Pixies have been acclaimed as the most influential, pioneering band of the late 80s alt/rock movement, having served as a major influence for artists like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, the Strokes, Weezer, and many more. And today, a whole new generation of music fans has been discovering and embracing the band’s “loudquietloud” signature sound. Quirky, catchy melodies have always been Pixies’ calling card; seven genre-defining studio albums, including the Gold-certified Surfer Rosa, and the iconic Platinum Doolittle, considered one of the all-time, quintessential alt/rock albums. Sell-out crowds all over the globe, Pixies’ live shows are unadulterated magic, simultaneously electrifying and lo-fi. Seventy-five minutes of the band playing anything they want, in whatever order they want, the classics and the new gems. And no two Pixies shows are ever the same.

After disbanding in 1993, Pixies launched their reunion tour in April 2004, playing to sell-out crowds across the globe for 15 years, a far longer period of time than they were a band originally. But writing, recording and releasing new music was something that the band had been wanting to do for a long time, so they secretly booked studio time in Wales for the fall of 2012. Six days into the recording, founding bassist Kim Deal decided to leave the band; Black Francis, Joey Santiago and David Lovering made the decision to carry on, finishing and releasing the band’s first studio album in more than two decades, 2014’s Indie Cindy.

As a prolific international touring band, Francis, Santiago & Lovering began working with a number of touring bassists, including former A Perfect Circle bassist, Paz Lenchantin who came out on the road with the band in 2014 and continues to this day. In 2016 the band welcomed Lenchantin as an official Pixie. The four piece are renowned for their emphatic live performances – where they play all four corners of the globe – their live sets regularly rack up to 30+ songs played – made even more impressive by the fact that there are no pre-planned setlists or soundchecks before the band walk onto the stage to play.

2016’s Head Carrier followed (which was Lenchantin’s recording debut with the band) and also marked the beginning of the band’s long-standing collaboration with British producer Tom Dalgety. 2018’s Beneath the Eyrie, the next full length recording project with Dalgety – was recorded at Dreamland Studios near Woodstock, NY. The recording session was documented by the innovative It’s a Pixies Podcast that captured a true un-edited record of the recording process. A deluxe edition followed featuring unreleased demos from the Dreamland session.

The band released stand alone single ‘Human Crime’ in the Spring of 2022 – the band immediately sold out shows in North America and headlined BBC Radio 6 Music Festival in Cardiff and Mexico City’s Vive Latino festival to 70,000 people to kick off the year.

Having recently completed another successful run with Pixies and Cat Power, Modest Mouse continues to prove themselves to be one of the most consistent live acts today. Modest Mouse released their highly anticipated new album, The Golden Casket, on June 25, 2021 via Epic Records. The Golden Casket heralds another new chapter in the GRAMMY® Award-nominated multi platinum band’s unpredictable evolution. Produced with Dave Sardy and Jacknife Lee in Los Angeles and in Modest Mouse’s studio in Portland, the album hovers in the liminal space between raw punk power and experimental studio science, frontman Isaac Brock explores themes ranging from the degradation of our psychic landscapes and invisible technology, to fatherhood. The twelve tracks behave like amorphous organisms, undergoing dramatic mutations and mood swings that speak to the chronic tug-of-war between hope and despair that plays out in Brock’s head.

Last November in London, Cat Power took the stage at Royal Albert Hall and delivered a song-for-song recreation of one of the most fabled and transformative live sets of all time. Held at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in May 1966—but long known as the “Royal Albert Hall Concert” due to a mislabeled bootleg—the original performance saw Bob Dylan switching from acoustic to electric midway through the show, drawing ire from an audience of folk purists and forever altering the course of rock-and-roll. In her own rendition of that historic night, the artist otherwise known as Chan Marshall inhabited each song with equal parts conviction and grace and a palpable sense of protectiveness, ultimately transposing the anarchic tension of Dylan’s set with a warm and luminous joy. Now captured on the live album Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, Marshall’s spellbinding performance both lovingly honors her hero’s imprint on history and brings a stunning new vitality to many of his most revered songs.

A singularly gifted song interpreter whose catalog includes three acclaimed covers albums (2000’s The Covers Record, 2008’s Jukebox, 2022’s Covers), Marshall holds an especially strong affinity for the songwriter-poet. “More than the work of any other songwriter, Dylan’s songs have spoken to me, and inspired me since i first began hearing them at 5 years old,” said Marshall. Like the original concert (and all of Dylan’s 1966 world tour), Marshall kept the first half of her set entirely acoustic, then went electric for the second half with the help of a full band: guitarist Arsun Sorrenti, bassist Erik Paparozzi, multi-instrumentalists Aaron Embry (harmonica, piano) and Jordan Summers (organ, Wurlitzer), and drummer Josh Adams. “I knew that when representing a performance that changed the rock-and-roll landscape forever, I needed to be very serious about it,” she says. “Although ‘serious’ feels like a small word for how deeply immersed I felt.”

As she prepared to recreate Dylan’s epochal concert—a 15-song set featuring classics like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” as well as “Just Like A Woman,” and several other cuts from his seminal album Blonde on Blonde, released just the day before – Marshall deliberately avoided rehearsing her vocal parts. “Since I started making music, I’ve had this superstition about doing something more than one time, because I feel like the soul is so linked to the moment,” she explains. Along with relying on her preternatural instincts as a vocalist, Marshall drew from her extraordinary familiarity with the songs at hand. “I remember being nine years old and knowing all the lyrics to ‘Desolation Row,’ because it was on one of the many albums my young parents were listening to all the time,” she says. “I was always singing along to his songs; I’d harmonize and do my own background vocals. And the way I sang the songs back then is the same way I sing them now.”

All throughout Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, that rarefied intimacy with Dylan’s material illuminates every moment—from the very first seconds of the set-opening “She Belongs To Me,” Marshall creates the strangely charmed sensation of sharing songs that have lived in her heart for decades. “When singing ‘She Belongs To Me’ in the past, sometimes I turned it into a first-person narrative – ’I am an artist, I don’t look back.’ I really identified with it like that,” said Marshall. “But for the show at Royal Albert Hall, I of course, sang it the way it was originally written – with the respect for the composition…and the great composer.”

Another song indelibly transformed by Marshall’s feminine perspective, “Just Like a Woman” takes on a raw and lovely tenderness, heightening the expansive sense of empathy that imbues all of her performance. And for the final song in the acoustic set, Marshall offers up a hushed and unhurried version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” infusing Dylan’s storytelling with an ineffable longing. “I was the most anxious for ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ because it comes from that moment when everybody became invested in Bob as some kind of hero,” she says. “There’s a real weight to that one as far as its place in history.”

Kicking off with “Tell Me, Momma” (a song played exclusively during Dylan’s 1966 world tour), the electric half of Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert steadily builds to a sublime intensity that peaks with the band’s hypnotic and haunting performance of “Ballad of a Thin Man.” In a brilliant spin on one of the most scathing songs in Dylan’s catalog, Marshall’s vocal delivery skews toward soulful rather than sneering, yet still achieves a thrilling ferocity. “There’s a feeling to that song like putting a cigarette out on someone’s forehead, or like a journalist writing an important article about someone who needs to be ratted out,” she says. In a nod to the most storied moment from the original concert, an audience member cries out “Judas!” just before the song starts; Marshall then responds by serenely invoking the name of Jesus. “It was something impulsive. I wasn’t expecting the audience to recreate their part of the original show as well, but then I wanted to set the record straight – in a way, Dylan is a deity to all of us who write songs.” Next, on “Like a Rolling Stone,” Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert closes out as Marshall brings a radiant compassion to Dylan’s epic tale of a woman fallen from grace, arriving at something undeniably glorious. “I couldn’t sing that one as high as I used to when I was younger, but it was still fun,” she points out. “There are definitely a few those moments throughout the show where you can hear that I didn’t hit the right register, or jumbled a word, or tried to push it out too fast. But I don’t care. I like those little accidents.”

As revealed on Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, Marshall approached every song in the setlist with both heartfelt reverence and a deep understanding of the delicate nature of song interpretation. “When someone covers a song you love, there’s the potential for them to give you something you can keep with you forever because of their way of performing it, their voice, the way they tap out or hum a particular line,” says Marshall. “A song changes when someone else sings it, whether they’re trying to stay faithful to the original version or not.” And while Marshall admits to a nervous anticipation prior to the show—“I was afraid to do the whole thing, but just because you’re afraid of something doesn’t mean it won’t be okay”—a certain sense of devotion helped to carry her through the night. “I had and still have such respect for the man who crafted so many songs that helped develop conscious thinking in millions of people, helped shape the way they see the world,” says Marshall. “So even though my hands were shaking so much I had to keep them in my pockets, I felt real dignity for myself. It felt like a real honor for me to stand there.”