Mumford & Sons perform at Chase Center in San Francisco on Sept. 19, 2019. Photos: Joaquin Cabello. SAN FRANCISCO — One year, they were playing Popscene to a couple hundred people. Fast forward a decade, and they were being handed the John Steinbeck Award by two of the Bay Area’s premier…

San Jose State University and Stanford Live will present Mumford & Sons with the John Steinbeck Award in a ceremony and acoustic performance at the Bing Concert Hall on Sept. 18. Tickets will be sold to the event, with proceeds benefiting the Steinbeck Service Fellowship created by Nick Taylor of the…

Santana performs at BottleRock Napa Valley at the Napa Valley Expo on May 26, 2019. Photos: Shawn Robbins. NAPA — Guitar legend Carlos Santana, closing out BottleRock Napa Valley 2019 on Sunday along with Mumford and Sons, saw it as his mission to fight fear with love. On several occasions,…

Imagine Dragons perform at the Concord Pavilion in Concord on July 24, 2018. The band is one of six co-headliners at BottleRock Napa May 24 to 26. Photo: Kate Vides. NAPA — BottleRock Napa Valley producers today unveiled the lineup for the seventh incarnation of their annual wine country festival,…

Since the release of Wilder Mind in 2015, Mumford & Sons have experimented with breaking out of their folk rock bubble. Their new album, Delta, positions itself as a somewhat experimental, yet entirely familiar, addition to the band’s discography. If Wilder Mind made a stab toward Top 40 alt-rock, Delta doesn’t quite…

Photos: Tim Durkan SANTA CLARA — On its own, U2 performing its 1987 breakout album, The Joshua Tree, is significant for two reasons. Foremost, it means the Irish band has accepted its position as a legacy band with a storied songbook that the casual fan prefers over new material. But…

Original art: Vivian Shih Chelsea’s 33rd birthday was going to be one she’d never forget. U2, her favorite band, was performing for two nights in Toronto, Canada, and the California native would be there to see both performances. “That is my happy place. That’s my church,” she said. “I go…

Photos: Jon Ching This is the third in a five-part series. Read how I’m scoring my list and find out about my “special consideration” acts in Part 1, HERE, and the runners-up in Part 2, HERE. Reminder: If the name is hyperlinked, that means I wrote about the act this year,…

Photos: Roman Gokhman BERKELEY — “How many of you are students?” Marcus Mumford surveyed the packed crowd at UC Berkeley’s Greek Theatre Thursday night, the second of three consecutive sell-outs for London folk-rockers Mumford & Sons. “How many of you are parents? How many of you smoke weed,” the disheveled…