Category Archives: TVD Washington, DC

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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One would hope that talented musicians with a following are adequately rewarded to sustain their art, without having to take on odd jobs.

So it may be a little dispiriting to learn that Jens Lekman, the Swedish singer-songwriter with a singular style, has augmented his career by playing more than 130 weddings over the years. Maybe he does it for the extra income, or perhaps he’s gathering material. Most likely it’s because he’s a nice guy with a disarmingly direct connection to his fans (he vows to respond to all fan emails on his website, and I can attest to his generosity in that he played a benefit concert for one of my daughter’s friends badly hurt in a car accident years ago).

At any rate, his time playing for couples on their big day led to more of his own creativity with his latest album, Songs for Other People’s Weddings. It’s a concept album about a fictional wedding singer, named J, who goes a step further by first meeting with couples, learning their stories, and writing new wedding songs just for them.

In the story, he meets a girl also identified with an initial, V, and follows her from Gothenburg, Sweden, to New York, only to see them break up. If it sounds like a good romantic yarn, that’s what the popular young adult fiction author David Levithan (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist) thought as well. Together, they came up not only with lyrics and direction for the album, but Levithan also wrote his own novel with the same name, Songs for Other People’s Weddings, issued in tandem with the book.

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The night I was waiting for finally arrived—the Swedish metal circus is back in town! Swedish metal masters Avatar are touring the US again at last. On November 23, they stopped off at the Fillmore Silver Spring for the first time since 2023. They’re on tour in support of their latest album, Don’t Go In The Forest. Avatar continues to pick winners to bring along on tour; on this run, they have SpiritWorld and Alien Weaponry along for the ride.

It was a marathon night of metal, kicking off at 7:30 when SpiritWorld took the stage. Hailing from Las Vegas, SpiritWorld (Stu Folsom, Matt Schrum, Nick Brundy, and Preston Harper) describe their sound as “deathwestern”—it’s thrash metal with Western themes. The band all wear stylized stage clothes that underscore that theme, wearing suits with elaborate embroidery and sequins, cowboy hats, and boots.

The 30-minute set was a short list of long tunes; just four songs, split between 2022’s Deathwestern and 2025’s Helldorado. Helldorado has received praise for its cool and original concept, which mixes aggressive metal with Americana. SpiritWorld did its job as the night’s leadoff, priming the crowd at the Fillmore for a whole evening of metal, and getting the crowd surfing started in the process.

After a quick turnover, the house lights darkened, and Van Halen’s “Jump” filled the room. Once the song ended, drummer Henry de Jong appeared onstage, walked to his drums, and performed a short haka for the simmering crowd. Alien Weaponry hail from New Zealand and are of Māori ancestry. Māori are the indigenous people of New Zealand (Aotearoa), known for their rich culture, traditions, and language. The haka is a ceremonial dance that conveys pride and respect.

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Any doubts about the “the end” of rock music were put to rest Tuesday night at the Fillmore Silver Spring, when Mammoth made a stop on their current tour, in support of the band’s latest album, The End, released in October. This third album finds Mammoth, minus “WVH” from the name, continuing to evolve. There is no question that Wolfgang Van Halen is making his own mark on music.

In tow on The End tour is Los Angeles-based Return to Dust. Getting the rock and roll party started early, Return to Dust (Matty Bielawski, Sebastian Gonzalez, London Hudson, and Graham Stanush) hit the still-assembling crowd with a blazing 25-minute set. Return to Dust is a very young band; the kickoff song was “Black Road,” the title track from their debut EP, released only in 2023. After releasing their only LP (so far), Return to Dust, in 2024, their second EP, “Speak Like the Dead,” was released in August.

The band’s sound is a throwback to ’90s rock—think Soundgarden and Alice in Chains—and provided a solid complement to the rest of the lineup. This band has a bright future and, like Mammoth, Return to Dust carries with them a relative of rock royalty. Drummer Hudson is the son of guitar legend Slash.

I made a comment to another photographer Tuesday night that the last time I covered Mammoth, they were supporting Alter Bridge (back in 2023). On this tour, Alter Bridge frontman and all-around rock god Myles Kennedy was supporting Mammoth, comfortably occupying the middle spot on the night’s bill.

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Jorma Kaukonen doesn’t turn 85 until next month, but the celebrations have already begun, with the first of a handful of concerts that cover his lengthy career alongside a half dozen notable and rotating guest stars. His hometown show at the Warner Theatre in DC brought his longtime collaborator Jack Casady on bass, along with Jim Lauderdale, Steve Kimock, Cindy Cashdollar, harmonica player Ross Garren, and drummer Justin Guip in various configurations.

Kaukonen is the giant around whom all the music revolved, though he began the show solo. With his white hair and beard, he resembles something of a sage of the guitar by now. And though the world got to know him as the wild-haired young electric guitarist that powered Jefferson Airplane, he sat to exclusively fingerpick his acoustic guitar, as he did when he started the offshoot Hot Tuna with his old high school buddy and Airplane mate Casady more than half a century ago.

Kaukonen’s vocals aren’t as smooth or supple as they once were—indeed, he’s prone to adding little grunts and un-huhms at the end of a lot of lines in the manner of the old country blues players he so emulates. The clear emphasis, though, is on the finger work, which is nimble as ever, flying through songs that inspired him—particularly those from the bluesman Reverend Gary Davis, three of whose songs he performed, including “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” “I first started playing this song at 19 or 20,” he said with a smile. “It has a lot more meaning to me today.”

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For her big headlining tour, singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman, whose music combines Southern gothic, indie confession, and art rock, set up recorded ambient music beds. The “transition tracks,” as she called them, were to play keep the sonic groove going between songs as she and her four-piece band shifted from one song to another, largely from her latest album, Planting by the Signs.

It was meant to create seamless atmospherics between her arresting, slow-burning songs. Also: “They keep me from talking.” But early on in her show at the Atlantis in DC, she had her keyboardist cut the tracks off. Goodman, who is equally entertaining as a droll raconteur, knew what she had to say would last longer than interstitial music.

She only had a few of these spoken segments. In the first, she admitted she was going to play a lot from the new album. In another, she tried to follow up on instructions for the disposable cameras she had distributed before the show in an effort to get some authentic, non-digital, visual record of her tour from the very fans in her audience for a promotional zine her record distribution company was doing to get attention for her latest work.

She also spoke about the stark contrast she was finding (and everyone in the audience knew) between the “hellhole” descriptions of cities like DC that her mother feared, and the quite opposite actuality.

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Dave Alvin donned a huge Stetson hat for his show at the Hamilton last weekend.

He has worn many hats, figuratively, since making himself known through blistering guitar work in The Blasters 45 years ago. There was a long solo career that alternately dipped into traditional folk, the mythos of California, and the joys of band work over a dozen albums. He filled in for a bit in the punk band X and its country offshoot, The Knitters. And he’s been touring with his Texas friend Jimmie Dale Gilmore, with whom he’s recorded a pair of satisfying albums.

He’s out now with yet another outfit, The Third Mind, a kind of supergroup of strong Golden State musicians whose logo and approach lean on the psychedelic. And while electric guitars, improvisational jams, and a proximity to the Grateful Dead ethos are part of it, the main conceit of the band, Alvin says, was to go into a studio with seasoned enough musicians that when you decide on a song to cover—usually from the rich vein of San Francisco folk-rock of the late 1960s—everybody immediately dug in.

It was an approach used by Miles Davis in the studio—turn on the tape and see what happens. And though what they do isn’t jazz, the same free approach applies for The Third Mind, whose band title even suggests: Don’t think about it, let it flow. Already, there have been three studio albums from the group since 2020, though touring hasn’t been as common because of the band members’ demands elsewhere. So it was a delight to see them in a DC club, conjuring uncommon approaches to deep nuggets being brought to light.

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There’s no fanfare when Destroyer takes to the stage. Indeed, bandleader Dan Bejar looks at the crowd warily before turning to his six-piece band to begin conjuring its unique sound.

Nowhere near as metal as its name might suggest, Destroyer has instead traveled intriguing roads of pop and poetry over 14 albums to create its own kind of shambling majesty. At their stop at the Black Cat in DC on a Tuesday night, they concentrated on the most recent output of their 30-year history, quite naturally emphasizing four from its latest, Dan’s Boogie. That’s another misleading title, of course, because what they come up with is no mere barroom hootchie coo.

On record, the Destroyer sound of late is sophisticated, a smartly navigated pop of strong melody and a touch of electronica, over which Bejar’s musings intersect, with a kind of observational poetry much more thought-provoking than the lush musical bed would indicate. “Your entrance was its own Red Scare,” he began, amid the grandeur of the opening, “The Same Thing as Nothing at All.” “You quote unquote the French au pair.”

Later comes the sung chorus, “The chandelier struggles to light up the night / Pride comes before the fall / to have loved and lost/is the same thing as nothing at all.” The Pet Shop Boys come to mind in some of this, in part because of Bejar’s penchant for arch and detached spoken word in his Canadian tenor. There’s a certain weariness at the center of it, belied by the buoyant melodies that often build to crashing chords.

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Now in its 16th year, DC’s twice yearly record dig returns to Washington’s vinyl and community-centric Eaton DC on Sunday, October 19, 2025—and the event is free all day. That’s right—as in FREE DC.

For this event, we’ll have 45+ record dealers from up and down the East Coast with thousands of records, a stellar DJ line up, drinks, food and much more.

Our thanks to our friends at the Fillmore Silver Spring for capturing our event in the video above in its halls way back when. You can also check out previous records fairs here, here, here, and here for the overall vibe of the day.

THE FALL 2025 DJ LINEUP:
11:00 – 12:00 – Rik Ducci (DC)
12:00 – 1:00 – Marcello Bentine (Dante’s HiFi) & Eduardo Brechó (Petroleo Music Brazil)
1:00 – 2:00 – Lulu Lewis (NYC)
2:00 – 3:00 – Freddie J (RVA)
3:00 – 4:00 – Baby Alcatraz (DC)
4:00 – 5:00 – Les the DJ (DC)

Mark your calendars! 
THE DC RECORD FAIR
Sunday, October 19, 2025 at Eaton DC, 1201 K Street, NW DC
11:00AM–5:00PM—and free all day!
Follow via Facebook.

Now in its 16th year, DC’s twice yearly record dig returns to Washington’s vinyl and community-centric Eaton DC on Sunday, October 19, 2025—and the event is free all day. That’s right—as in FREE DC.

For this event, we’ll have 45+ record dealers from up and down the East Coast with thousands of records, a stellar DJ line up, drinks, food and much more.

Our thanks to our friends at the Fillmore Silver Spring for capturing our event in the video above in its halls way back when. You can also check out previous records fairs here, here, here, and here for the overall vibe of the day.

THE FALL 2025 DJ LINEUP:
11:00 – 12:00 – Rik Ducci (DC)
12:00 – 1:00 – Marcello Bentine (Dante’s HiFi) & Eduardo Brechó (Petroleo Music Brazil)
1:00 – 2:00 – Lulu Lewis (NYC)
2:00 – 3:00 – Freddie J (RVA)
3:00 – 4:00 – Baby Alcatraz (DC)
4:00 – 5:00 – Les the DJ (DC)

Mark your calendars! 
THE DC RECORD FAIR
Sunday, October 19, 2025 at Eaton DC, 1201 K Street, NW DC
11:00AM–5:00PM—and free all day!
Follow via Facebook.

Now in its 16th year, DC’s twice yearly record dig returns to Washington’s vinyl and community-centric Eaton DC on Sunday, October 19, 2025—and the event is free all day. That’s right—as in FREE DC.

For this event, we’ll have 45+ record dealers from up and down the East Coast with thousands of records, a stellar DJ line up, drinks, food and much more.

Our thanks to our friends at the Fillmore Silver Spring for capturing our event in the video above in its halls way back when. You can also check out previous records fairs here, here, here, and here for the overall vibe of the day.

Mark your calendars! 
THE DC RECORD FAIR
Sunday, October 19, 2025 at Eaton DC, 1201 K Street, NW DC
11:00AM–5:00PM—and free all day!
Follow via Facebook.

Now in its 16th year, DC’s twice yearly record dig returns to Washington’s vinyl and community-centric Eaton DC on Sunday, October 19, 2025—and the event is free all day. That’s right—as in FREE DC.

For this event, we’ll have 45+ record dealers from up and down the East Coast with thousands of records, a stellar DJ line up, drinks, food and much more.

Our thanks to our friends at the Fillmore Silver Spring for capturing our event in the video above in its halls way back when. You can also check out previous records fairs here, here, here, and here for the overall vibe of the day.

Mark your calendars! 
THE DC RECORD FAIR
Sunday, October 19, 2025 at Eaton DC, 1201 K Street, NW DC
11:00AM–5:00PM—and free all day!
Follow via Facebook.

It is not often that one gets to witness a performance from a true musical legend in person. The mightiest ones grace us with their presence in arenas and stadiums, letting us near, but never too close. But sometimes in rare moments we get lucky, and a Metal God will come down from the mountain to walk among us mortals.

On a quiet Sunday night in the Washington, DC suburbs, the Fillmore Silver Spring was the setting for such a divine moment, when legendary Bruce Dickinson, frontman of metal giants Iron Maiden, made a stop on his Mandrake Project tour. The Mandrake Project is Dickinson’s seventh solo album, but it’s been nearly 20 years since his last release; this tour is indeed a blessing from the metal gods.

It was 9:00 pm, after a short DJ set, when the house lights of the Fillmore darkened and audio from The Invaders (a short lived, late 1960s sci-fi series) filled the room. One by one the band (Chris Declerq and Philip Naslund on guitars, Tanya O’Callaghan on bass, Dave Moreno on drums, and Maestro Mistheria on keyboards) took the stage, with Dickinson entering the stage last, welcomed by the adoring, roaring audience.

Dickinson at once hit the crowd with “Accident of Birth,” from the 1997 album of the same name. The sci-fi continued with “Abduction” from the 2005 album Tyranny of Souls. “Laughing in the Hiding Bush,” from 1994, was in the cleanup spot.

What hit me immediately was Dickinson’s energy. After decades in the metal world, at age 67, Dickinson moves on stage like the Tasmanian Devil, thrashing about and throwing hands while belting out songs. He sounds amazing and still hits all the notes. In the photo pit, I ran back and forth trying to keep up with his energy. It was tough!

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What a delight it is to have The Darkness roll through town. The veteran British rockers are touring to promote their latest album, Dreams on Toast, and brought their always fun party to Washington, DC’s Lincoln Theatre Sunday night.

Taking the Lincoln Theatre stage ahead of schedule, supporting artist Mark Daly brings classic rock sensibility with an Irish flair to the tour. Hailing from Cork, Ireland, Daly was discovered in Spain when music manager Brian Message attended a gig by Daly’s band, The Voodoos. Impressed by the band’s raw, hard rock sound, Daly and his crew were brought to London, where they recorded an EP. Since then, Daly has worked and toured with the likes of Geoff Tate, Ritchie Kotzen, and producer Brian Virtue.

On Sunday night in DC, Daly brought the fire during a quick set showcasing his songwriting. Several of the songs (such as “Better Off Alone” and “I Wanna Be More”) come from Devil’s Arms, released last year. Daly clearly shows that his keeping the spirit of classic rock alive, and the fans at the Lincoln Theatre showed that in 2025 there is still an audience for it. Daly expressed his appreciation for American audiences, pointing out his observation that they always show up to support the opening act. The crowd, who were mostly seated during the set, responded well to Daly and his band, and rewarded him with a standing ovation at the end.

Against a black backdrop with “The Darkness” emblazoned in red, The Darkness (Justin Hawkins, Dan Hawkins, Frankie Poullain, and Rufus Taylor) strolled onto the darkened stage to the usual sounds of ABBA’s “Arrival” woven into the cheers of the band’s faithful, ready for a good time. They opened with “Rock and Roll Party Cowboy” from Dreams on Toast, released in March. With several months to sit with the new material, the DC crowd already knew the words and sang along.

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After a long absence, Chevelle returned to Washington, DC Sunday night, making a stop on their 2025 summer tour at The Anthem. Touring to support their latest album, Bright as Blasphemy, they marked the official end of a long sweltering summer in the nation’s capital, bringing with them Dead Poet Society and Asking Alexandria.

While the DC Jazz Fest livened up the bright outdoor atmosphere of DC’s Wharf Sunday, LA’s Dead Poet Society kicked off the dark rock party indoors. Dead Poet Society (Jack Underkofler, Jack Collins, Dylan Brenner, and Will Goodroad) hyped up the still-gathering crowd with their powerful energy and an off-the-cuff style that has its roots in their early days, when they formed somewhat by accident back in Boston. The set was short but packed a punch. In thirty minutes, the quartet blasted the uninitiated in the crowd with its alt rock sound. Dead Poet Society’s latest album is 2024’s Fission, featuring the charting “Hurt.”

After a quick turnover on stage, Asking Alexandria continued the aural assault on the Anthem’s crowd. An English quartet, Asking Alexandria (the current lineup is James Cassells, Cameron Liddell, Sam Bettley, and Danny Warsnop) made a huge impression on the thickened crowd. The enthusiasm in the room built during the set and came to a head once vocalist Danny Worsnop started encouraging crowd surfing. From the back of The Anthem’s floor, I could watch crowd surfer after crowd surfer float to the stage. A circle pit then touched down like a joyful tornado—it felt like much needed catharsis.

The band then subdued the energy. While the others left the stage, Wornsop played “Someone, Somewhere” on an acoustic guitar as well as the beginning of “Moving On” before being rejoined by his bandmates. Asking Alexandria wrapped up with “The Final Episode (Let’s Change the Channel).” It was an excellent set from the metalcore outfit and succeeded in prepping the crowd for headliner Chevelle. Asking Alexandria’s latest album is 2023’s Where Do We Go from Here?

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