Category Archives: TVD Washington, DC

The Jayhawks are marking four decades as a band on their current tour, and in all those years, they’ve been a reliably consistent Americana mainstay. A headlining theater date in Washington showed not just the verve of their latest album, Sanctuary Park, their 12th, but also how many great songs they’ve recorded since 1996.

Perhaps it was the wide stage of the venue (they usually stop at cozier places like the Birchmere Music Hall when they are in the area), but it’s odd to see the band as a quartet now after so many years as mostly a quintet.

Gary Louris has been the undisputed leader and frontman of the group ever since Mark Olson left in 1995, but usually there has been a second guitarist up there with the rest of the band—bassist Marc Perlman, drummer Tim O’Reagan, and keyboardist Karen Grotberg. Visually, it was a bit odd that Grotberg was off by herself a little farther stage left, apart from the other three. The lights weren’t much to talk about either.

But, oh, the songs. Seven of the 11 tunes on Sanctuary Park were showcased, starting with the opening “Keeping Our Heads Above Water” to the attempted singalong “Rowing the Boat” in the show’s encore. Louris had a lot to do—singing, playing acoustic or electric guitar as required, providing harmonica if needed, and trying to engage in between-song patter. Dedicating several songs to his wife Stephanie, whom he married in 2020, Louris also said she inspired the new songs and their sunnier direction.

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Appetite for the Grateful Dead catalog lingers long after the band’s demise decades ago. That’s made clear by the hundreds of active, full-time Dead cover bands as well as tribute tours from acts that could otherwise fill seats with their own material.

The latest example is Gillian Walsh and David Rawlings, who have been taking a break from their Woodland tour to fully immerse themselves in a Grateful Dead Reckoning tour, plying their Grammy-winning acoustic approach to the catalog—nominally to pay homage to the 45th anniversary of the Dead’s own Reckoning.

A live album, Reckoning was taken from the acoustic portion of the Dead’s 1980 tour (the electric parts of which would be assembled soon after on their Dead Set). And Welch and Rawlings, on a stark set at the Warner Theatre and joined only by their bassist Paul Kowert, didn’t replicate the album track by track (indeed, they ended up doing only eight of its 16 tracks in DC).

Instead, the two had a more relaxed approach, picking and choosing others from the Dead catalog that suited the approach—from such crowd pleasers as the opening “Bertha” and “Candy Man” to “Box of Rain” to start the generous show’s extended encore.

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Danny Elfman has spent decades making gorgeous monsters. At the Fillmore Silver Spring on Monday night, the iconic musician and composer proved (again!) there are few artists alive who can navigate punk, new wave, industrial rock, and cinematic grandeur simultaneously the way he does. In Elfman’s care, it’s all part of the same twisted, weird universe. What an honor to be able to cover this for The Vinyl District.

The Fillmore was packed, and I’ll admit I was a bit surprised by that, especially on a Monday night. I feel dumb writing that now, because while Elfman plays the occasional festival (I had the pleasure of photographing him in 2024 at Sick New World in Las Vegas), this short, eleven-city tour is his first with a band since 1995. It’s no wonder the Fillmore was packed. So, this was hardly a Gen X nostalgia party, although there were plenty of people around who remembered Oingo Boingo the first time. Elfman devotees of all ages populated the Fillmore for what was an amazing and strange treat.

Elfman’s tour avoids turning him into a museum piece. Indeed, Elfman is working on a new album set for release this fall; his live shows incorporate both old and new material. The set moves through Oingo Boingo favorites, solo material, and newer songs, with “Sorry,” “Insects,” “Nothing to Fear (But Fear Itself),” “Native Intelligence,” “Just Another Day,” “True,” “Sayonara,” “Happy,” and the wonderfully jagged “Upside Down,” establishing the evening’s manic momentum. A personal favorite was “The River of Life,” a banger I hope to hear again soon.

Then came the fun detour into Elfman’s cinematic imagination. Donning a Jack Skellington-inspired jacket (momentarily covering up what is now his signature bare and tattooed torso), “This Is Halloween” unfolded with the menace one would hope for. It made me smile to see how it delighted the entire audience. Elfman’s performance—punctuated by a Cheshire Cat grin—doesn’t feel like a composer presenting greatest hits from a podium, backed by an orchestra. This is a rock ’n’ roll band with a movie studio growing inside it.

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Bob Dylan’s summer US tour, winding up this weekend in Nashville, has its own title, after 30 years of being the Never Ending Tour and another five years of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour to coincide with the 2020 album of the same name that’s dominated shows ever since.

The 2026 two-month swing, which stopped last weekend at Wolf Trap in Virginia, is titled “The Long Hot Summer Tour” and has been both. But it’s been more notable for its sudden, largely unexplained change of guitarists. Bob Britt, who has been playing with Dylan since 2019, disappeared after a June 26 show in Albuquerque (he wasn’t fired, he said, but he hasn’t said much more). Second guitarist Doug Lancio, who has been part of Dylan’s band since 2021, left even earlier, after a pair of shows in Berkeley the second week in June.

These are not unimportant roles, since Dylan himself inexplicably gave up guitar for keyboards on tour about 2002 (because of arthritis? To better orchestrate the band? I’m thinking it’s also been easier for him to refer to lyrics when they’re sitting on his console rather than on the floor).

Of the newbies, Chicagoan Joel Paterson, a lanky, respected player whose most regular gig has been Mondays at the Green Mill there, took over solo for a week at the end of June, before being joined by a New York-based jazz player Julian Lage, who was on a half dozen dates through mid-July, but apparently had his own quartet gigs booked already, some of them internationally. So the latest addition to the guitarist lineup has been Memphis-based Jad Tariq, for whom the July 24 Wolf Trap gig was only his fifth appearance.

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Six years after his death, the legacy of John Prine and his trove of enduring songs are not likely to fade anytime soon, especially with the scheduling of several events to mark what would have been his 80th birthday later this year. The first of those was also a season’s highlight at Wolf Trap Performing Arts Center in Vienna, VA, on June 9.

“Songwriters Celebrate John Prine” drew an enviable roster, including Emmylou Harris, Margo Price, Patty Griffin, and I’m with Her, to sing Prine’s songs as well as their own originals that might have shown an influence. A benefit for the Hello in There Foundation, founded by his family, was surprisingly female-dominated. Not that anyone would necessarily think of Prine as a feminist songwriter (aside from “Angel from Montgomery” forever associated with Bonnie Raitt).

But the night was also a showcase for rising songwriters (and a descendant) for longtime Prine enthusiasts to discover. That was the case for Colorado singer/songwriter Jobi Riccio, who began the proceedings with one of Prine’s best tunes from his final work, “Summer’s End,” followed by her own love song, “Idaho,” from her album Face the Feeling that came out last month.

Like the others on the bill, she benefitted from the knowing, tasty sounds of Prine’s own backing band, led by guitarist Jason Wilber and including Dave Jacques, Kenneth Blevins, Bryan Owings, and Fats Kaplan, whose pedal steel work lends a nice country feel to nearly everything. The band added keyboardist Jen Gunderman, who had played with The Jayhawks for years.

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Vienna, Austria, may have been the center of the international music world on a recent Saturday because of the big Eurovision Song Contest finale. But in Vienna, Virginia, that same night in a strip mall, the irrepressible septuagenarian guitar-slinger Bill Kirchen was tearing up the place on the eve of issuing his latest album.

Ably backed by longtime players Jack Saunders on bass and Rick Richards on drums, the fiery show even featured local guitar hero Dave Chappell on a handful of songs, adding a jazzier tone to Kirchen’s relentless rockabilly twang.

Kirchen’s shows are always something of a homecoming in the DC area. Though he was born in Connecticut 77 years ago and formed Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen in Michigan nearly 60 years ago, he moved to the mid-Atlantic in the ‘80s and stayed for a couple of decades. Eventually, he and his band Too Much Fun were a regular Tuesday night attraction at a beloved joint in Annandale called the Sunset Grill.

A number of the old “Grillbillies” were in attendance at his packed show at Jammin’ Java in Vienna, and though their reunions made for some occasionally annoying background noises, that rumble also turned the club into the kind of freewheeling honky tonk where the best of Kirchen’s tunes were born.

As dexterous as he is on guitar, where his fingers are unfailing on the Telecaster, Kirchen is a laconic frontman, with a number of stories and witty asides between the songs. A longtime devotee to classic and obscure country songs with a diesel-fueled penchant for truck driving songs, he honors and preserves a whole genre to life, even as he adds life to it with some new songs.

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The sudden rise of viruses worldwide reminds us of the lingering effects of the pandemic that shook the world six years ago. For musicians, the time meant the immediate suspension of touring plans, replaced by isolation and introspection, with writing songs alone in an unsettled time.

Such introspection has always been a part of Sam Beam, who performs thoughtful, tuneful chamber folk under the name Iron & Wine. He created so much music during the shutdown days, it’s still coming out. The new Iron & Wine album Hen’s Teeth, largely recorded when he made his last album Light Verse in 2024, is the basis of his current tour, which played a rich, sold-out stop at Washington’s 9:30 Club last week.

Eight of the 10 songs of Hen’s Teeth were played, with just three from the previous Light Verse. But those few were already treated like classics, such as “All in Good Time,” which became a sing-along high point.

Beam in his chest-long beard and wiry, greying hair may look like a fiery, vindictive prophet (and his band, in their shades of red and maroon, disciples). But he comes off as a kindly and benevolent soul on stage, engaging easily with the charged-up crowd, who were just as happy to hear all the new music.

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On Sunday night (Mother’s Day, as the crowd was often reminded), the Anthem played host to a lineup that felt like a living timeline of alternative rock when it welcomed Courtney Barnett on her Creature of Habit tour.

The evening featured dusty folk-rock, fuzzy ‘90s guitar crunch, and the observational indie rock that made Courtney Barnett one of the defining voices of modern guitar music. On the Creature of Habit tour, Barnett brings along Truman Sinclair and Momma. The show was like a celebration of how rock music continually reinvents itself without ever fully losing sight of its roots. Warm, loud, and human, the show succeeded not just because of Barnett but because every artist contributed a different chapter to the story.

Opening the night was singer-songwriter Truman Sinclair, whose early set shifted the feel of the Anthem’s large room into something more intimate. Armed with a harmonica and an easygoing stage presence, the Chicago native delivered songs that carried echoes of 1970s folk rock, but with influences from the 2000’s emo scene. Through songs like “Bloodline,” “Pale Horse,” and “Dust to Dust,” I could hear the influence of greats like Neil Young, particularly in the warmth of Sinclair’s vocals and the loose, rootsy guitar work.

The harmonica playing gave songs a warm texture, while the band’s relaxed chemistry made the set feel unforced and genuine. Rather than sounding like an imitation, though, Sinclair’s music felt like a continuation of the folk-rock tradition through a younger lens.

Sinclair’s set never tried to overwhelm the audience. Instead, through Sinclair’s charming nervous energy, it slowly pulled people inward, winning over the room through sincerity and atmosphere. Sinclair’s debut album is American Recordings.

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It’s a little jarring that bands that reached their heights in the ’90s are now mounting 40th anniversary tours. Just as we’ve gotten used to grey hairs bopping to ’60s and ’70s revivalists, there are throngs wagging their white-haired heads to the anthems from out of the grunge-era Clinton Administration—and sometimes bringing their kids along so they can witness in person the bands that dad used to blast from the CD player.

That was the scene when The Afghan Whigs played a packed 9:30 Club in Washington last week, their first return there in years, with Mercury Rev opening.

It was a loud, roaring show from the Whigs—with decibels so cranked it threatened to blow hats off. And in place of a tour built around a new release, this one was well balanced over their career, though there was a hint of their next steps with a couple of songs from an album due later this year, the piano-led “Duvateen,” definitely an outlier from all the guitar-driven rock, and the menacing “House of I” with its insidious “Sympathy for the Devil” style doo-doo’s.

Just two original members remain in the Whigs, frontman and driving force Greg Dulli and bassist John Curley, and each carries the well-groomed grey of grizzled grunge-era veterans. Their age (early 60s) is contrasted by the relative youth of the current members, from the behatted Christopher Thorn of Blind Melon on guitar, and the versatile Rick G. Nelson on keyboards, strings, and fiddle, to newly added drummer Bryan Lee Brown (replacing Patrick Keeler, busy working with Jack White’s band).

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Looking like a pair of archetypal men of the West, Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore pick up their guitars and face each other like old gunslingers, eventually conversing enough musically to sync up—one electric, one acoustic—as they begin their two-man show.

In many ways, the two musicians couldn’t be more different. One is from California, the other from Texas; one tall, the other shorter; one with a deep baritone, the other with a keening, distinctive tenor.

Then, of course, there is the difference in their guitars—Alvin’s stinging electric leads, honed in driving bands like The Blasters and most recently firing up the psychedelic band The Third Mind, almost don’t fit with the gentler, steady acoustic work of Gilmore.

But the two have addressed these differences agreeably, first on their initial duo album Downey to Lubbock in 2018, and again in their 2024 follow-up, Texicali. The formats on each album were the same—Alvin would take the lead on one song, Gilmore would take the next. Alvin’s band, The Guilty Ones, would back them both (and Jon Langford of the Mekons would design both covers).

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Despite the flashiest outward appearances of popular music, spinning into the future drenched in electronica, glitter, and maybe penned by robots, some artists still pride themselves on kicking the backroads for inspiration.

Discovering old tunes like fossils underfoot, drawn to their ancient longings, hard-won truths, and surprising turns and mysteries, these prospecting musicians dust them off, clean them up, and bring their own perspectives, finally presenting them to living, breathing audiences who otherwise might not have heard of them.

North Carolina’s Jake Xerxes Fussell is one of them, sitting unfussily on a chair at Union Stage in Washington, DC, last weekend, picking out old blues, gospel spirituals, and field hollers from a variety of sources. His opener, for example, “Jump for Joy,” was a cover from someone the nation should remember, if not those in the city of his birth, Duke Ellington. “He’s from down here, I believe,” Fussell commented before covering someone equally surprising, the UK’s Nick Lowe and “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass” with a relaxed approach that made the jaunty new wave hit at first unrecognizable.

But mostly, he seemed to set his wayback machine to the early days of regional recordings in the South, when homegrown musicians came up with songs they might have heard from bluesmen busking on a downtown street, or from their own grandparents’ porch, or from church choirs trying out arcane practices like shape note singing. In those days, there was time to celebrate a “Jubilee,” to mention one song title, or take up the suggestion to go “Donkey Riding” (which may have referred to a 19th-century steam engine and not the mammal).

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Winding up another of what guitarist Sean Eden called a “micro-tour,” Luna returned to the Birchmere Music Hall in Alexandria, VA, last week, opening with the glasslike instrumental strains that eventually aligned into John Barry’s theme from Midnight Cowboy.

It set the stage for a certain kind of twangy urban sophistication and intrigue that has been the hallmark of the Luna sound since it began out of the ashes of Galaxie 500. Standard-bearers of a certain New York guitar rock—artsy and angular, alternately poetic and driving—Luna extended the traditions of the Velvet Underground and Television with inventive music (that sometimes used some of the musicians from those bands on their string of 1990s albums).

Trapped in the confines of critical acclaim and commercial indifference, they disbanded in 2005, only to delight fans by reuniting a decade later with a seeming shrug. Since then, they’ve toured in these occasional week-long bursts of dates, releasing just one Luna studio recording since the reboot—a half-instrumental, half-cover album in 2017.

Through it all, there have been releases of different configurations, mostly from frontman Dean Wareham (whose latest only came out last month). And there have been duo works with his wife and Luna bassist Britta Phillips—all of which were ignored in the live show. More connected to the present, Luna released three live albums in 2022, covering recordings from 30 years earlier. They had pulled that trick only the night before, in Philadelphia, of the entire Bewitched, for no announced reason.

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There was something straightforward and refreshingly honest about Bush’s stop at The Anthem on April 9. No overproduced theatrics and no bloat; it was just a welcome, straight-up rock show. Bush is known as one of the bands from the 1990s with staying power, and the The Land of Milk and Honey tour is in support of their latest album, 2025’s I Beat Loneliness. On this tour of the US, Bush is bringing along Mammoth and young upstarts James and the Cold Gun along for the ride.

The night kicked off promptly at 7:00 PM when James and the Cold Gun, from Wales, took the stage to a crowd that was still filing in. Led by James Joseph, the band wasted no time getting down to business. James and the Cold Gun have two albums—most of the set list was taken from 2025’s Face in the Mirror, but included a track from the band’s self-titled, 2023 LP. As an opener on a larger bill, James and the Cold Gun succeeded in grabbing attention and setting the tone for the night.

After a quick turnover, Mammoth took the stage. The ridiculously talented Wolfgang Van Halen and his band (Ronnie Ficaro, Jon Jourdan, Frank Sidoris, and Garrett Whitlock) dove right into “One of a Kind” from The End (2025). By now, Mammoth has three albums; their supporting slot setlist pulls from all of them. It included the Grammy-nominated “Distance,” which has become a signature song for Mammoth performances. It adds emotional weight to their gigs and is a quiet tribute to Van Halen’s legendary father.

Mammoth’s role in the lineup on this tour is clear: to bridge the gap between the scrappy hunger of the opener and the seasoned confidence of the headliner. Mammoth’s polished yet heavy sound and presence underscore that The Land of Milk and Honey tour isn’t a ’90s nostalgia package—it is a living, breathing, 21st-century rock show.

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Saturday night, Steel Panther stopped at the Fillmore Silver Spring as part of the comedic glam metal band’s Twenty Twenty $ex Tour. It showed Steel Panther doing what they do best: delivering an adults-only night of humor, top-shelf musicianship, and delightfully over-the-top parody. The DC suburbs got a show that struck a careful balance between comedy and tight musical performance.

Kicking off the warm spring night in Silver Spring were Nashville’s Cody Parks & The Dirty South. The country-metal outfit delivered a rowdy, no-frills set to the assembled crowd. It was like a shot of Jack Daniels before the slick LA glam of the headliner—a high-energy blend of outlaw country, Southern rock, and Tennessee attitude.

The band leans into themes of working-class pride and rural identity. Heck, they even have an EP called “Smothered & Covered” (2023), a reference to that beloved Southern institution, Waffle House. Cody Parks & The Dirty South don’t rely on elaborate stage production—just driving guitars, pounding drums, and a frontman in Parks who can work a room. In just thirty minutes, Cody Parks & The Dirty South managed to get the crowd engaged with their aural barroom brawl, setting up the tone for the rest of the night. The band’s latest EP is 2024’s “Country Metal, Vol. 1.”

From the moment Steel Panther took the stage at 9 PM, the Fillmore became a neon-lit throwback to the Sunset Strip’s most outrageous days. The LA-based band (frontman Michael Starr, guitarist Satchel, drummer Stix Zadinia, and bassist Spyder) kicked off the set with “Eyes of a Panther” and were joined by athletic dancers showing off their impressive abilities on poles flanking the stage.

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Rhett Miller always looks game for a show, whether or not he’s with his great band The Old 97’s, or even after experiencing vocal cord surgery. Kicking off his latest tour last week at Union Stage in Washington, DC, he came with his acoustic guitar and high energy gumption, his orange guitar case behind him spelling out his name, but also, crucially, the name of his regular band.

So instead of stressing his latest solo album, A Lifetime of Riding by Night, he tore into the classics from his band, from “Jagged” and “Won’t Be Home” to start to “Question” and “Timebomb” at the end. And a room full of longtime fans was happy to sing along at every turn. Fully three-fourths of the 21-song set were Old 97’s classics, and nobody was complaining.

As chief songwriter and singer for the band, Miller, of course, can carry off acoustic versions of them, given that the playing is aggressively energetic. And it’s fun to hear them presented in such close proximity. But it wasn’t as if the band, recently given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Americana Music Honors, wasn’t missed. Driving acoustic guitar is fine, but it can’t provide the sonic blast that Murry Hammond, Ken Bethea, and Philip Peeples bring to performances.

Still, the ever-youthful-looking Miller at 55 did what he could to provide engaging stagecraft by wagging his locks or windmilling chords on his guitar. Impending holidays gave him an excuse to bring out a couple of songs the band provided for The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Holiday Special, portraying an alien band called Bzermikitoolok and the Knowwheremen, playing both “I Don’t Know What Christmas Is (But Christmastime is Here)” and “Here it Is Christmastime,” which Kevin Bacon sang in the special.

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