Merrill Garbus is the performer and multi-instrumentalist behind tUnE-yArDs — a music project that blends African-inspired rhythms and vocals with electric bass and saxophone. But she only discovered music after a failed career as a puppeteer. She tells Kurt ...

Video: tUnE-yArDs performs songs from the album w h o k i l l

The drummer Jack DeJohnette has recorded with all the jazz superheroes of the last half century. But he tells Studio 360 that what he really wanted to do was play piano. He’d begun a promising career as a pianist when he was entranced by the drummer Vernell Fournier, who had ...

Video: Vernell Fournier plays with brushes

In 2009 the composer Eve Beglarian spent four months traveling down the Mississippi River. The sounds and stories she gathered from the trip inspired her new collection of compositions, BRIM: Songs from the RiverProject. She performs songs from the album live in the studio ...

Video: "It Happens Like This"

The Sons of the Pioneers pioneered one of the strangest branches of American music: singing cowboys.  Their 1934 song “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” made popular by a Gene Autry film of the same name, was written by Bob Nolan, a Canadian by birth who ...

Bruce Springsteen's album Wrecking Ball comes out March 6. A recent press announcement supplied a track list of eleven hardscrabble-titled songs. We've come up with our own list of ten real song titles mixed up with ten ringers.  Can you pick the titles that Bruce wrote?

The Scene: Dallas
From KERA's Art & Seek, an online resource for arts, music, and culture in North Texas.

The past two years, so many arts groups in North Texas have had to find new directors, managing directors and CEOs that people have wondered if there was something wrong — with the Arts District? With Dallas in general? It’s not an Arts District problem, not a North Texas problem. It’s an ...

The New Orleans piano player Henry Roeland Byrd made a name for himself as Professor Longhair, a former street hustler turned self-taught musician who started recording in his early 30s. In 1953 Atlantic records released "Tipitina." “As a kid you heard that song seven or eight times ...

The new DVD Talking Heads: Chronology contains film and video of Talking Heads in performance going all the way back to 1975 — before the advent of camcorders, and two years before the release of the band’s first LP. Kurt Andersen talks with David Byrne, the band’s ...

Video: Talking Heads, "Psycho Killer" Live at CBGB, 1975

When Amy Douglas was a teenager, her parents sent her to a boarding school for troubled kids deep in the Arizona desert. There she fell deep into a depression and struggled with an eating disorder. Then a cassette copy of The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads helped ...

Trout Mask Replica (1969) is part free jazz, part blues, part beat poetry. Frank Zappa (who gave singer-songwriter Don van Vliet the name Captain Beefheart) produced the album. “It sounds like it's been made up on the spot,” describes Mike Barnes, van Vliet’s biographer. “But in fact it was ...

Think of Cher’s hit “Believe” and that robotic, computerized sound of her voice. (Now try getting it out of your head. Sorry.) The Autotune effect that sounded so radical at the turn of the 21st century became the defining studio effect of the decade since. Every era of pop ...

Bonus: The Pop SFX Playlist

Kurt Andersen notes that we're in an age of flux and paralysis at the same time. In entertainment, we yearn for authenticity — but ten million of us watch the Kardashians every week. Where do we go from here? Playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick and Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams help ...

Did you know there are audio recordings that predate Thomas Edison's phonograph by almost 20 years? The phonautogram was invented by a Frenchman named Eduoard Leon-Scott and patented in 1857, translating sound waves (shakily) onto sheets of paper. But for the last century ...

There is no shortage of 2011 year-end playlists, but few are as trustworthy as what's currently on David Byrne's iPod. The former Talking Heads front man sat down with Kurt Andersen this week to talk about the new Talking Heads: Chronology DVD, a collection of rare ...

Christmas starts earlier every year, and perhaps the wreaths and peppermint mochas have you rolling your eyes. If so, too bad! It’ll be over soon enough, so light a pine-scented candle, set your Pandora to "Jingle Bells," and dig in to the Studio 360 Christmas archive. ...

Computers have taken over an astonishing array of tasks humans used to do. They fly our planes, give us directions, recommend books, set us up on dates.  But can they tell us a good story? Meet Brutus, a computer programmed to write fiction.  Through a series of mathematical equations, its ...

Bonus Track: “Self-Betrayal,” written by Brutus

Elliott Carter might be the hardest working man in classical music today. Having turned 103 over the weekend, he’s certainly the oldest. The composer is celebrating his latest birthday by premiering several new pieces, five of which were performed last week. The festivities continue tonight when Julliard's AXIOM ensemble performs ...

The singer Lalah Hathaway’s first recording was in 1969. She couldn't talk yet — she wasn’t even a year old — but you can hear her wailing on her father's single “The Ghetto." Lalah’s father was the R&B songwriter and performer Donny Hathaway. He was best known for soulful duets ...

Bonus Track: “You Were Meant For Me"  

A few hundred years ago, classical pianists would impress audiences by original cadenzas in the middle of a concerto — riffing, we would say now. Now improvisation is firmly in the realm of jazz. But a new record called Marvelous Fantasy explores the connection between jazz and classical ...

Video: O'Neal performs "Marvelous Fantasy," "The Lovers," and breakdances in the studio

Tim Minchin closes the show with a Christmas song he wrote for his daughter. And although he’s got a bone to pick with the holiday (and the socio-religious-economic-political issues surrounding it), his carol is equal parts satire and heart ...

Video: “White Wine in the Sun”