Andy Downing

In music, love is depicted in wildly varying forms, from cherubs fluttering about with bows drawn ("Cupid") and astral rays ("You Are the Sunshine of My Life") to a stalker's...

Bound Stems did not stumble upon its sound by accident, though listening to the band's debut EP, "The Logic of Building the Body Plan" (Flameshovel), it sometimes sounds that way....

There's a scene in "Fight Club" where Brad Pitt briefly holds a gun to the back of a store clerk's head before letting him go free. "His breakfast will taste...

"I've been into [John Fahey's] music for 25 years now and I still cannot articulate what it is about him. He's one of those guitar players who completely redefined ......

When she was 15, Katherine Schell was, by her own admission, a bit of a tomboy. Just two years earlier, her younger brother, Greg, had been diagnosed with leukemia and...

There is a growing list of clubs that, for one reason or another, Chris Erickson and the rest of the Functional Blackouts are no longer allowed to play. "We played...

Brian Moss, frontman for Hanalei, started the band as a side-project when his previous group, the Ghost, was nearing the end of its three-year-plus run. A nearly endless string of...

If Elizabeth Elmore talks in the mile-a-minute manner of an attorney delivering a closing argument, it's with good reason. The 29-year-old Reputation frontwoman, who currently runs her own entertainment law...

"Kings and Queens" (Thrill Jockey), the sophomore album from the National Trust is, by the band's admission, a dance record. "I moved back to Chicago in '95 and it was...

Cairo, Ill. sits at the farthest tip of the state, a leisurely six-hour drive south of Chicago on I-57. The city, ideally situated at the convergence of the Mississippi and...