Milwaukee rapper Ray Nitti didn’t get much of a heads up from V100 when DJs from the radio station called to tell him they were going to premiere his single “Bow” on their local segment “Heat From the Streets.” “They told me I had five minutes before it was going to be broadcast,” Nitti recalls. “I wanted to call everyone I knew and tell them my song was going to be on the radio...

When it comes to mining the depths of folk music, the members of Milwaukee’s alt-folk band The Maze would like to think of themselves as explorers trudging through the dense musical jungles with no predetermined route. With a try-anything mentality where electric guitars are often traded for ukuleles, The Maze has quietly (and occasionally loudly) found a following in the city and around the Midwest...

In a time when experimentation is often the hip thing to do, Green Bay’s rock ’n’ roll troubadours Beach Patrol stick to the tried-and-true basics. With a variety of past and present influences such as The Beatles, The Replacements, Tom Petty and Elvis Costello, the band sets out in studio or on stage to channel core rock ’n’ roll ideals and mix them with expertise...

One of the best things about The Lovelies’ reunion performance in February at an Atomic Records tribute concert was “looking and watching people sing along to songs that haven’t been played in almost 10 years,” recalls the band’s longtime drummer, Damian Strigens. A local alt-rock band that mirrored The Breeders...

Decibully’s long-delayed World Travels Fast arrives four years after the band’s last album, and singer William Seidel says its songs reflect that passage of time. “We definitely needed to slow down, take some time away from the band and focus on our personal lives,” Seidel explains. “We’re all getting older. We’ve been doing this for so long, and there’s only so many days you can sleep...

The Jazz Estate’s Monday night residency is billed as Ballini, Ogburn and Baumann, but internally those three players prefer to call the event by a less formal name. “We call it ‘Honest Mondays,’” says singer-songwriter Marc Ballini, who shares the stage with mandolinist Ryan Ogburn and guitarist Craig Baumann. “We just play...

As if the creativity and innovation of ’60s rock wasn’t exciting enough back in the day, some fans of The Rolling Stones and Cream began to suspect a hidden world behind that music, a deep substratum of influences called the blues. High-school students in the late ’60s, Steve Cohen (harmonica), Bill Stone (guitar) and Dave Kasik...

Brian Barney was the only music writer I’ve worked with that bands requested by name. “Can Brian Barney write an article about us?” countless bands asked me over the years, and it’s easy to see why they wanted Brian to cover them. He wrote about other people’s music with the same enthusiasm and passion he had for his own music...