A confession: When I get a new Drive-By Truckers album, I skip ahead to the songs written and sung by Mike Cooley.
One of the keys to the Athens, Ga.-by-way-of-Alabama outfit's enduring supremacy is that most bands don't have any great songwriters and the Truckers have always had at least two. Cooley co-founded the group [...]

People really geek out over the old 9:30 Club. Tonight, the D.C. Music Salon is screening a 2004 documentary about the venue—it's called 930 F Street, after the space's original street address before it moved to V Street—and everyone says you should go. A few weeks before the film by Tarik Dahir and Jeff Gaul [...]

Editor's note: We would've had this up yesterday, but due to an apocalyptic spike in traffic, uploading this many photos was impossible. Apologies!
Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, brought his laptop, his mashed-up songs, and his crowd props to the sold out 9:30 Club Tuesday. More of a massive performance-art piece than a concert, this traveling [...]

It's probably a safe bet that you or someone you know went to see The Dismemberment Plan this weekend. At Saturday's show at the 9:30 Club, you could overhear plenty of conversations from fans who'd traveled from out of town to see the reunited band. It's unclear exactly how many fans made it on stage [...]

Last night, per tradition, The Dismemberment Plan played "The Ice of Boston" toward the end of its show at the 9:30 Club, and a throng of fans joined the band on stage. As a service to you, the reader, I documented the whole thing, making no attempt to 1) hold my camera steady; or 2) [...]

With contributions from Alex Baca, Matt Siblo.
- The Dismemberment Plan has good taste in openers. Best warm-up set has to go to Bluebrain, which despite a muddy audio mix was easily the biggest mindfuck: The duo had massive brass-horn edifices strapped to their backs, an actual brass section, video projections, and several of the band's [...]

There are many hardcore fans of the Drive-By Truckers who feel the band lost something in the songwriting when singer/guitarist Jason Isbell left in 2007. While Patterson Hood's lyrics are more Southern Gothic, Isbell's writing is simpler, more situational and emotional. When he sings, he's like an old friend beckoning you with memories and whiskey. He [...]

Brian Schanck was 15 years old when a friend played him Emergency & I, the third album by The Dismemberment Plan. “The music was euphonious and the lyrics hit home,” he says, recalling the D.C. indie rock band’s oddball pairing of funk rhythms and emo narrative. He dug it.
When Schanck turned 18, he tattooed the [...]

When Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville came out in 1993, many of the guys I knew loved Phair's cheerleader-prettiness and the record's brazen sexuality ("Dude, she said she wants to be a blow job queen, heh heh"). The women I knew loved the record for its power, its intelligent sexuality with lyrics that were honest [...]

It’s a Tuesday night at LIV nightclub on U Street NW, and Mambo Sauce vocalist Black Boo has broken into a reggae-tinged Waka Flocka Flame mash-up. The crowd is feeling it, but standing on stage, Demont “Peekaso” Pinder is facing the other way.
In one hand he holds an iPad, displaying the worn face of Miles [...]