This year marks the 50th annual edition of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. To celebrate, Smithsonian Folkways will release Jazz Fest, a five-disc box set of live recordings from the iconic fest, spanning 1974 through 2016. You can preview the set now with Trombone Shorty‘s hard-grooving 2010 version …

Twenty-five years after “Buddy Holly,” Rivers Cuomo still remains peerless in his ability to get you humming a line like “leave a five star review and I’ll leave one too” until the only way to un-hum it is by stabbing yourself in the thigh with the nearest sharp object. The …

What dropped trailer-wise over the past week, you ask? How about action-filled clips for both a cult-superhero reboot and the upcoming redo of the most famous all-powerful-mutant-run-amuck tale of them all? We also get sneak peeks at FX‘s upcoming bio-series about Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, and Netflix’s D.J. Idris …

(This piece originally ran on January 25th, as part of our 2019 Sundance Film Festival coverage.) There was no gaggle of protestors outside the Egyptian Theater in Park City, Utah early Friday morning, despite news reports that the Sundance Film Festival had been told to brace for a massive disruption …

Sharon Van Etten stretched her malleable voice from a whisper to a full-blown scream on Thursday’s Ellen, performing her cathartic single “Seventeen.” The singer-songwriter opened in a hushed tone, crooning over pulsating bass guitar, airy synth pads and a post-punk drum pattern. The song exploded in the final verse, with …

Johnny Cash would have turned 87 this week. To honor the Man in Black on his birthday, folk singer Todd Snider unveiled the new single “The Ghost of Johnny Cash” from his forthcoming album Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3, which will be released March 15th via Aimless Records/Thirty Tigers. The …

Mike McCready‘s mother taught art for nearly three decades, and she instilled in him a great love of painting and sculpture. But even though he liked art, the omnipresence of works by Monet, Van Gogh and Warhol intimidated him when it came to making his own visual art. McCready would …

A cover of the Oscar-winning “Shallow,” a powerful anthem by one half of Sugarland and an uplifting message song by a nameless, faceless collective of Nashville artists help make up the tracks you need to hear this week. Jimmie Allen & Abbey Anderson, “Shallow” A Star Is Born‘s show-stealing power …

Terrence Howard has spoken out in defense of Jussie Smollett following his arrest for allegedly staging a hate crime. The Empire actor who plays patriarch Lucious Lyon posted a video to Instagram Sunday of Smollett playing with a child who appears to be Howard’s son; Smollett portrays Lucious Lyon’s son …

From the opening lines of her 2016 debut, Julia Jacklin showed a knack for translating everyday memories into young-adult revelations. “You were taller than my bedroom door frame,” she sang. “Hit me hard when I found height don’t make a man, no.” On the Australian singer-songwriter’s second album, Crushing, those …