The line around the corner to get into Hiro Ballroom last night for Public Storage Blues, a benefit for the writer Anthony Haden-Guest, was not because the club was filled to capacity—it’s just that they weren’t letting anyone in. The invitation said doo

Sharon Van Etten is peeling an orange in her South Brooklyn apartment. After 14 months on the road, she's unpacked her bags in a place she can, for now, call home. During the vocalist's transitory period — following the release of her 2009 debut Because

At Sunday’s Grammy Awards, the music industry crowns its best performers for the year. Next month, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts its latest class of music legends. How would you like to get in on crowning some of that glory? Think of it as a fan

Seems like everyone and his brother is doing coves of Hallelujah these days. My favorite of those is by John Cale. I’ve given up reading Slate, but: do they just not like Jennifer Warnes’ album “Famous Blue Raincoat”? I put together a Spotify playlist a

If there’s a problem with Leonard Cohen (and let’s be clear – there isn’t), it’s that the absolute magnificence of his poetry can disappear into the familiarity of his songs. You remember the words, but with repetition, forget about their brilliance. Put

For the two hours veteran rock 'n' roll band Wilco was on stage at the Paramount Monday night, it was a seemingly unstoppable force of power-pop brilliance married to avant-garde leanings and a deep well of folk-rock legacy. Imagine vintage Elvis Costell

This month, The Velvet Underground filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against the Andy Warhol foundation alleging that the foundation violated their rights to the “The Velvet Underground and Nico” album design (a bold, yellow banana above Warhol’

In 1969, Fluxus artist/musician Takehisa Kosugi formed the Taj Mahal Travelers, an octet of Japanese musicians whose used traditional instruments like violin, double bass, tuba, trumpet, and mandolin in non-traditional ways and run through early electron

While he’s had several self-penned hits in Europe and the UK, over here he’s probably best k

INTERVIEW: Leonard Cohen is back with his 12th album – he talks to BRIAN BOYD about rapturous audiences, his love of Yeats and how he has temporarily given up smoking SPEND ANY TIME in the company of Leonard Cohen and you feel as though you are in the pr

“You moved in slow degrees/A sudden memory/You’re a Leonard Cohen song” “But I was caught, like a fleeting thought / Stuck inside Leonard Cohen’s mind” “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / So I can sigh eternally” Nearing half a century and 12 albums la

Few could dispute that 77-year-old Leonard Cohen is a musical treasure, the author of some of the most beautiful and poetic songs of the last four decades. And only the heartless would deny the Canadian artist the very late and long overdue career resurg

Thanks for the great description of the music. I haven’t listened to it for years, and didn’t remember a thing. Your writing captures the Man and his Intentions eerily well. I have often wondered to myself what Bowie’s thing about Ferry was all about, (a

While the amazing John Cale is best known as a founder of the Velvet Underground, his association with the group followed Cale's deep involvement with the avant-garde classical music scene. During the early 1960s, Cale performed with John Cage, La Monte

IN THE early 1960s Welsh pianist John Cale left his Carmarthenshire home for New York, met Lou Reed and formed the Velvet Underground, one of the most influential bands in rock history. Now, almost 40 years later, Cale has again joined with his former ba

According to the suit, Warhol supplied the famous artwork in return for a split of the $3,000 advance that MGM paid the band to record the album. In the intervening years, no one bothered to formally file intellectual property rights to the image, John C

Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) -- The Andy Warhol Foundation was accused in a lawsuit by The Velvet Underground of infringing the trademark for the banana design on the cover of the rock group’s first album in 1967. The band’s founders, Lou Reed and John Cale, sai

Andy Warhol painted the banana for the Velvet Underground in the mid-60s It is, arguably, the most famous banana in the world – and now it has been deemed important enough to have started a copyright war. Rock band The Velvet Underground have launche

Nearly 45 years after a banana appeared on their iconic 1967 debut album, the Velvet Underground are suing the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts citing copyright infringement and seeking unspecified damages. According to the New York Post -- and