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I saw Jay Bennett perform just one time apart from his seven-year stint with Wilco at a Detroit dive called the Lager House, in the shadow of the abandoned Tigers Stadium. For me, a huge fan of Bennett's contributions to Wilco and his first solo record, The Palace at 4am, the performance was hugely deflating -- a drunken mess of bluesy, distorted bar-band rock that seemed completely incongruous with the subtle genius who made Wilco records come to life. Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy's greatest talent has always been the ability to surround himself with the right musicians, and Bennett's holistic, high-minded approach as the multi-instrumentalist yielded both artists' best work. But that was hardly the Bennett that showed up that night in Detroit; the blown-out versions of tunes from The Palace at 4am grew more defiant as the room grew emptier, ensuring that Bennett would capture onlythe most determined of Wilco's audience who had turned up. Foolishly, I left early.

When Bennett was found dead last weekend, the news murmured through the Sasquatch Music Festival in central Washington State. The cause of death is still unknown, but the circumstances of a public quarrel with his old band followed the news closely. Recently, Bennett had filed a lawsuit against Tweedy for breach of contract and unpaid artist's royalties, stemming in part from his role in a 2002 documentary about Wilco, in which he was unflatteringly portrayed. Even though he was on a recording tear at his studio, Pieholden Studios (named for a Wilco song), and enrolled in post-graduate classes at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (an institution where he'd already earned numerous degrees), his health wasn't good; he was also about to have hip-replacement surgery and the timing of the surgery was linked to the lawsuit in message boards.

But as Wilco fans return to Bennett's recordings, it's clear that his legacy won't be darkened by the clouds that hung over his late life. His legacy is that of a selfless, brilliant musician better at playing other people's songs than his own (many of his songs turn out overly crowded with ideas). He was the brains behind the decade's brainiest band, and an arranger who could transform Jeff Tweedy's occasionally obtuse treatises on yuppie discontent into sparkling, profoundly universal statements. It was this ability -- to see into the guts of a song and infuse it with just the right sound -- that made the musical settings for songs written by Woody Guthrie on the Mermaid Avenue recordings pitch-perfect. In celebration of his stunning career, we revisit some of Bennett's greatest musical moments.

Bob Dylan's Together Through Life is a spirited ramble though American roots, blues and sunbaked southwestern soul. To celebrate its release, we put together a kit of favorite Dylan features on Rhapsody: a playlist of Dylan covers, a feature about his great narratives, a guide though his seminal albums and our review of the new one. LIfe's been good to him so far.

BROWSE: Read Rhapsody's review of Together Through Life.

EXPLORE: See our play-by-play of Dylan's great narrative songs.

DROP IN: Hear Together... and more at Dylan's home on Rhapsody.

PLAY: Hear a playlist Dylan covers by African Americans.

ROCK THE RADIO: Listen Bob Dylan artist radio. It totally rules.

LEARN: Dig into Uncle Bob's catalog with our Dylan Album Guide.

U2
No Line on the Horizon

In the last decade, it seems like U2 has been content to simply get bigger instead of better, consoling themselves after the ambitious Pop disaster by repainting aching portraits like "One" again and again with an increasingly larger brush. By the time the Dubliners released How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb in 2004, their attempt to recapture their big-hearted history was weighed down with moments of near-parody: the larger-than-life rock band that poses in the empty air plane hanger, addresses the United Nations, and hocks strident jams like "Beautiful Day" for ESPN B-roll and custom mp3 players. Fans who greeted the rebellious and ambitious Boy some two and a half decades earlier were painfully avoiding the soap-boxing businessman he'd grown into.

And though No Line On The Horizon is neither a bold return to those salad days nor a bold departure for the band, the wealth of great moments make it U2's most lived-in record in a decade. Yeah, there are times when Bono is still addressing his minions in painful cliches and cheesy one-liners ("Stand up for your love!" he demands on the aptly-named "Stand Up Comedy"; "I was born to sing for you," he confesses on, ahem, "Magnificent."). And there are touches of electro-glippity gloppity that probably seemed like a good idea while the band was holed up in a recording studio in Fez, Morocco, and lots of chest pounding grandeur. But there's also something the band has been out of for a long time: subtlety. It sneaks up in a pair of six-minute supertankers, "Unknown Caller" and "Moment of Surrender," and creeps in amongst the surly sing-speak politicizing of "Breathe." The first two have an organic, dramatic arch that shows that these guys can be rousing without being unctuous. The last one, the LP's most biting, reminds us of something we'd nearly forgotten: that U2, at their core, are still a great rock 'n' roll band.


Visit the U2 Survival Guide, a one-stop destination for U2 playlists, radio stations, exclusive galleries and more.

Rhapsody Reviews: Text about music -- remember that?

Willie Nelson, Asleep at the Wheel
Willie and the Wheel
Willie's penchant for collaboration has defined his late career; he's joined up with everyone from alt country pouter Ryan Adams [hear it here] to late-night comedian Stephen Colbert. Even though he's backed here by veteran traditional country outfit Asleep at the Wheel, this seems as much of a partnership with recently deceased Atlantic Records boss and iconic producer Jerry Wexler, who had the concept for the record shelved for years and produced it just before his death. Similar to Willie's 2006 release You Don't Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker, he sings the genre of his youth with obvious revelry, and here the band's virtuosity (indisputable from the very start with the noodling Dixie horns of "Hesitation Blues") feels every bit as affectionate. For that, thank Ray Benson, longstanding front man of Asleep at the Wheel, whose arrangements help make "Sweet Jennie Lee" and "Oh! You Pretty Woman" particularly swinging standouts.

Rhapsody Reviews: Text about music -- remember that?

The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
Lonely Road
It's all of 12 seconds before Red Jumpsuit commence their full-blown shred, announcing the chops-heavy, melodic rock that dominates their sophomore release with Duke Kitchens' lightening speed finger-tapping. While most of the record feels like an anticipated progression from Don't You Fake It, the songs that lie beneath the ripping are better in every way -- they're hookier and thematically more developed, more concise, more dynamic, more ... everything. When they weave in a half-speed breakdown, as on "Pen & Paper" or "Represent," it suggests that they are the most capable mainstream act to look to the '90s underground for inspiration (sorry, Fall Out Boy). But it's not all emo 2.0 posturing either; "Believe" is a swinging rock ballad lush with strings and cooing vocal back-ups that goes out on a limb with its soul inspiration -- and nails it. The verse of "Pleads and Postcards" is structured over a stadium-size riff nipped from AC/DC. If this pile of influences sounds all over the map, it most certainly is, but the album's feel is still consistent (thanks in large part to vocalist Ronnie Winter, who is not afraid to show off the technical ability of his pipes), resulting in a record that shows a band that delivers on its huge potential.

Brit neo-soul singer Adele blindsided everyone, including herself, when she picked up four Grammy nominations in 2008 in such illustrious categories as Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best New Artist. We caught up with the singer after a sound check in St. Paul, Minn., to chat about some of her favorite music, Sarah Palin and life on the road. [Hate the written word with a tireless vengeance? Hear the audio of this interview here.]

Rhapsody: You recently were on Saturday Night Live with Sarah Palin; did you get to meet her?
Adele: I didn't want to really. I felt like a traitor. I had a big Obama badge on my shirt and she kinda came up to my boob and saw the photo and I felt really bad. She was really nice afterward. She came up and said hello. Her daughters bought her my album a couple months before. She seemed really nice, but I'm an Obama fan to the day I die.

Rhapsody: You've toured as a supporting act with a number of great artists, but this time around you're headlining. Tell me about choosing someone to play with you?
Adele: I picked a British singer named James Morrison, who I love. I love his voice so much. He's supporting me on all the dates. He didn't do the first three because he just had a baby who is like 14 weeks old, so he joined us yesterday in Chicago. I think his voice is absolutely amazing.

Rhapsody Reviews: Text about music -- remember that?


Bruce Springsteen
Working on a Dream
Somewhere between stumping for Barack Obama, picking up a Golden Globe for the theme to The Wrestler and playing dates on two continents, Springsteen put together Working on a Dream, his 16th studio album and one that feels like the sunnier companion of 2007's dark Magic. (Little wonder why: The Boss began tracking with producer Brendan O'Brien in the weeks immediately following the wrap of Magic.) But if his 2007 effort could be read as a dusty, bleak assessment of George W. Bush's America, the tone here is a nearly sanguine vantage that reflects the changing of the guard. He falls head-over-heels in love with the "Queen of the Supermarket," spews plenty of "I love you's" over "Kingdom of Days" and literally whistles while he works through the determined title track. It can get a little thick ("Let your love shine down" is but one of the hackneyed one-liners muddling "Surprise, Surprise"), but the record's late-coming introspection, including the brooding "Life Itself," prevents it from getting filed next to rare clunkers like Tunnel of Love.

Rhapsody Reviews: Text about music -- remember that?

Mark Olson & Gary Louris
Ready For the Flood

At one time or another there were a dozen-odd musicians who called themselves Jayhawks, but to listen to the early, defining dispatches from the band -- a self-titled 1985 collection that barely saw daylight; another, Blue Earth, which was little more than gussied-up demos -- it's clear that the essence of that band was the partnership of singer-songwriters Mark Olson and Gary Louris. On those early, hasty recordings, the reedy, telepathic harmonies nimbly tumble between melody and harmony so intimately that you lose track of which is which. The Jayhawks -- what the diehards consider the real Jayhawks -- is the sound of that partnership, which goes down to the bones. Even if their testaments to false love and small town funerals were sung by young men who fancied themselves old and wise (the most depressing commonality of the No Depression movement they fathered), the authenticity in their partnership was the genuine article; it kicked up the dust of Gram Parsons to stir what would become the other flannel shirt movement of the '90s: alt country.

About halfway down the half page of scrawl I took home from last night’s performance of the McCoy Tyner trio with Marc Ribot is a note that made perfect sense at the time. It says, “This is the difference between what is and what should be.” In the clear light of the morning, the stoner epiphany of that sentence seems exactly like the kind of thing you write down during a drug experience -- something so urgent, that life’s needle comes scratching off the record and you have to write it down immediately, fearing that your square, sober self will let the newly discovered answer to life’s mystery slip away. When you wake up the next day, head pounding and tongue thick, it’s happened again: the sagacious wisdom has melted into a bit of nonsense like “this is the difference between what is and what should be.”

Rachel: So, MTV's Total Request Live is set to end its 10-year run, airing its final episode this Friday and a good-bye bash on November 16. In honor of the long-running request show, Rhapsody's Rock editor, Nate Cavalieri, and our Pop editor (that would be yours truly, Rachel Devitt) decided to have a little conversation about its legacy, which I, poptimist that I am, think is fairly significant. Nate is a bit more cynical, however. And off we go.

OK, yes, one of TRL's most significant "gifts" to the world has been Carson Daly (seriously, can we regift that one?), but I also think the show has carved out -- and deserves -- a special place in music history. It's been host to lots of important pop cultural events: the beginnings of the boy band phenomenon; Mariah's popsicle-laden meltdown/striptease; the first official report of Britney Spears's split from K-Fed. For a good chunk of its run, TRL was an important barometer of popular culture. Not to mention it's been one of the only places you can actually see, uh, music videos on the music video network (even if they aren't full clips).

Nate: Rachel, if I wake up on Christmas morning to find a wobbling refrigerator box that stinks of Axe body spray, I'm re-regifting Carson right back to you. I'll go along for the ride that TRL deserves a special place in the annals of pop culture, but, at the risk of coming off like a curmudgeonly fishing buddy of Walter Matthau, the cancellation of the show was a mercy killing after so many years of TRL hobbling along like a crippled old nag. Sure, it made waves during its short and juicy peak, but, like the cast of twits that dominated its charts – the thrill was quickly gone. Its place in the pop-culture scrap heap is somewhere near the Star Trek franchise – enormously popular, increasingly wretched and ultimately unwatchable. As for it being the only place on MTV to see actual music videos, sure, maybe if the video was number one. But if it wasn't number one, they only played part of it! I know but slogging through an entire three-minute video is rough, but, sigh, I want the M back in MTV!

A few years ago, I interviewed the Dodos, a San Francisco duo who was, at that time, trying to keep their heads during the disorienting situation that befalls a band who's being vigorously courted by record labels. We parked on the sidewalk of a café in the Mission District as the singer, Meric Long, spoke about the most bewildering gig he'd ever played, a few weeks prior, in the board room of a Manhattan skyscraper, to an audience of record industry decision-makers. For a musician of Long's pedigree -- a vet of San Francisco's indie songwriter scene who pens unapologetically nervy, decidedly un-commercial songs -- his obvious discomfort about the situation was evident then, and even more so when they issued their first LP on a reputable small independent label, French Kiss. The situation with the Dodos office gig was on the brain yesterday, sitting in a conference room on the 48th floor of a building near the chaotic center of Times Square (where Rhapsody's New York office makes its home) when Ryan Star strode in, guitar in hand, dressed in faded black, buttressed by a small trio of nervous, doting label operatives.  

Fans of any '60s icon share a similar gripe: the legacy of too many great artists is inextricably tied to too few of their songs in heavy rotation on oldies stations. These select tracks get played and played out, and eventually even the lifelong Beatles fan reaches for the dial during the third daily course of "Yellow Submarine." Today, I cued up the Four Tops after reading about the passing of the band's leader, Levi Stubbs, who died in his sleep in his Detroit home at the age of 72, and was reminded about how this predicament is particularly hard on the stable of artists from '60s Motown: The Jackson 5 is relegated to "I'll Be There"; Stevie Wonder, a Motown artist with as deep and wide-ranging catalog of any, is on three times an afternoon with "For Once in My Life." For the Four Tops, the heavy-rotation hits come between 1964's "Baby, I Need Your Loving" and their final Top 10 in 1973, "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I've Got)." Of the handful of stuff between these bookends, some, like The Big Chill-approved "It's the Same Old Song," represent Motown's streamlined mainstream operation. Others, like "Reach Out, I'll Be There," speak to the group's power in the studio. But it's the outlying, oddly successful hit "Bernadette," a tune that is among their most popular and their most enduring, that best demonstrates Stubbs' power as a performer. It's the rare example of a heavy-rotation hit that lives up to its responsibilities. 

You can have your Dirty South and maybe even your DC Hardcore -- but when it comes to most rank and file rock 'n' roll, American regionalist associations are pretty dicey. There's Seattle of the '90s or Detroit of the '00s, and sh*t, even sniveling Omaha. Yet, when it comes to similarities in the way things actually sound? It rarely comes out in the wash (heard Screaming Trees and Alice in Chains lately?). It was on the brain a lot last week when the long-withheld digital release of Kid Rock went live in Rhapsody. Even if his late career more resembles the beer-bloated aggrandizing of Southern rockers like .38 Special than the MC5, Kid Rock makes much of his Michigan roots.

In scenes with, well, a scene, the glue always seems to be influential figureheads -- something that might be more embodied these days by hip-hop producers. In that way, the recent collection of singles by Memphis garage-rock riser Jay Reatard firmly proves the exception of Memphis' rock legacy. It’s a record that's not only sonically, stylistically concordant with the city's vibrant underground rock scene, but one that shows the long-lasting influence of the people who built it.

[Click the "Continue Reading..." link to listen to a playlist featuring the music discussed in this post.]

It’s Friday at rush hour, and the show has only begun on the N Judah train line. Regular commuters clutch their briefcases, terrified, as a crowd of rowdy interlopers -- many in cowboy shirts, many in no shirts at all -- pack the car. The route is headed toward Golden Gate Park, where the eighth annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival commenced this afternoon, and two of the car's more enthusiastic riders are stone-giddy about the opening day headliner: "Robert f*ck*ng Plant, man," one says to the other in the blown-mind inflection that's the universal dialect of the three-day event. San Francisco might host a slew other open-air music festivals, but Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a multi-stage festival of roots rock, country and bluegrass (paid for by San Francisco venture capitalist Warren Hellman) is probably the one that most accurately reflects the eccentricities of its host city. Starting with Robert f*ck*ng Plant.

At a glance, last night's performance by Argentinean/Swede folk phenom Jose Gonzalez wasn't much to see: the final set of a two-day, sold-out stand at Yoshi's in Oakland, CA, mostly featured Gonzalez at center stage, hunched over a nylon-string guitar. Sitting between a heavy red curtain and a curious mix of the jazz club's typical chardonnay-and-maki crowd and reverent doe-eyed fans, he was occasionally buttressed by singer Yukimi Nagamo and percussionist Erik Bodin. There was almost no banter ("This song," he said in the honeyed shush of a yoga instructor, "is about tribalism") and few frills beyond those inherent in Gonzalez's faux-traditional Brazilian finger-picking and melancholic evocation of Joao Gilberto. Even the setlist -- drawn from his similarly elegant, bare pair of albums and scattered with new material -- didn't raise eyebrows, save for a forceful cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" that was trotted out for an encore. But, Gonzalez demonstrated that he's one of the most commanding songwriters of recent years by achieving the difficult task of what architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe called "an interesting plainness." The set also made it plainly apparent, and never more serenely unobjectionable, that Gonzalez, is also someone who thrives in an industry that's seen the death of the album-based career. He could be the poster child of its passing.