When Ray Charles lifted a gospel track from the Southern Tones and pointed the lyrics towards a girl instead of a higher power, he invented soul. Since then, the notion of swapping Jesus for a girl ...
A Swiss singer takes her worst nights into a live band’s arrangements and stays in tune for every word, and the steadiness proves nothing about whether she is all right.
A Bay Area psych-soul band hands its middle to a veteran tenor and gets tenderness and anger out of him in a single register.
Two decades into his career, Juga-Naut packs his bars with food, place names, and pay figures, and the detail makes the case ...
The Atlanta rapper drags her breakup verses onto a rave dance floor, where the drops hold back the hurt, the verses start, ...
A French singer of Cameroonian descent takes freak back from the sideshow and fills the pews with every shade she can name.
October is when the best of the fall has to prove itself before the onslaught of holiday sets. Highlights this month: John Legend enlists Pharrell to produce an entire set; Fontaines D.C. returns ...
A Zambian band once added its own sound to the Western songs it covered. Sampa the Great makes hip-hop the next layer on that ...
The leader of a gospel choir generally looks in two directions: his back is to the singers, who need to see his hands, and his face is directed toward the audience, who need to see a confident man of ...