Music

From staff reports

Puddy Knife may be a relatively new addition to the diverse landscape that is the Spokane music scene, but their true origins are from a very different time in the Lilac City.

Amelia Day spent a good chunk of her youth infatuated by music.

Aspen Kye grew up on music in Spokane, and all these years later she’ll be celebrating her 30th birthday with one of the biggest shows of her career.

Peter Yarrow, whose caring and righteous vocals for the trio Peter, Paul and Mary helped establish them as one of the most popular folk acts of the 1960s, died Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 86.

When Brendan Wheeler pitched an Eagle Scout project that would focus on collecting and repairing musical instruments to give to low-income children, he thought he’d collect 25 instruments at most.

Last year saw a wide array of impressive albums spanning all genres. There was such an impressive output that I would argue more music flew under the radar in 2024 than any other year this decade. At the end of the day, only so many songs can trend, and social media platforms are pushing the power of the single to places the industry hasn’t necessarily seen. Because of this, full-length albums from anybody besides established powerhouses can wind up left in the dust. Although this list could be much, much longer, here are five records from 2024 that deserve more limelight than they were given.

The Big Dipper saw a sold-out crowd drawn to the venue Saturday night by three (relatively) local bands – one of which making a heavily anticipated return.

The Spokane Symphony and Spokane Symphony Chorale is ringing in the new year with their rendition of Beethoven’s powerful Ninth Symphony.

Spokane-native Blake Braley describes the lifestyle of a working musician as “doing the thing,” and he has quickly become one of the Lilac City’s most popular while doing so.

Great albums were coming out of every corner of the pop music universe in 2024.

EDM legends the Glitch Mob are taking over the Knitting Factory this weekend.

The holiday season can feel like a balancing act for theaters. There’s the desire to check off all the holiday classics audiences have come to expect while also producing something that feels fresh yet still festive.

For Brett Noble and 221 Press, putting on events that showcase local talent is one of many means of gratification, and shows like this weekend’s Sonic Solstice exemplify this.

The Spokane Symphony Chorale is celebrating the movies of Christmas with a weekend of holiday classics.

It is a fact both certain and inexplicable that some gifted musicians are able to impart a unique quality of tone to the sound of their instruments. This, reason tells us, is plainly impossible.  A cellist, for example, employs a bow, which is no more than a band of horse hair stretched between two ends of a stick.

R.E.M. never had a chance to be a secret. Though some of the band’s earliest fans would later bemoan its globe-straddling success, in the way of all connoisseurs who get to an eventually popular thing first, the band was always big relative to its station. Within weeks of its now fabled first performance in 1980 at a friend’s birthday party in an old, deconsecrated church in Athens, Georgia, the quartet was drawing larger-than-average crowds at some of the music-rich college town’s hippest venues. By the end of 1981, the New York Times had listed “Radio Free Europe” as one of the year’s best songs, when that single was all the group had released. And in 1983, Rolling Stone – hardly the pulse of the counterculture by that time – was honoring “Murmur,” the band’s first full-length effort, as the best album of the year, beating out such fringe releases as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and the Police’s “Synchronicity.”

Country music group Lonestar hit the ground running in the mid-1990s. The second single off their eponymous debut album, “No News,” spawned their first country chart topper, and from then on ruling the charts became an outright consistency.

From staff reports