Music Bank
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Manic Street Preachers
Manic Street Preachers emerged at the dawn of the 1990s as a fiery rebuke of the placid state of British indie rock, a scene that grew to favor the swirling solipsism of shoegaze and the neo-psychedelia of acid house. Inspired by the provocative punk of the Clash and the heavy glam of Guns N’ Roses, the Manics wedded leftist politics with arena-filling guitar riffs, a combination that made them irresistible to the British rock press of the ’90s…
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Young Jessie
The Los Angeles R&B vocal group scene of the 1950s was a fairly incestuous one — members flitted from one aggregation to the next, often sporting several connections at the time. Young Jessie was a member of the Flairs, Hunters, and Coasters, as well as scoring a solo West Coast hit with his 1955 rocker Mary Lou. Obediah Jessie was a Los Angeles high-school classmate of Richard “Louie Louie” Berry. The two put together the Flairs and debuted on the Bihari Brothers’ Flair label in 1953 with She Wants to Rock…
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Chris Difford
After the break-up of Squeeze in 1983, Chris Difford continued writing songs for artists such as Jools Holland, Helen Shapiro, Elvis Costello. He has also written lyrics for music by Jools Holland, Elton John, Wet Wet Wet and others. He launched a solo career in 2003 with his album ‘I Didn’t Get Where I Am’…
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Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift is that rarest of pop phenomena: a superstar who managed to completely cross over from country to the mainstream, becoming an enduring pop culture icon and conquering the world in the process. Swift shed her country roots like they were a second skin, revealing that she was perhaps the savviest populist singer/songwriter of her generation…
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Joe Jackson
Arriving in the middle of the rush of angry young men during the late 1970s, Joe Jackson swiftly established himself as one the great unpredictable talents to emerge during rock’s new wave. Initially playing nervy, punk-inspired pop/rock — his breakthrough single “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” married a smooth melody with barbed lyrics, the racket of “I’m the Man” rivalled the Clash — Jackson branched out into reggae and jump blues before settling into the sophisticated songsmith of Night & Day…
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Jonas Brothers
A bright, buoyant band who savvily blend classic pop with fashionable dance flair, the Jonas Brothers are the rare teen idols who not only sustained their popularity as they matured, they built upon it: Happiness Begins, their R&B-influenced 2019 comeback record, matched the peaks they had a decade prior. During those early years, the Jonas Brothers played neo-bubblegum with a fizzy Y2K verve that made them Radio Disney staples during its heyday…
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The Radio Dept.
The Radio Dept. were one of the more successful shoegaze-influenced indie rock bands to come out of Sweden in the early 2000s, making waves among indie aficionados on the strength of their critically acclaimed first release, Lesser Matters. Elin Almered and Johan Duncanson formed a prototypical version of the group in Lund, Sweden, in 1995 while they were in high school, naming the group after a gas station called Radioavdelningen…
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Gaz Coombes
As the exuberant frontman for the boundlessly imaginative Brit-pop group Supergrass, Gaz Coombes at one point seemed to be an eternal teenager — a man destined to never slow down. But time has a way of aging even the irrepressibly youthful, and by their second decade Supergrass had started to expand sonically; by the time he released his solo debut, Here Come the Bombs, in 2012, just two years after the disbandment of Supergrass,
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Ron Sexsmith
Ron Sexsmith has a talent for catchy but graceful melodies that’s matched by his skills as a lyricist, drawing compact sketches of love and the trials of everyday life that are heartfelt and compassionate even when he’s being witty, and warm without becoming overly sentimental. Sexsmith’s songs are fine examples of pop classicism and his work as a recording artist has found him maturing steadily throughout his career…
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Vic Chesnutt
Though Michael Stipe had been a fan of Vic Chesnutt since the late ’80s, producing his first two full-lengths, it took the Sweet Relief Two tribute album to make a star of him in mid-1996. The album featured artists such as Madonna, Hootie & the Blowfish, Smashing Pumpkins, and R.E.M. covering the songs of Chesnutt, a paraplegic who was injured in a car accident when he was 18. The singer/songwriter began playing contemporary acoustic folk around Athens, GA, soon after his injury…
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