Why would anyone pay to see a show of Christmas songs when every Walgreens speaker has been blasting the same carols since Halloween? The best answer is because it’s Brian Wilson singing The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album in its entirety. Though the 1964 record doesn’t have the cachet of Pet Sounds…

If you hear St. Paul & the Broken Bones sight unseen, the Alabama neo-soul band conjures images of Al Green sweating while crooning. Singer Paul Janeway chuckles when asked about listeners’ preconceptions about his appearance before they see his band live. “When we started, there were assumptions I wouldn’t look the way I do,” he says. “It’s fun to surprise people.”

Nobody thinks of Utah as a hotbed for beats, but Late Night Alumni’s John Hancock says that preconception is dead wrong. “Utah has a lot of music,” he says from his Salt Lake City home. “A lot of DJs come through on the way to California. It has a great indie-rock scene too, with Neon Trees and Imagine Dragons getting their start here.” His Late Night Alumni, which straddles electronic and indie rock, is a good ambassador for the state of Utah music.

It was more than two decades ago that Steven Toth was coined “Mr. Entertainment.” “I used to juggle and do handstands for a band called One-Eyed Kings,” the Hollywood native tells New Times. After short stints with the band Lee County Oswald, Toth found himself with a surplus of songs he’d written, and thus Mr. Entertainment and the Pookiesmackers were born.

What were the odds that one of the most distinctive voices in rock history had a twin who was her musical equal? When Kim Deal, the bassist of the Pixies and lead singer of one of the band’s most beloved songs, “Gigantic,” came out with her own project, the Breeders,…

Musical influences are cyclical. There have been stages in rock history when everyone was trying to sing like Bob Dylan and other eras when everyone channeled their inner Lou Reed. But among the indie rockers who’ve pushed boundaries and topped the charts since the turn of the century, one has…

Asked how his rock band got its name, singer/guitarist Albae Camino recites the dictionary definition of “analog.” The gist is that “computers are digital devices; humans are analog,” he says. “We brainstormed short, simple names representing the way we sound. The four of us go for a pure…

There aren’t too many crooners in modern rock like Scott Yoder. But it’s not Roy Orbison or Chris Isaak who Yoder is channeling when performing. “I always had an affinity for the classic films, like Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel,” Yoder says. “In these film-noir movies, they usually had a scene…

When the garage-rock political revolutionaries of MC5 recorded their live album Kick Out the Jams at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom in 1968, it became an instant classic. But guitarist Wayne Kramer still has an uneasy feeling about that concert. “It was a monumental night, but the pressure was too much…

It’s so easy to mock farewell tours. Classic-rock legends embark upon them every few years when alimony or back taxes call them to the road one last time — until the next time. But eventually, every artist has a tour that ends up being a farewell. Tom Petty’s came last year, Prince’s the year before…