Working at our arts & culture desk, there are lots of unsolicited emails from new music artists about their latest project. Within the messages there is a best-case, white-whale scenario: hit play, immediately realize this is something different. Which is exactly what happened…
Rock
Album Review: Brighton MA – Amateur Lovers
Brighton MA Amateur Lovers Loose Tooth Records www.brightonma.net [audio:http://files.for-robots.com/daveb/sunblinded.mp3] Brighton MA is a Chicago Band with some ties to Iowa City. They have my sympathies — Chicago is a rough town musically, full of clubs and bands playing mean zero sum games. Safe to say anyone mediocre or timid gets tossed in Lake Michigan tout […]
Mannix Attack
For Iowa native Karlee Mannix, doodles turned into an art degree and high school choir turned into a family-affair band. Karlee, an Iowa alum, enjoys her eclectic life. When she is not working as a photographer’s assistant at The Portrait Shop in Coralville, she is singing in Iowa City bars with her husband and guitarist, […]
Hear Them Roar: The Iowa Women's Music Festival
[audio:zoe_lewis_never_too_old.mp3] Zoe Lewis – Never Too Old (mp3) Feminists burning their bras in protest, women such as Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt on stage, and the Equal Rights Amendment finally up for ratification—this was the1960s and 1970s, an era of women’s liberation, and, one could easily assume, a heyday for women’s music. Wrong. […]
The Sit-Down with Dan Bern
Iowa-born singer-songwriter Dan Bern recently returned to Iowa to visit his mother and ended up sticking around to lend his talents to flood-relief benefits in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Little Village caught up with Bern to talk about place. Little Village: How would you describe your experience growing up in Mount Vernon, Iowa? Dan […]

