Interviews
Caribou
When Caribou (a.k.a. Dan Snaith) won the 2008 Polaris Prize for his album Andorra, he celebrated in his own particular way: by disappearing back into his home studio in London, England. “Apart from a nice financial boost,” he says, “it was like nothing had happened.”
Courtney Love
“You can take me anywhere,” Courtney Love says. Had she made this statement five or six years ago, when she was busy flashing David Letterman, stumbling into Pamela Anderson and getting arrested with startling frequency, it would have ranked as one of her more outlandish pronouncements. But now, post-rehab, and with a powerful comeback album to promote, she sounds lucid and strikingly intelligent; she might even be eminently presentable – if a little manic.
Jeff Beck
For 45 years, Jeff Beck has been the guitar hero’s guitar hero. He can make his Fender Stratocasters and Oxblood Les Pauls talk, sing, squawk and wail at fever pitch, without ever grandstanding. So in an age where music video games have made pyrotechnics de rigueur, one might expect that a new Jeff Beck album would lay waste to those of his fellow axemen with awesome speed-of-light shredding.
Barenaked Ladies
The Barenaked Ladies are mad as hell—or at least, being polite Canadian gentlemen, they’re rather peeved. “Give it up for anger—it makes us strong!” sings Ed Robertson on the band’s new album, All in Good Time . Having survived a time in their history they describe as “devastating,” Canada’s most playful band is ready to let some darker feelings show.
Rufus Wainwright Q&A
Rufus Wainwright has had an eventful and painful past year. Last spring in Berlin, he debuted Sonnette, a Shakespeare-based theatrical collaboration with maverick director Robert Wilson. A few months later in Manchester, he premiered his first opera, Prima Donna.
Rufus Wainwright
From his music, his videos, and his promotional photos, you’d think that Rufus Wainwright is a Wildean aesthete living in an opulent dream. Fittingly, on a promotional visit to Toronto, the singer, songwriter, and now opera composer, has found seemingly the only hotel suite in the city containing both a grand piano and a chaise lounge. But when he unfolds himself across the latter, his eyes bleary and his hair swept up as if by a rogue gust of wind, he comes across as less of a decadent epicure than a patient waiting to be psychoanalyzed.
Dan Black
“Music’s about being the right thing at the right time in the right place,” says Dan Black, “and you can’t really engineer that.” If anyone should know, it’s he: Some 15 years after the singer, songwriter and producer started his career in London, he looks as though he might, all of a sudden, break through in North America.
Martha & The Muffins
Sometimes Mark Gane feels as if he’s living in a Talking Heads song. “I look around, and it’s like ‘Once in a Lifetime,’” says the guitarist, singer, and songwriter for Martha & The Muffins. “‘Look at my beautiful car and my house. How did I get here?’ I can’t really explain how it’s all happened. It constantly astounds me.”
Nikki Yanofsky
Nikki Yanofsky has a habit of astonishing people. Usually this is how it happens: first, she bounds onstage in a club or a theatre, a petite teenage gamine in front of a greying, paunchy all-male jazz combo. She then snaps her fingers and counts off the introduction to a jazz standard. The moment her voice rings out, the venue echoes with the sound of dropping jaws.
Pat Metheny & Jaga Jazzist
If jazz is to thrive in the Teens, its creators will need to resist retrenchment. On Tuesday, two of the genre’s most forward-thinking acts are releasing albums that do just that. Should others follow suit, the future of jazz will be complex and vibrant indeed.
