Daoud Tyler-Ameen

"No Children" began as a darkly funny song about divorce. Today, it's something more: a vessel for raw-throated catharsis and a chance to indulge your worst self.

Tegan and Sara's touchstone album is turning 10. To celebrate, we asked 14 artists — one for each song — to explain how hearing The Con changed their lives, music and senses of self.

Rick Springfield, Tunde Adebimpe, Kenny Chesney and members of Talking Heads and The Feelies share how music moved — and moved us — in Jonathan Demme's movies.

The NPR Music staff spent Friday morning listening to the rapper's new album. Here are eight reactions to what will likely go down as one of the best albums of 2017.

The revered drummer, who suffered from bladder cancer in the past, popularized the breakbeat and became one of the most sampled musicians ever.

The three MCs behind the current No. 1 song in the country have a knack for finding the sensuous contours of the English language — a trait they share with the author of Llama Llama Red Pajama.

To toast an iconic album's 10th birthday, a conversation about listening while black — featuring Another Round host Tracy Clayton and writer/poet Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib.

All Songs Considered heads to Splitsville with a look at some of the bands they've broken up with or grown apart from over the years, along with some of the artists they'll stand by no matter what.

When hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton are away, NPR Music's Saidah Blount and Daoud Tyler-Ameen hack past the All Songs firewall and take over the show.

The Fall Out Boy frontman delivers a whip-smart remix that dares to treat Jepsen as more than a meme.

Late in the summer of 2013, Leslie Odom Jr. walked into a room. A lifelong performer who'd won arts scholarships as a teenager in Philadelphia, studied drama at Carnegie Mellon and sung in his first Broadway ensemble before he was out of high school, he knew some of what to ...

Laura Jane Grace and Lauren Denitzio both fell in love with music in their teens, and both turned it into a career. By the time they met in the studio this past winter, their lives had taken very different paths.

Grace quit school at 16 to found Against ...

As "Never Were," a standout from Worriers' 2013 EP Cruel Optimist, reaches the end of its charging first verse, the drums and guitars stop on a dime. In a few evocative lines, we've just learned of singer Lauren Denitzio's journey from inquisitive child to dutiful student to radicalized ...

Late last year, Queens, N.Y., songwriter Elaiza Santos quietly announced that her recorded output was about to disappear. A college student with a world-weary voice, Santos had begun her music career on two fronts: as the lead singer of Crying, an adventurous rock trio that wreathes its riffs ...

Quarterbacks empties its toolbox within the opening seconds of its self-titled full-length debut: a trebly guitar, a tight rhythm section whose home tempo lies somewhere in the Hüsker Dü range, a single subdued vocal. There's a dizzy little thrill in how deftly the three members carry off a pop song ...

Pop music's great storytellers tend to be handy with the dissolve cut — using telling turns of phrase to signal that time has passed, things have changed and we're rejoining our characters somewhere new. (Think of "Jeremy" or "Luka" or "Stan," the way their ...

"Perhaps" opens with the same steady fingerpicking that made listeners sit up and take notice when the first Iron & Wine songs surfaced a decade ago. It's a progressive sound in that it actually indicates progress, like tape threading through a cassette player or yarn through a spinning ...

Certain musical rhythms trip us up: We try to dance or count along and keep losing our place. Two musicians explain what makes some beats so slippery, and what butter has to do with making them stick.

When a performer has an exceptional night, we sometimes say he or she "left it all on stage" — the "it" being effort, energy, passion, sweat. To close a concert with a raw throat and a rumpled appearance signifies full disclosure, proof that the person on stage has held absolutely ...

On their 2012 debut, the four members of Swearin' cohered around a consistent sound: fierce and fuzzy and improbably melodic, with choruses you couldn't help shouting along to once you could make out the words. But there was a tension in hearing things turn slightly sweet or slightly ...