Mumford & Sons perform at BottleRock Napa Valley at the Napa Valley Expo on May 26, 2019. BottleRock Napa Valley, which was scrapped in 2020 following an initial postponement, has been postponed again in 2021, moving from its traditional Memorial Day Weekend to Labor Day Weekend instead. It also…

Imelda May, Courtesy. When Irish chanteuse Imelda May first wrote “11 Past The Hour,” the initial taste from her forthcoming album—she was writing about herself. This was before the pandemic forced everyone into their homes. Somewhere along the line, the song about awakenings and finding safety and love went…

Esperanza Spalding performs in “Throughline: San Francisco Symphony—From Hall to Home.” Other artists highlighted include Bryce Dessner of The National and violinist Pekka Kuusisto. Courtesy: SF Symphony. After Esa-Pekka Salonen was named to fill the shoes of Michael Tilson Thomas as music director of the San Francisco Symphony in…

almost monday, Courtesy: Cole Ferguson. This was going to be a breakout year for San Diego pop trio almost monday. In a way it still is, thanks to the streaming and radio success of runaway hit “broken people.” Still, after beginning 2020 by opening for AJR, almost monday were…

DISCO, the 15th album by Australian dance queen Kylie Minogue, brings full circle a career that began way back in 1987, with a decidedly disco cover of 1962 doo-wop song “The Loco-Motion.” Over the three decades since, the pop singer-songwriter has dabbled in other genres, such as on 2018’s…

Marina Kaye, Courtesy. It’s 9 p.m. in Geneva, Switzerland; an appropriate time to hop on a video call with self-proclaimed French dark pop singer-songwriter Marina Kaye. The artist, who just recently announced her return with long-gestating third album Twisted, is well-known in Europe for writing sometimes melodramatic, sometimes vengeful,…

Perhaps John Rzeznik and the Goo Goo Dolls had the best foresight out of anyone during lockdown. As other musicians were writing about claustrophobic isolation, the Goos decided to press fast-forward on the rest of 2020—right to Christmas with the band’s first holiday album in its 30 years. And…

Songhoy Blues, Courtesy. At one point a decade ago, the members of Malian rock band Songhoy Blues weren’t allowed to play shows. The ban had nothing to do with pandemic shelter-in-place orders and everything with an Islamist group that had taken over northern parts of the country and imposed sharia law,…

SkyStar Observation Wheel in Golden Gate Park, photographed on Oct. 25, 2020. Roman Gokhman/STAFF. Could the new Golden Gate Park Ferris wheel—the SkyStar—withstand the predicted 70-mile-per-h0ur winds Sunday night? I wasn’t about to find out. The 150-feet-tall SkyStar “observation wheel”—company spokesman Jon Finck was quick to point out that…

Thanks to the new Disney+ film “Clouds,” Zach Sobiech‘s 2012 hit song of the same name is again at the top of streaming charts, seven years after it brought the 17-year-old and his songwriting partner, bandmate and best friend, Sammy Brown, international acclaim just before his death to a…