Leonard Cohen held his audience spellbound through a three-hour show Friday night at the Milwaukee Theatre. His 3,700 fans spanned generations, much as his two long sets spanned the decades, covering favorite songs

One of last year's sharpest online videos was a three-minute montage of Taylor Swift looking completely and utterly shocked by her many award-show victories. In clip after clip, the country singer gasps in stunned disbelief as she claims yet another ...

An hour after his scheduled start time, Scott Weiland took the stage not to a taut rock riff or a triumphant Stone Temple Pilots hit but… a 20-minute blues jam. With reggae undertones. On which he played Theremin. With his bac...

From the New York Times' colorful review of Weezer's New York concert Wednesday night: Mr. Cuomo both led the show and observed it from different angles. He let all his band members take multiple turns singing. He played drums on a decent cover of Oasis�s �(What�s the Story) Morning Glory?� Ultimately he supervised an invasion of his own show, leading a ragtag amateur troupe of 30 or so ...

In the increasingly rare moments that my grandfather remembers what I do for a living long enough to make conversation about it-I write about music, among other things, I tell him when he asks-he'll pose a follow-up question: "What's your favorite band?" I never have an answer for this question, but my grandfather always does. "I know mine," he says, proudly. "The Glenn Miller Orchestra....

“I knew someone would cover this song at Summerfest,” my friend moaned as “The House of the Rising Sun” drifted over the festival grounds from stages away. The band playing the song wasn’t a cover band, though; it was the group that made the song famous 40-some years ago, The Animals, sounding very much like an Animals cover band.

As leader of The Silos, Walter Salas-Humara has been recording since the mid-’80s, working on more than a dozen albums with collaborators as diverse as Alejandro Escovedo and, in an upcoming project, novelist Jonathan Lethem. At Sunday’s Shank Hall show, Salas-Humara led a band made up of Milwaukee and Madison musicians.

As many critics noted upon the release of Seattle band The Cave Singers’ debut album, the band members’ musical pedigrees suggest they’d be unlikely to attempt—much less succeed at—acoustic American roots music. Nonetheless, guitarist Derek Fudesco (of the now disbanded Pretty Girls Make Graves), vocalist Pete Quirk (of post-punk quintet Hint Hint) and drummer Marty Lund (of Cobra High) released their acclaimed Invitation Songs in September 2007.

Like Jonathan Richman, Jens Lekman is a doeeyed and baritonevoiced songwriter who travels the world singing simple, unaffected songs about universal experiences. And like Richman, he writes some of the purest, most genuine music ever recorded. But where Richman relies on just a primitive guitardrum setup to share his vision in concert, Lekman aims for something grander. For his latest tour, he’s recruited a quintet of musicians, including a violinist and cellist, whose swooning strings caress his more intimate songs and aggrandize his zippier, poppier ones. With a little assistance from a laptop, Lekman’s arrangements can conjure anything from classic soul to disco to calypso. Jonathan Richman’s music only sounds this fully realized in Jonathan Richman’s head.

Few bands blur the line between thrilling and tedious like the Duluth slowcore trio Low.