THROUGH THE LENS: The 2025 Waterfront Blues Festival Presented an Eclectic Mix of Blues, Soul & Funk to a Discerning Audience

Every now and then a book comes along and pulls back a curtain on tired ways of thinking, revealing the breadth and depth of movements or ideas that we’d taken for granted. Erin Osmon’s richly textured Won’t Back Down: Heartland Rock and the Fight for America (Norton,

Heather Mae should be going viral for her art: she has a commanding voice and a deft pen, just as competent writing sinuous electro-pop and affirming, heartbreaking folk music. She is not shy about her politics: her music is unapologetically queer, fat-positive, and condemning of repressive Evangelical Christianity. Her double

By '87 Agent Pink had come back from LA with an expensive degree and a lot of experience talking into a college radio microphone. I was the typesetter at a regional music magazine, which paid the rent, promised bylines, and came with the chance to flip through a crate