Stephen Thompson

All week, Morning Edition has been examining how coffee fits into modern life, which led us to look into the many ways the drink's trembling tendrils have reached into popular music. With the Beastie Boys taking their "sugar with coffee and cream," Carly Simon finding "clouds in my ...

It's no exaggeration to say that Colin Stetson rarely stops to take a breath: The Montreal saxophonist uses circular breathing and other inventive techniques — no loops or overdubs! — to sculpt muscular instrumental soundscapes that bulge and roar ominously. Not one for airy pauses, Stetson infuses his solo ...

Bradford Cox's music is the stuff of an obsessive and unquiet mind. Everything about the singer's approach to music — whether he's dumping four discs' worth of home recordings onto the Internet with little fanfare or smearing fake blood onto his spindly, dress-clad body onstage — has a chaotic, haunted ...

We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the value-packed coupon booklets we'll never open is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, what to do about an unruly CD collection.

Cindy Nelson writes: "On the spectrum of ...

It began, appropriately enough, with a plea for darkness. Nick Cave may have opened his SXSW set in the twilight hours, but if anyone could will the night into being, it's the black-clad Australian star.

After opening with "Higgs Boson Blues" — a circuitous dirge from Push the Sky Away, ...

A super-sized chamber-rock collective from Austin, Texas, Mother Falcon constructs sweepingly majestic rock out of a nine-piece string section, multiple horns, a bassoon, a glockenspiel and a diverse assortment of voices that sing and shout to the rafters. The band makes the most of those many moving parts — its ...

The massive commercial success of Adele and Amy Winehouse guaranteed an avalanche of high-profile U.K. soul singers, particularly the kind whose music harkens back to brassy '60s soul. But, as charming and effervescent as singers like Duffy and Paloma Faith can be, their music isn't forward-looking; ...

For all his wry self-deprecation, Steve Martin has never been a musical tourist: The actor, comedian and author has been passionate about the banjo for decades, and trotted it out on stage at every opportunity in the years leading up to his decorated recording career. Martin's got the chops ...

Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O pulls off one of the trickiest maneuvers in rock 'n' roll: the ability to appear utterly bonkers on stage while remaining in control of every chaotic outburst. The woman knows how to make an entrance, too: She emerged on stage at Stubb's in Austin ...

We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the fruit baskets welcoming us to our new office is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, how to reconcile a person you like with musical tastes you don't.

Ashley ...

There'd be nothing wrong with "one-hit wonder" status if the term didn't suggest some sort of creative limitation; if people didn't assume that one hit means only one good song. But for Sean Nelson and Harvey Danger, the 1998 smash "Flagpole Sitta" has had a way of overshadowing the superior ...

Shuggie Otis has long been adjacent to worldwide stardom. His late father, the R&B legend Johnny Otis, is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The younger Otis' most ardent fans consider his brief late-'60s and early-'70s recording career to have produced works on par with those of ...

After nearly 30 years, The Flaming Lips couldn't be harder to predict or pin down. The Oklahoma band has nothing left to prove — no lofty commercial standard to maintain, no gigantic hit of the variety anyone expects it to re-create, and no core sound whose boundaries and limitations ...

Justin Vernon has to feel pressure every time he steps into a recording studio. As the leader of Bon Iver, he's gone 2 for 2, with a classic debut (For Emma, Forever Ago) followed by a lush and fussed-over album (Bon Iver) which won him a pair of Grammys, ...

No one's ever been voted Least Likely To Lead An 11-Piece Band, but if such an honor had been bestowed 12 years ago, Sam Beam would've been a frontrunner. A shy, prolifically bearded academic, Beam started out making whisper-quiet bedroom recordings — just his voice and an acoustic guitar, issuing ...

A playful, electronics-infused Mexican rock band, Café Tacvba found itself in an unusual spot on the Stubb's stage at SXSW on March 13: namely, bookended by Nick Cave and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, both of whom roll around seductively in far seedier corners of rock 'n' roll. Singing in Spanish to ...

We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the two five-pound bags of Gummi Bears we ordered from Amazon Prime is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, a request for tips on broadening your horizons to include ...

In the past, calling Villagers a band has been a misnomer: From its inception, it's been little more than an alias for Conor O'Brien, a singer-songwriter from Dublin with a flair for the dramatic and a gift for creating rich arrangements out of instruments he's played himself. Villagers' 2010 ...

We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the Penzey's spice catalogs we will never open is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, why "unplugged" versions of songs are so often preferable to their more fussed-over studio ...

Bands are often described as coming "out of nowhere," as if they'd sprung into existence fully formed and hadn't spent years writing songs and polishing their collective voice and sound. The New York City quintet Caveman only entered the national consciousness last year, but its searching, dreamily rendered, deftly ...