Robin Hilton

Lou Barlow has always been a restless - often anxious - old soul. In three decades of making music, first with Dinosaur Jr., later with Sebadoh and Folk Implosion, the guitarist and songwriter has tried to make sense of his place in the world with a prolific ...

Well, Drum Fill Friday is back after a two-month break, during which I changed an unimaginable number of diapers (on paternity leave) and spent many sleepless nights staring wide-eyed into the middle distance while holding a screaming baby. But in those rare quiet moments, when I was able to put ...

We kick off this week's All Songs Considered with new music from Wilco. The band surprised fans by dropping a new album out of the blue late last week. It's called ... wait for it ... Star Wars, and Wilco is letting everyone download it for free from ...

Not long after my son was born it occurred to me that he'd never heard music before. He wriggled into the world and had spent the first few days looking dubious, taking in the sights and colors and sounds and voices around him, trying to make sense of it all. ...

Eagles drummer, singer-songwriter and producer Don Henley is back with his first solo album in 15 years. Cass County is a country album featuring an all-star list of collaborators, including Merle Haggard, Alison Krauss, Vince Gill, Dolly Parton and Mick ...

Protomartyr's latest song, its best yet, is a fierce and unforgettable shredder. "Why Does It Shake?" — from the Detroit band's upcoming album, The Agent Intellect -- rumbles and roars with a gritty chug as frontman Joe Casey stares down his own mortality. "Sharp mind, eternal youth / I'll ...

What song makes you cry? It could be "Adagio for Strings," but it could also be "Highway to Hell." As you'll learn on this week's All Songs Considered, the music that gets us weeping can have as much, or more, to do with association than with composition.

Last week we ...

This week's Drum Fill Friday comes from Guest Quizmaster Hanna Brewer, drummer for the Texas party-rock group Purple. The group is known for its rowdy live shows and healthy sense of humor, and is currently on tour for its debut album, (409).

Brewer, who also sings for Purple, ...

While they're not splitting open a person's chest and massaging their heart back to life, musicians and the songs they make may actually be saving lives. At least that's the consensus we gathered from the thousands of stories and comments we've gotten in the past week from listeners in response ...

When Clap Your Hands Say Yeah released its self-titled debut record in 2005, it became one of the first albums to break big because of the Internet. The band recorded and released it on its own, without any label support, and shared it on the group's ...

The music videos by Cleveland's experimental rock group Mr. Gnome are always a spectacle. The duo's memorable 2012 video for "House Of Circles" was an epic production, with grand theatrics and stunning visual effects, while "Vampires" and "Night Of The Crickets" were surreal curiosities that played ...

On our show this week, bigger is better. We start with a pop anthem and feature a set of artists all leaning into or newly discovering their boldest, most attention-grabbing music yet. Some, as in the case of a frontman gone solo and a bilingual saxophone-heavy punk band, deliver precisely ...

This week Bob Boilen and I and a handful of other people from NPR Music got to see Sufjan Stevens in concert. It was a life-changing performance — one we'll all remember for many years. Stevens played most of his latest album Carrie & Lowell, a ...

In honor of Mother's Day, we asked listeners to tell us about the songs that remind them of mom. We got thousands of stories and song suggestions, way more than we could ever publish here. So for this week's All Songs +1 podcast we've also put together a list ...

Mother's Day is back again (it's this coming Sunday) to remind you to do something nice for your mom. But maybe you don't need a commercial holiday to think about your mother and all she's done (or hasn't done) for you. Maybe all it takes is a song. If so, ...

Sharon Van Etten could sing the instruction manual for a dishwasher and make it sound like lyrical poetry. Over the course of four full-lengths, her voice has only evolved and grown both bolder and more nuanced. Van Etten plays every word like an instrument, bending one note into the next ...

Tuva Lodmark and Nella Daltrey, the pair of 22-year-old Swedes who together make up the minimalist-rock duo Pale Honey, have been making music together since elementary school. Their latest music is quite spare – they turn it up every now and then with some great distortion, but usually it's simple, ...

Singer Jeen O'Brien has been around for a while, making music with a number of artists. She and Brendan Canning of Broken Social Scene are in a band together called Cookie Duster. Don't ask me what a cookie duster is — I have no idea.

O'Brien, performing here ...

This week on All Songs Considered, we grapple with the alchemy of creation — the myriad ways a musician gets from blank page and empty studio to a full sound and lyrics that ring true. We were inspired in part by a show Bob saw recently by Magnetic Fields front ...

It's hard to get your head around the amount of work it must have taken to make the new video for Son Lux's "Change Is Everything." Conceived and produced by The Made Shop, the whole thing was painstakingly pieced together entirely with a foam white board, ...