Robin Hilton

It's often said that reality is nine-tenths perception — that your level of happiness or misery in life depends way more on how you view your circumstances than the circumstances themselves. Sometimes it's best to just shrug everything off and say, "things happen" (or words to that effect).

It's the ...

The electro-pop group's latest cut is a euphoric anthem to youthful dreams and the inertia that keeps us from reaching them. Frenetic, propulsive and bristling with life, "Until We Can't (Let's Go)" finds Passion Pit frontman Michael Angelakos pleading for escape from the tedium of an ordinary life. "We'​r​e here ...

It's been a couple of weeks since we last had a Drum Fill Friday (South by Southwest and the weeklong flu I always get after the festival set me back a bit). So I thought I'd return with some low-hanging fruit to help get everyone back into the swing. You'll ...

On All Songs Considered this week, we hear two songs by familiar musicians, one stripped down to his essence and one in a brand new context. Ryan Adams is at his best live, playing solo acoustic hits, with lots of comical chatter. The prolific singer and songwriter has a ...

Son Lux, the brain child of beat wizard Ryan Lott, is back as an official trio, with a new album and a new song. The album is called Bones and was co-written and recorded by Lott with drummer Ian Chang and guitarist Rafiq Bhatia.

The first single from the ...

After a week of 16-hour days and little-to-no sleep, the All Songs Considered gang is back from Austin with a slew of musical discoveries from the 2015 South by Southwest music festival. On this week's show, hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton are joined by NPR Music's Stephen Thompson to ...

If you love music as much as we do (we really love music), there's a good chance that this is one of your favorite weeks of the year. This is when the massive South by Southwest music festival and conference bubbles up and spills over into the streets of Austin, ...

I don't have any special tricks or themes to this week's Drum Fill Friday. (Well, I may have slipped one little trick in here. See if you can catch it.) But there should be a little bit in here for everybody, from funk and soul to vintage Top 40 pop ...

Every Thursday this year we're celebrating All Songs Considered's 15th birthday with personal memories and highlights from the show's decade and a half online and on the air. If you have a story about the show you'd like to share, drop us an email: allsongs@npr.org.

Back in the ...

Sufjan Stevens is offering another peek at his upcoming album, Carrie & Lowell with the song "Should Have Known Better." It's a gorgeous reflection on regrets and the myriad ways the past can haunt and hold us. "I should have known better," Stevens sings. "To see what I ...

On this week's All Songs Considered, we look at one of life's immutable truths: Nothing's ever easy! Or, at least some things are way harder than they need to be. That's part of the message in the new kiss-off song that opens our show, "Hot Scary Summer," from the upcoming ...

Electro-pop singer Grimes is sharing a previously unreleased track with fans and a video to go with it. The song "REALiTi" was originally recorded in 2013, and the video was shot on location during Grimes' tour that year through Asia. "Since this is no longer gonna be on the ...

Sometime late this year Norwegian singer-songwriter Ane Brun will release a new full-length album. And though we don't have a name for the album yet or a release date, Brun is sharing the first new track from the record and an enchanting video to go with. The song is "Directions," ...

Hardly anyone had heard of Bon Iver when we booked him to play our South By Southwest day party in March 2008. It was a magical time. Jagjaguwar had just released Bon Iver's breathlessly beautiful album For Emma, Forever Ago, the one Justin Vernon had famously recorded in ...

This week on All Songs Considered, we get heavy — heavy lyrics, heavy themes — as hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton explore the meaning of life, even breaking it down to the atomic level, with existential music from English folk singer Bill Fay, Björk and more.

Bill ...

What kid hasn't dreamed of building a robot friend, throwing a massive party and breaking all the rules? In "No Idea," a new video from the Oxford, Mississippi rock duo Young Buffalo, a young boy's dreams come true soon after he assembles an adorable robot in his parents' garage. Their ...

BRONCHO's new video, for the song "NC-17," is a chilling meditation on civilization's slow descent into madness — the inevitable devolution of a morally bankrupt society consumed by greed and the destructive impulses of its youth. Well, that or it's just a bunch of bored kids doing stupid ...

In last week's Drum Fill Friday I included one of my favorite drummers, Steve Jordan. (I won't say which song he was on in case you haven't taken the quiz yet.) I was first introduced to Jordan through his work with The Blues Brothers in the late '70s and early ...

Forty years ago this week, Led Zeppelin released the band's monumental sixth album, the double LP Physical Graffiti. It was, as guitarist Jimmy Page himself tells us in this interview, "the mother of all double albums," with some of the band's most memorable songs, including "Kashmir," "Houses Of The ...

Lily & Madeleine's latest video is a transfixing and strangely twisted fairy tale that unfolds slowly in a world of ice and snow. "Blue blades, sharper than knives beneath my feet," the two sing before plunging into a frozen sea. "Graze my skin so fine, but cut so deep."