Music "We don't have that much of a preconceived idea of what Portland will be like in a musical sense, or what the audience will be like," Sparks singer Russell Mael told me at the end of our half-hour conversation prior to the band’s first-ever appeara...   More

Music Stories For the first time in its 42-year, 22-album career, Sparks is playing Portland. The Mael brothers’ Two Hands, One Mouth tour—the hands being those of composer-lyricist Ron Mael, as deployed    More

Music Hate Bob Seger? There's an AP for that. But if you're less inimical toward the Bard of Motor City than my colleague AP Kryza—whose commentary on Seger in a recent WW offered the excuse that the rocker's music was force-fed him as a Michigan native—then Saturday night's show at t...   More

Music "Fuck the Oscars—I win!" So declared Patti Smith from the stage at the Crystal Ballroom last Tuesday, bragging that she'd received, right from the hand of Kevin Shields, the very first copy of the new My Bloody Valentine album. But she immediately followed by saying she didn't mean it, that she watches the Oscars every year, and loves Jennifer Lawrence. To prove it, she pu...   More

Music Guitarist, singer and songwriter Pete Krebs, one of Portland music's longtime leading lights, has been diagnosed with stage two dismoplastic melanoma, a rare form of cancer which is unresponsive to such treatments as radiation and chemotherapy, according to an online request for financial assistance by his wife, Rebecca. Surger...   More

Music Stories Born: In Prestatyn, Wales, in 1957. Formed: In 1986 in London. Sounds like: Beatlesque melodies and gentle-Jagger vocals mixed with Neil Young-aspiring lyrics and Prince-ly production touches. For    More

Music Stories Born: Betty Haskins, Jan. 29, 1946 Sounds like: A throwback—the good kind—to the chitlin’ circuit, armed with a savvy, personalized rock repertoire. For fans of: Tina Turner, crossover R&B   More

Music Stories [SINGER-SONGROCKER] Plenty of artists have fallen through the music-biz cracks, but few have lodged in those cracks like an irritant in an oyster and spent the next couple of decades cranking out    More

Music Stories John Wesley Harding and the Decemberists’ Jenny Conlee are trading a Chuck Berry-style do-si-do. No, not the duck walk, but that other thing Chuck does—bent at the knee and pointing one foot out   More

Music Stories Born: May 1, 1939, in Seattle.  Sounds like: A cool glass of water in a beautiful, cut-crystal flute.  For fans of: Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, folk art and song.  Latest release: Thi   More