Soundcheck

Helado Tropical ("tropical ice cream") is a collaboration between Helado Negro, the experimental pop project of Ecuadorian-American singer/songwriter Roberto Carlos Lange, and Reyna Tropical, which is the work of the...

They started as a street band in Mexico City, but  Son Rompe Pera has attracted attention as far south as Chile. Formed in 2017, they’re a party band with a distinctive sound centered on brothers who play...

From the 2026 New York Guitar Festival , recorded live at Bryant Park, hear a set from the instrumental trio called The Messthetics -who are Anthony Pirog (guitar), Joe Lally (bass) and Brendan Canty (drums). Pirog has...

Some vocal performances are so emotionally compelling that you can’t help but hang on every word while eagerly anticipating the next. Such spellbinding experiences are the live performances of two acts that come from...

Girl Ultra is the project of Mexico City-born Mariana de Miguel; a singer-songwriter whose creativity knows no bounds. Though she started her musical career as an underground R&B artist on Soundcloud about a decade ago...

California-based harpist Lara Somogyi may be classically trained, but there’s nothing classical about her approach to making music. She surrounds herself with several effects pedals to expand the sound of her harp into...

Hardships tend to take time to overcome, and some songwriters turn to music to process their emotions as they move from one battle to the next. Two of those songwriters are Steve Earle and Anjimile , who come from very...

During her two-decade career, the singer, actor, playwright and two-time NAACP Image Award winner Somi has blended the sounds of American and African music – jazz and R&B, but also Afrobeat, folksong, and highlife. Her...

Australian singer Grace Cummings is the kind of songwriter who believes in the spontaneity of the creative process. “I’m a loner. I talk to myself a lot,” she says, and amid those internal conversations, she stumbles...

Blackstar was David Bowie’s last record, a musical farewell, and it featured the sax player Donny McCaslin . In fact, Bowie ended up using Donny McCaslin’s whole band for that album. The experience led McCaslin to...

Wendy Eisenberg is a Brooklyn-based guitarist, improviser, and songwriter who uses guitar, pedals, the tenor banjo, the computer, the synthesizer and the voice. They are also a professor of songwriting, and a constant...

The artist known as Everlast was the lead rapper in the group House of Pain, whose single “Jump Around” remains one of hip hop’s most familiar songs. But in the 1990s he began adding bluesy guitars to his songs...

It’s common for songwriting artists to process their emotions through composing music. LA-based folk singer Annahstasia spent many years crafting her debut album, Tether, doing just that, without a metronome guiding...

Shearwater is the project of singer, songwriter, and ornithologist, Jonathan Meiburg , who recently took a trip to the Antarctica to study the “the bizarre life of the polar seafloor” and wrote a book called A Most...

Folk music is known to be the music of the people, but it can sound vastly different from region to region. There are also songs that take inspiration from folk music but fall under a different genre altogether. For...