I didn't realize how great a year it's been for music in D.C. until I started compiling this list. While I didn't hear many landmark, career-defining albums in 2011, there were a ton of great songs from both young and veteran artists. Whatever D.C.'s reputation, there's a healthy community of smart, ambitious musicmakers in this [...]

"Playing music is like handwriting," says Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye. "If you play a song over and over, it starts to evolve."
For my feature this week on Fugazi's new online archive of live shows, I discussed some of the subtle changes you can hear in live version of the song "Repeater." Since then, I spoke to [...]

Everyone's Talking 'bout Fugazi: After you read Ryan Little's thinky Washington City Paper feature on the post-hardcore band's new live archive, check out Marc Masters' for the Washington Post. Masters quotes critic John Gross saying, "At times they reminded me more of song-based jazz than rock...When they got a good head of steam going, you [...]

In 2009, a 45-minute MP3 of audio from Fugazi concerts cropped up on punk and indie-rock blogs. But it wasn’t a musical recording: Instead, James Burns, the fan behind the file, had cobbled together choice clips of outrageous stage banter. The collage not only affirmed the band’s reputation for hardline punk diatribes (“Would the gentleman in [...]

Remember when you paid $5 to see that life-changing, all-ages show where Guy Picciotto hung upside down from a basketball hoop? Or when Ian MacKaye stretched out the insanity of "23 Beats Off" for just a few minutes more? It's time to relive all those memories, folks...
In news that should make Phish jealous, The New [...]

The indie corner of the Internet went nuts Monday after WaPo's David Malitz published a piece about the recent rediscovery of a rare Elliott Smith recording. The story went that a former WMUC DJ Ben Weisholtz found a copy of a 1996 live radio session—"Misery Let Me Down"—in an old MiniDisc player he sold on [...]

Solo Lally: From his home in Italy, Fugazi expat Joe Lally talks to the Riverfront Times of St. Louis about life as a solo artist. The interview is nothing shattering, just mostly about how nice it is to live in Italy and a little about being a "guy from Fugazi." Of the latter, the bassist said: [...]

Next week Universal will reissue Nirvana's Nevermind to celebrate the album's 20th anniversary, which will put a nice cherry on top of the grunge-nostalgia sundae folks seem so eager to devour lately. But as anyone who lived in Seattle in the late '80s and early '90s—or anyone who spent a couple hours Googling bands after [...]

Punk forums and Twitter went aflutter Sunday night when the Minor Threat song "Minor Threat" was played on HBO's Entourage. Given that big companies have a history of using Dischord stuff without permission, some assumed it went down like the Great Nike Copyright Infringement of 2005, or the Forever 21 T-shirt, or the Fox assholery [...]

For this week's issue, I reported a lengthy oral history of the annual concert series at Fort Reno in Tenleytown. This summer's shows conclude tonight with sets from The Evens and Laughing Man.
For years, Fort Reno regulars have circulated rumors of a ban against go-go (and even hip-hop) at Fort Reno. Certainly, no one seems to [...]