Robin Hilton

Every year around this time we like to take a break from our usual musical discoveries and get together with old friends for what we call the All Songs Considered Holiday Spectacular, a seasonal special done in the tradition of old-time radio.

A few years ago, we rented a cabin ...

When I was first offered the job of producing All Songs Considered not long after it started in 2000, NPR couldn't guarantee me the show would be around for more than a year. After all, it was an experiment: an Internet-only, streaming music show in an era when most people ...

You never entirely know what you're going to get when you ask listeners to rank their favorite albums of the year. But the results of All Songs Considered's 2015 listener poll may be the most diverse we've seen in ten years of doing these lists. From Kendrick Lamar's ...

If one thing defined the year in music for me in 2015, it was the seemingly endless struggle I had just trying to keep up with all the great releases. The pace and volume at which albums were dropped, often with no advance warning or fanfare, was breathtaking, and it ...

By the time Spoon released Gimme Fiction in 2005, the Austin, Texas rock group was already a decade into its career with more than a half-dozen releases. But none of the band's previous work felt as polished or as remarkably inspired. Gimme Fiction is at times brooding and cryptic. ...

Bob Dylan's 1965 classic "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is a dense masterpiece, packed with literary references and serpentine tales about a weary, uncertain life on the road. It makes a fitting score for a newly produced video, which includes rare footage from Dylan's European tour of that year. ...

The Detroit band Protomartyr makes loud, screeching rock that's more thoughtful than thrilling. It only takes a few seconds of the group's brightly lit Tiny Desk performance for things to get pretty deep: "False happiness is on the rise," enigmatic frontman Joe Casey deadpans. "See the victims piled high ...

Bob loves it. He hates it. He's on the fence about it. Lyrics from Courtney Barnett's "Pedestrian At Best," from Bob Boilen's favorite album of 2015, could also stand in for his feelings about the music he listened to all year. But today we're here to celebrate the ...

Next week we're going to share NPR Music's favorite albums of 2015, but before we reveal the big list, we want you to tell us what you loved. In the form below, write in the five new albums you loved the most in 2015, in order from one (your number ...

On this week's All Songs Considered we share a track from Macklemore and Ryan Lewis featuring Leon Bridges premiered on the All Songs blog. And after a 10-year hiatus from releasing new music, Missy Elliott is back in action with a song that ...

Trevor Powers, the songwriter and frontman of Youth Lagoon, has never attempted to hide his navel-gazing anxieties. On his 2011 debut (The Year Of Hibernation) and its 2013 followup (Wondrous Bughouse), Powers documents a lifetime of existential crises with swirling questions about spirituality, mortality and his own mental state. ...

Macklemore's latest effort with producer Ryan Lewis is "Kevin," a funk-flavored tirade against the ravages of addiction, with a particularly scathing indictment against overprescription of medication. The Seattle duo is joined by soul singer Leon Bridges for the hook. "Doctor please give me a dose of the American dream," Bridges ...

Music can provide a space for healing, feeling and thought. Following the terrorist attacks in Paris, including at a show in that city's Bataclan concert hall, we were compelled to play music with a meditative tone, songs that allow space and time for reflection. A tune Bob Boilen found himself ...

Shovels & Rope's new album of covers, Busted Jukebox Vol. I, took a village to create. The folk-rock duo of Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent called in their talented friends and collaborators to tackle songs from Elvis Costello, Nine Inch Nails and Guns n' Roses, just to name ...

Like many major U.S. cities, Minneapolis has as a tumultuous and divided past, with tales of gangsters, government corruption, racism and economic injustice. It's a bleak history both mocked and memorialized in a popular tag painted on buildings and grain elevators around the city that reads, "United Crushers," a reference ...

Director David Lynch and Polish composer Marek Zebrowski met back in 2006 when Zebrowski helped score and did translations for Lynch's film Inland Empire. The two bonded over their shared love for experimental music, and a year later released an album of improvisations they did together called Polish Night Music. ...

This week's All Songs Considered is an emotional roller coaster. Hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton start off mellow with the sweet, acoustic Many Rooms, only to pull the rug out from under it with a monstrously good tune from Grimes. Then we've got intricate Ethiopian accordion rhythms from Hailu ...

The latest song from Britain's moody dream pop group Daughter is a clever play on identity and purpose in a cruel world. The name, "Numbers," refers both to the things that leave us feeling numb and the callous ways people are often reduced to faceless, nameless figures.

As the ...

We've known and loved Carrie Brownstein for years now, not only for her guitar shredding in the band Sleater-Kinney — or her work with Fred Armisen on the IFC comedy Portlandia — but for her longtime contributions to NPR Music. For several years after Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006, ...

Diane Coffee gives the kind of live performances you talk about for weeks after seeing. It's not that the band tears up the stage. There's no elaborate light show or other orchestrated theatrics. The main attraction — and the reason you'll want to watch and hear more — is ...