Benjamin Tyler grew up in the southwest, studying jazz in Tempe, Arizona. Despite jazz’s propaganda as an outlet for musical freedom, he felt boxed-in. “I had a lot to get off my chest, and I just felt a little stifled in school,” he says. “And no one really wanted to

by Jeff Hill Smash Mouth bassist Paul De Lisle is calling to check in from the beach in Hawaii, where he is enjoying a day off. It is a safe bet that he is seeing better waves than the ones in Brookings on the Oregon coast, where he visited and

  Coy Iacono lives off the side of the Redwood Highway in Grants Pass. But it isn’t the noise from the many passing trucks that bothers him. It’s the lack of it. “Every night when you fall asleep, a tour bus passes by,” he says. “And they need to stop.

Lots of musicians publish tell-all memoirs. Some tell a little more than others, like The Dirt, the collective autobiography of Motley Crue, which is a thrilling, though somewhat tawdry read. But those books are often written by ghostwriters, not the artists themselves. I recently found a copy of Woody Guthrie’s

With electronic music easier to make than ever, a resurgent acoustic culture and the pop charts being dominated by hip-hop, the louderati in Moses Nose, who will be playing two nights in Ashland, have a simple, clearly-defined struggle. “Not a lot of people connect with rock and roll like they

Every critic has their biases that savvy readers can learn to take or leave. For purposes of transparency, know that this reporter’s proclivities include a total disdain for derivative instead of constructive nostalgia. No matter how many decades pass, a good sound will always be a good sound, but there’s