John Payne

It all started with a Woody Guthrie and a simple insight: The best songs don't a lot of technology or other instruments to perform....

Mark Stewart, aka Stew, and his musical partner Heidi Rodewald return to their hometown to perform their new James Baldwin celebration for four nights....

Former L.A. Weekly music editor John Payne remembers the outspoken writer, critic and scholar who "didn’t just love music, he really kind of was music."...

He thinks big, real big: L.A.-based multi-instrumentalist Tim Conley is the man behind Mast (stylized as MAST), whose second album, Love and War, is just out on Alpha Pup. An ambitiously massive undertaking structured like a three-act play, the record’s 17 songs are interlaced with recurring musical themes serving as......

The mysterious Bay Area collective known as The Residents, whose masked members have never been identified, have set the standard for the avant-garde-iest of art rock and related alternative whatsit for more than four decades. The band — if you can even call them that — has released something like......

The octopus-like Manimal Group is an L.A. record label, distribution, publicity and film/TV music-syncing company that for several years has been busily re-imagining what the music biz can be all about. The company’s success owes much to the prescient vision of its hard-hustling founder Paul Beahan, who has enabled the......

St. Louis-born Patrick Duniven is a singer-songwriter with an almost unearthly gift for the catchy riff and the catchier chorus. As a matter of fact, his new song is so damn catchy that it’s funny. With “Fun for a While,” the L.A.-based Duniven has created one of those songs that’s......

The bewitching sonorities composer-singer Julia Holter creates on her new album Have You in My Wilderness (Domino) might be loosely bunched under the banner of pop ballads — albeit of a musically avantish stripe. Lyrically, her follow-up to 2013’s critically huzza’d Loud City Song explores, like pop music often does,......

From way down yonder come the Eagle Rock Gospel Singers, a musical combo well-named because that is exactly where they live, what they preach and most decidedly what they do. The band got its start about five years ago when a bunch of American roots music enthusiasts began holding hoedowns......