Sound Stories & Interviews

Sometimes you can hear the sound of the freeway from inside Gregory Alan Isakov's house. The noise of the Boulder, Colorado, traffic seeps through the walls – not a lot, but just enough – and that can be a problem when the singer songwriter is at work laying down the tracks for his next album.
Isakov has never been one for recording studios, opting rather to record and produce his albums mostly on his own, with some help from friends, typically right in his own his home, even if that means forgoing the luxury of soundproof walls. But in the mornings, the buzz of vehicles is low enough when he rolls out of bed and makes his way to the nest of wires and cables that inhabit his home during recording time to allow him to lay down some of his delicate, heartfelt folk numbers, which we heard on 2009's excellent Empty Northern

The boys of the Strokes are men now. But their most recent album, Angles, will leave you wishing for the gritty scruffiness of their younger years. Back in 2001, the young New York garage rockers blindsided listeners with Is This It? and again in 2003 with Room on Fire. As twenty-somethings, the Strokes were revivalists griming up the music that they loved.

“For me, music is a definite calling. I wrote my first song on piano when I was five years old,” says Genre, a Bend musician who is currently performing a mesmerizing mix of flamenco guitar interspersed with tributes to The Cure, Morrissey and Depeche Mode every Thursday evening at Tart Bistro. On these nights, Genre’s hands undulate across the neck of his Pedro de Miguel guitar the way a storm scatters over a field, brutal and full of beauty.
“True flamenco music has its own distinctive style of play and rhythms, which appeal if not for the simple fact that they are found nowhere else on the planet,” Genre says.

The opening song on All Eternals Deck (The Mountain Goats' millionth record) depicts brave young cowboys who must crawl till dawn in order to survive the abuse of vampires. As with all John Darnielle (the primary Goat) songs, this one is a complete story (with sentences, not just pretty words) and sets up an album revolving around survival. All Eternals Deck is probably most similar to the dark, metal band imagery of 2008's Heretic Pride, but the characters Darnielle presented on that album didn't survive. On Deck, Darnielle's characters surprisingly continue going despite being attacked, misread, surrounded by mundane circumstances, dumped or finding teeth marks on their neck.

How do you go from posing for pictures with an assault rifle, rapping about gangbanging and belonging to one of the most profane (yet pioneering) hip-hop groups of all time to a producer of family-friendly comedy? To get an answer, you'd have to ask Ice Cube, because he's done all of that.
The former N.W.A. member, who has also enjoyed a wildly successful solo career in the gangsta rap world, is somehow the same dude who served as producer for the family film Are We There Yet? and now is executive producer of the TBS sitcom of the same name. But this isn't to say Ice Cube has sold out. He really hasn't. In fact, his last album, I am the West, hit the streets last fall and was surprisingly awesome and a great throwback to the glory days of West Coast rap.

For the past decade, Jay Tablet (real name: Joseph Taveres) has been a key player in the Oregon hip-hop scene as half of Cloaked Characters, along with Rory Oneders. But now, Tablet is breaking out on his own with his first solo disc, Put It On The Tab.
Here, Tablet keeps the upbeat Cloaked Characters' vibe alive, but does venture out into his own stylistic territory, experimenting with more electronic and dance sounds than we're used to hearing from CC. The album features plenty of familiar guest rappers and vocalists, including Mosley Wotta, Caitlin Cardier and even an appearance by Madchild of Swollen Members, but Tablet manages to keep his stamp on the record by anchoring each track with his own swagger.

With the exception of announcing the arrival of royalty, trumpets aren't typically considered the most impressive of instruments on their own. They aren't particularly delicate or dainty and it takes quite a set of lungs – not to mention an abundance of saliva – to even produce a note.
So when someone is described as a trumpet master, it's bound to provoke some speculation as to what exactly this means. Does it mean having won four Grammys, six Billboard Awards and an Emmy? Perhaps it means having traveled the world performing across a wide scope of genres to create a musical career that hasn't slowed down in over 40 years? Could it be when HBO decides to make a movie out of said life and casts Andy Garcia as the star?