Katie Presley

Thursdays this year we're celebrating All Songs Considered's 15th birthday with personal memories and highlights from the show's decade and a half online and on the air. If you have a story about the show you'd like to share, drop us an email: allsongs@npr.org.

This September brings the

On this week's episode of All Songs Considered, we've got an album announcement from a new band featuring Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys and song premieres from Widowspeak and Joan Shelley.

We've also got an incredible story, one that surrounds the latest release from D.C. ...

Jasamine White-Gluz has a voice for the best of times and the worst of times. The singer and guitarist of Canadian psychedelic shoegaze band No Joy has an ethereal, breezy voice that reads as laid-back or apathetic depending on the lighting. The thin line between those two attitudes is the ...

Singer-songwriter Liza Anne conceived of her latest album, Two, as a marriage between audio and visual storytelling. So when it came time for her bring to life "Lost," a deeply introspective track about self-caused and self-contained misery, she turned to the equally self-contained medium of dance. Choreographer Kendall Walker, the ...

The amps on All Songs Considered this week never dip lower than 11. Bob is joined in the studio by a sleep-deprived Katie Presley, who just moved across the country in a packed truck and has the road trip anthem to prove it, along with NPR Music's Lars Gotrich, who ...

London DJ Maya Jane Coles records under many names, and seems to aim for accuracy in her aliases. Under her given name, she creates the house music that's made her famous (Nicki Minaj helped by sampling a 2010 Coles track in a recent single). With Lena Cullen, Coles makes ...

**Viewer Advisory: The above video contains profanity**

Don't be fooled by the glittery jumpsuit. Frazey Ford is out for blood. The video for this scathing breakup anthem, "Done," follows Ford — whose silky-soft vocals sound naughty and scrumptious wrapped around curse words — taking to the streets with ...

On this week's All Songs Considered, Bob is joined in the studio by NPR Music's Katie Presley and Jacob Ganz and the crew sets its sights on discovery. None of the musicians featured in this episode have ever been played on All Songs before — we set out to find ...

Listening to Anna B Savage's music is like being told a secret. Very little information has been released about the London singer-songwriter, which adds to the mystique wrought by her husky, confessional voice. Every aspect of Savage's aesthetic is spare, from the title of her first single, "1," to the ...

Karen Dalton's career was built on covering the songs of others. Patty Griffin writes songs that others famously cover. Both artists are considered masters of their respective crafts by their peers, but neither is a household name. Each has a voice that sounds like it couldn't possibly ...

Girlpool have fun, but they don't mess around. The lo-fi punk duo spend the duration of their new video, for the title track from their debut LP, Before The World Was Big, cartwheeling and frolicking on a sun-drenched beach. Cares are few, trust falls are many, and a boardwalk Ferris ...

What song makes you cry? It could be "Adagio for Strings," but it could also be "Highway to Hell." As you'll learn on this week's All Songs Considered, the music that gets us weeping can have as much, or more, to do with association than with composition.

Last week we ...

Shana Cleveland maintains a Flickr account to showcase her watercolor paintings of "famous faces and drawings." The collection, now numbering in the 60s, is drawn in subtle grayscale washes, with special focus on eyes and the way light hits, for example, Diana Ross' bouffant. They're drawings by someone who ...

Bodies matter. Judith Butler named a book (and built a career) after the idea. Marina Abramovic, to prove the point, held hers still for anyone who would come, and drew a record-breaking audience as she did so. And they've become a physical and philosophical keystone for ...

"Gold was different," Isaac Asimov wrote in his final novella. "It had a feel. Each piece had a weight. Piled together it had a gleaming beauty." The choice Asimov's protagonist faces when he says this is between payment for a job in the intangible electronic currency on which his world ...

A small town is the perfect place to start a legend. There aren't as many witnesses to contradict a story, and those who are present are more likely to defend and encourage lore that boosts local mystique than contest it. The way they tell it, Annie Truscott, Gretchen Grimm, Julia ...

THEESatisfaction opens its second album, EarthEE, with the lines, "Said the bird to the water: May I take a sip? May I dip my toes in it?" Whether the introduction is meant as an avian parable or, more likely, a declaration of intent, it effectively functions as a disclaimer ...

The romantic notion of a musician holing up in a studio, alone between soundproof walls with her genius and the muses, doesn't hold water in Louisiana. The lion's share of post-contact American musical history has been borne along the curves of the Mississippi River, and no place incubates a tune ...

Reunion mythology is a powerful force in the music industry. It can artificially preserve overripe bands past their sell-by date, or rob stellar releases of thoughtful criticism in favor of tireless gossip. Former bandmates pursuing other projects have to shout louder than their own histories to be heard in a ...

Sisterhood, novelist Marilynne Robinson writes in Housekeeping, "is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them."

Few performers are more qualified to provide a soundtrack to their lighted house than folk-pop duo Lily and Madeleine Jurkiewicz, ...