David Dye

After a band breakup, musician Chris Snyder consoled himself with the challenge of what he called "the threesixfive project": a challenge to write a song every day for a year. This one-man band ended up with 10 songs that stuck, and those formed his debut album, Yearling.

The Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist ...

Mount Moriah is a rock band formed around the duo of guitarist Jenks Miller and singer Heather McEntire. Its second full-length album, the recent Miracle Temple, combines the strum and twang of Southern rock with vocals that hit hard emotionally.

On this installment of World Cafe, host David Dye discusses ...

Hanni El Khatib is a first-generation American who grew up with a Palestinian father and a Filipino mother in San Francisco. His music has origins in '50s and '60s soul, blues, R&B and garage rock, with all those influences filtered through an intense love of punk music.

El Khatib's ...

Dawes' Taylor Goldsmith writes heartfelt first-person songs, somewhat in the style of Laurel Canyon predecessors like Jackson Browne. In an exhaustive interview with World Cafe's Michaela Majoun, Goldsmith describes the inspiration for the songs on the band's new album, Stories Don't End.

Dawes recorded Stories Don't ...

Frightened Rabbit's Scott Hutchinson has been creating compelling, sometimes even uplifting, songs about abject failure since the Scottish band's first album, Sing the Greys, came out in 2006.

On this installment of World Cafe, Hutchinson tells host David Dye how the entire band was involved in writing lyrics for ...

RNDM is a new band featuring Joseph Arthur, Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Richard Stuverud. Ament and Arthur met when the latter opened for Pearl Jam on tour.

Ament tells World Cafe host David Dye that he was mesmerized by Arthur's ability to create band sounds ...

In this installment of World Cafe, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy (the stage name of Will Oldham) and Dawn McCarthy perform their own versions of classic Everly Brothers songs — as heard on their latest album together, What the Brothers Sang.

The two Kentuckians find new ways to harmonize on an ...

Laura Stevenson describes herself as an "unfunny Woody Allen," which is another way of saying that her work channels her obsessions with death and doubt. On her third album, Wheel, she finds a way to make it all sound downright jaunty.

Stevenson came to her more folk leanings from roots ...

There have been releases under the name Yim Yames and projects with New Multitudes and Monsters of Folk, but Regions of Light and Sound of God is the first album bearing Jim James' own name. The My Morning Jacket singer has ...

At 81, music mogul and Columbia Records president Clive Davis has slowed down just enough to write his autobiography, The Soundtrack of My Life. The book, which describes how he's consistently made hit records, has itself become a bestseller.

In this installment of World Cafe, Davis discusses how seeing Janis ...

Calvin Cooke, Aubrey Ghent and brothers Darrick and Chuck Campbell are The Slide Brothers. The band's self-titled album debut album was produced by Robert Randolph, the spectacular young pedal-steel guitarist who became the first player from the Sacred Steel tradition to break out to a wider audience.

On this installment ...

Seattle's Hey Marseilles formed around the collaboration between singer Matt Bishop and guitarist Nick Ward, back when the two were students at the University of Washington. The band has since grown into the septet that recorded Hey Marseilles' sincere and endearing new album, Lines We Trace.

Since the release of ...

The members of London's Treetop Flyers capture the sound of California folk-rock in the '60s on their debut album, The Mountain Moves. They met on the periphery of the London folk scene that gave the world Mumford & Sons and Laura Marling.

Treetop Flyers, led by singers Reid ...

It's hard to find another band that's stayed as true to its vision as Low. Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker have been making Low records for 20 years now, and just released their 10th full-length album, The Invisible Way.

At the invitation of Jeff Tweedy, the Minnesota band ...

A little reinvention never hurt anyone. Nashville singers Jordan Meredith and Louis Johnson met in St. Augustine, Fla., and quickly discovered how well their voices blended together, so they moved to New York City and formed Augustine.

The duo, which now resides in Nashville, has since become The Saint Johns, ...

David Beck and Paul Cauthen were both playing music around San Marcos, Texas, when they recognized that it might be a good move to combine their talents and became Sons of Fathers. Actually, they originally went by the name Beck and Cauthen until another, more famous Beck took ...

Thao Nguyen has been busy since her last album, Know Better Learn Faster, came out in 2009. The band moved to San Francisco while Nguyen explored recording with other artists, even making an album with Mirah.

But, as we hear in this segment on World Cafe, ...

When Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan ditched their solo careers to form The Milk Carton Kids, they discovered that they had a lot to teach each other. They also had a plan: to give their music away in order to find their audience. It worked remarkably well. Now, ...

While on tour with his band Guster, Adam Gardner noticed that a lot of energy was being consumed, particularly in getting bands and fans together for a show. His wife, an ecologist, had been nudging him at home to become more green, and he'd started to wonder what ...

The last few years have found Mark Oliver Everett of Eels doing more than a bit of summing up. That includes an autobiography, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, as well as an anthology of the band's past work — all while putting out an inter-related trilogy of new ...