Stephen Thompson

We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the two five-pound bags of Gummi Bears we ordered from Amazon Prime is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, a request for tips on broadening your horizons to include ...

In the past, calling Villagers a band has been a misnomer: From its inception, it's been little more than an alias for Conor O'Brien, a singer-songwriter from Dublin with a flair for the dramatic and a gift for creating rich arrangements out of instruments he's played himself. Villagers' 2010 ...

We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the Penzey's spice catalogs we will never open is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, why "unplugged" versions of songs are so often preferable to their more fussed-over studio ...

Michael Benjamin Lerner crafts songs that embody control and precision — which makes a whole lot of sense, given that he's 1) a drummer at heart; and 2) Telekinesis' only member. For his third album, Dormarion, the 26-year-old multi-instrumentalist sheds his do-everything-yourself ethos enough to work with another drummer ...

Bands are often described as coming "out of nowhere," as if they'd sprung into existence fully formed and hadn't spent years writing songs and polishing their collective voice and sound. The New York City quintet Caveman only entered the national consciousness last year, but its searching, dreamily rendered, deftly ...

Blues music is supposed to be cathartic — a way to process and package pain in ways that make it palatable; to take our hurt and ache, set it outside ourselves, give it a tune and rhythm that makes it tangible and real yet somehow less terrifying.

Jason Molina, who ...

As big-time bands go, Wavves started out a little undercooked: just a guy named Nathan Williams who made sloppy four-track garage-pop anthems with cheap equipment. Big-time hype followed quickly — a little too quickly for any new band's own good — and Wavves' sound has now spent a ...

Somewhere along the way, Dave Grohl has become the unofficial Mayor of Rock 'n' Roll: a gregarious ambassador who wins armloads of Grammys and even directs a documentary — Sound City: Real to Reel — about the artistry, technology and magic that goes into making a great studio recording. So ...

Alt-J's Joe Newman has a funny way of singing — especially for the uninitiated, it can seem cartoonish or, worse, affected. He bends his high, twisty voice in strange ways, wrapping it around inventive arrangements that burble and boom and otherwise ramp up a sense of unease. The easiest way ...

Backed by only a DJ, New York rapper Le1f and his 3-foot blond braids proved an apt counterpart to Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O, who'd finished performing on the nearby Stubb's main stage just minutes earlier. He performed with confidence, command and occasionally avant-garde fearlessness, but also kept an eye ...

A studio wizard still in his early 20s, Youth Lagoon's Trevor Powers makes music that documents the spiraling uncertainty of a worried mind. It must have been tough to translate to the live stage, where the comfort and cover of the studio are stripped away and every fussy swirl has ...

If Katie Crutchfield ever becomes a solo star, it's hard to imagine how the Waxahatchee singer's most bruised and beautiful songs will translate to a gigantic stage. Tucked into a back room at Stubb's during SXSW on March 13 — and following in the immediate aftermath of Nick Cave's swaggering ...

Listen to Stephen Thompson's conversation with Audie Cornish on All Things Considered by clicking the audio link.

The South by Southwest music festival kicked off Tuesday with the first of five straight nights of music overload: The clubs, makeshift music venues and front porches of Austin, Texas, were ...

In 20 years, Low's basic ingredients haven't changed much: Guitarist Alan Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker swap and sometimes layer their vocals, with a third member joining the married couple on bass. The pace, for the most part, is kept deliberate, even glacial, with strategically deployed silence hanging between ...

To stand out as an acoustic-guitar-wielding folk-rock singer-songwriter, you'd better have an awful lot of charisma at your disposal — and it helps if, like Josh Ritter, you're able to infuse your songs with a sense that stakes are high and words ring true. A prolific singer-songwriter who's appropriately ...

We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the eight billion SXSW solicitations is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, a request for tips on assembling the perfect travel playlist.

Janna Sanford writes: "I'd love advice and ...

It says a lot about SXSW's size and scope that this "sampler" of the annual music festival spans six and a half hours, but here we are: 100 songs by 100 artists worth discovering at this year's big event.

Handpicked from among thousands of artists, this genre-traversing playlist picks highlights, ...

An Alabama native now based in Brooklyn, Phosphorescent's Matthew Houck sings with wryly weary raggedness to suit his late-at-night laments. Even when their arrangements feel grand and fleshed-out, epic and searching, Houck's best songs come off like intimate conversations with a confidante — wise and soft, and warmed by ...

For a guy who gets tagged with a lot of limiting descriptors — "freak folk," "hippie" and so forth — Devendra Banhart doesn't like to let his music sit in any spot for long. His catalog, which now includes seven official albums, has taken him through warmly intimate ballads, ...

Given that Jimi Hendrix has been dead for more than four decades, the visionary guitarist has remained awfully prolific: He left behind a formidable tape library, full of alternate takes, discarded ideas and collaborations of varying quality, and those materials have been mined in the making of far more ...