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Anaïs Mitchell was raised on a sheep farm in Vermont, and her songs have the freshness of deep, unsullied nature. I don't think I've ever heard songs quite like this: twisty and melodic and somehow effortlessly...

Legendary local folkie Dick Siegel stops before a head shot of a 1950s-era robot. Its bolts-for-ears, grille teeth, and raised arm provoke giggles. Siegel raises his own arm: "Hail!" It's Marvelous Mike, a yellow...

Over forty years ago, four Chicago musicians founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) as a radical self-help group for nurturing, performing, recording, and teaching original music. Six years...

It isn't difficult to remember the slackers from the early 1990s, with their skateboards, their own language, their tattoos, their piercings, and their tough rock. They hung around towns like this, where they could easily...

I can't imagine what it's like to be a longtime Josh Ritter fan and hear his new album, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, in which our hero, his four-man band, and the eight-piece Great North Sound Society...

Although there was no sax in sight nor an air guitar around at last year's MACFest, a nearly full Rackham Auditorium rocked and rolled with the musical energy of the a cappella groups that call the U-M home. Each group has...

"This is sad," the bearded man (professor or specialist or rock/fossil guy) says. "A fragment of a paleosomethingsomething shell. Only a fragment." He turns the shell over and over in his hands before holding...

The seven members of My Dear Disco form a semicircle around me in the cramped dressing room of the Blind Pig and try to explain why the bar downstairs is jam packed. None of these hyperattentive and articulate twenty-somethings...

The Santa Cruz River Band comes from Tucson, one of the cities in the southern tier of states where deep connections with Mexico long predate the current immigration controversy. It's been said that the city's economy...

The Clean House, by up-and-coming New York playwright Sarah Ruhl, now at the Performance Network, is an absurdist romp stretched over the bones of a melodrama. It’s narrated by Brazilian maid Mathilde (Aphrodite...

What will he play? When he makes his first Ann Arbor appearance in twenty-five years, Krystian Zimerman could play almost anything. Just because he's a Polish pianist and a student of Artur Rubinstein, don't assume...