The BoDeans got their start as a Waukesha bar band with a slight Americana accent, but in the years since their 1986 debut album, core members Sam Llanas and Kurt Neuman have grown as songwriters and outgrown easy labels...

An affinity for night is a large part of both the public and private persona of musician Sam Llanas...

Waukesha natives The BoDeans have had their share of commercial highs and lows since they signed to Warner Bros. back in 1985. Recording their debut album Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams with T-Bone Burnett, and having its single...

Waukesha natives The BoDeans have had their share of commercial highs and lows since they signed to Warner Bros. back in 1985. Recording their debut album Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams with T-Bone Burnett, and having its single...

Overrated by the rock press when they debuted in 1986, the BoDeans were elevated by excitable critics from promising Milwaukee bar band to champions of heartland rock. Many groups would have evaporated under the withering hype and exhausted their stock of inspiration in a blur of relentless touring. Somehow...

Waukesha natives The BoDeans have had their share of commercial highs and lows since they signed to Warner Bros. back in 1985. Recording their debut album Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams with T-Bone Burnett, and having Closer to Free become the theme song for nineties TV show “Party of Five” put them on the map during...

The Milwaukee Admirals offer fans perhaps the biggest carrot of the season tonight with a post-game concert from The BoDeans, the beloved Milwaukee band and perennial Summerfest headliners. That group is riding high from last year’s Still, an album that reunited them with producer T-Bone Burnett and delivers plenty of their signature, upbeat roots-rock. It’s arguably the group’s best album in 15 years. The game itself...

John Sieger returned to Nashville, the city he lived in for much of the 1990s, to cut his latest solo album, The Shaming of the True. The album’s release arrives at a curious time, however. These days Sieger is devoting much of his energy to his new, Milwaukee-based soul/western-swing band The Subcontinentals, so . . .

The Nashville that John Sieger experienced during the mid-’90s was just as many music lovers picture the city, a friendly haven for songwriting talent where hungry up-and-comers intermingle with established legends. During his time there, Sieger performed with Lucinda Williams and rubbed shoulders with Shelby Lynn. His friend lived next door to Emmylou Harris. Sieger, who has written songs for Dwight Yoakam and The BoDeans, had some success in Nashville—he hosted a weekly night at the city’s renowned Pub of Love—but, he explains, “I wasn’t making enough money to really say I had a career in music.”

Nearly three decades ago, the BoDeans were formed when Kurt Neumann and Sammy Llanas initiated a unique singing and songwriting partnership in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The partnership was built on give and take, whether in the trading of lyrical or melodic ideas, an exchange of guitar riffs, or the blending of vocal harmonies. As frontmen for what . . .