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When Jamie Darken first began writing the songs that would appear on his debut solo EP, Burial, he imagined he was crafting demos for Cherry Ames, a local Washington DC area indie-rock band that Darken performs as vocalist, guitarist, and bassist. With Cherry Ames on hiatus amidst the global shutdown and performing in venues unavailable as an option, Darken’s drive to make progress with the ideas on his own eventually brought the tracks to the place where it simply felt right to release as his own project. The result is five songs written, produced, and performed by Darken, with the exception of leading single “This Could Be Your Home” co-written with fellow DC area musician Christopher Mathews-Larsen.

In 2015, Jake Mimikos formed the Frontier and he hasn’t looked back. He has been featured on NPR, Netflix, The CW, MTV and more! The frontier is a one-man indie/acoustic project emerging from the D.C. area that combines a number of different genres including indie rock and acoustic. The band currently works with producer Austin Bello and has been creating some really interesting music! We got the opportunity to interview him, and wanted to share what we learned.

The 2021 DC Music Summit is going virtual! While I’ll miss the in-person opportunity to network, the DCMS team, headed by founder Dior Ashley Brown, is working hard to recreate the networking experience, live music performance, and educational workshops that attendees have come to expect from this Wammie Award winning annual event.

Organizations and events like DC Music Summit help put a spotlight on local music industry leaders and highlight the diverse and inclusive creative culture and community that has continued to thrive within the DMV music scene. I’m excited to be presenting one of the many educational workshops with topics ranging from music publishing to personal health and wellness taking place at the event happening May 21 & 22

If you haven’t heard of Kid Travis yet, you are missing out. He’s also a neighboring member of the DMV as he hails from Bristol, PA, which is a bit North of Philadelphia. He started out making music in 2013, and has had some serious growth in the past few years. He has become somewhat of a YouTube sensation by making covers of famous artists tracks, and even got Post Malone to call him a “Gangster”. Lately he’s been focusing on creating his own original tracks, that have been gaining even more traction. We got the opportunity to interview him, which you can check out below while listening to one of his newest tracks, “WON’T LET ME GO”. (theirs a special treat at the end as well)

U Street knows how to party. When World War II formally ended in 1945, residents of Northwest took to the street, cheering and celebrating the Allied victory. The neighborhood had also erupted in joy in 1937 when Joe Louis became boxing’s heavyweight champion.

The 21st century has seen U Street continue its merry tradition of revelry, thanks to the Funk Parade, which began in 2013 thanks to an enterprising entrepreneur named Justin Rood. He had a dream of a “low rumble” coming down U Street that was soon accompanied by a marching band and his neighbors all cheering—almost as if New Orleans had come to the capital city.

Discovering new things is one of life’s greatest gifts. Whether it is food or love or music, the thrill of being exposed to something you were otherwise unaware of and now have become fascinated with is a feeling that can’t be manufactured. As a music editor I have the pleasure of not only discovering new music but also exposing it and sharing it with the public. Case in point? The unsigned indie band Yellow Tie Guy. Catchy hooks and uplifting lyric themes are only part of the picture. I caught up with the band’s leader Daniel Hill to discuss the band’s growth, the origins of the name and their latest single, “Jailbreak.”

Out of the female-fronted bands in the DMV, Azure Wolf is one to give your undivided attention. With stomping grounds centered around Winchester, VA, the band began as a solo folk project and quickly expanded into the four-piece lineup that stands today. Azure Wolf’s ethereal brand of spacerock carries dreamlike qualities, with haunting vocals and an arrangement that’s sonically rich in time, timbre and rhythmic manipulation. Listeners of the band will feel real, defined emotions, as the band continues to write and produce new music that is sure to delight the ears and the brains in the space between.

Known to “set the stage on fire” with his hard-hitting lyrics and commanding stage presence, Chuck Da Arsonist, a pioneer of the DC hip-hop scene, knew he was destined to be a rapper the moment he discovered A Tribe Called Quest. Growing up, the DMV native was influenced by the best of the best, including Stephanie Mills, Miki Howard, Howard Hewett, Luther Vandross, and Lionel Richie.

If you’re looking for “raw, uncut hip-hop music,” then look no further.

Poetry is the currency of culture, and in this absorbing half-hour documentary, the poet Alejandro Murguía waxes on not only his years fighting for social justice, but on how the Beat generation (Ginsburg, Kerouac, etc.) bred a sense of rebellion against the way things “always” had been. Murguía was born in America but his family moved to Mexico when he was very young, so when they returned to California, he had to learn English—but soon had such a command of the language that he used it to fire up an ever-expanding circle of admirers. Little surprise he was drawn to San Francisco, where so many movements took hold in the ‘60s.

We’ve been waiting and we know that you have too. Stray Fossa, a band that started out in Sewanee, Tennessee has released 3 new tracks recently and we’re going to review all 3! They’ve been featured on our page a bit before, but in case you’re new here and need a background, they took a bit of a break for some years after moving from Tennessee, and met up in Richmond, VA. They gained a lot of their inspiration from their parents’ record collection, which you can hear in the way brothers Nick and Will Evans, and Zach Blount combine retro-synths and reverb layered guitar chords.

Last spring’s D.C. International Film Festival was among the last major in-person fetes prior to lockdown. Even as nervous planners nixed SXSW and other events, Maria Datch, chair of the board and director of international relations for DCIFF, and her team pressed on to make 2020’s iteration happen.
“Last year’s crew specifically thanked us, saying, ‘My film is not going to be seen anywhere live. You were it,’” Datch said of the “before” times.
Accordingly, this year DCIFF will be a hybrid affair, with many screenings and panel events taking place online, along with a few in-person events as capacity and social distancing restrictions allow. Several live events will be held at the Arlington Drafthouse in Virginia, where it is more feasible to space out patrons.

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of chatting with young indie singer-songwriter and Alchemical Records writer, Hero Magnus to discuss her inspirations, goals, stories, and her new single, “Yours First,” now streaming. Her EP, “Make Me a Man,” is set to release on March 26, 2021.
Hero did a lot of Jewish singing in temple at a young age, which was very lovely. At around 14 or 15, she started writing her own music. However, she thought she was too old to make it and stopped for about six months. Fortunately, she started writing again and went to Berklee College of Music for a Summer, which was really inspiring to her. Since then she has focused on writing, performing, recording, and releasing songs, which became extremely important to her.

Playing hundreds of shows touring in twelve states with regularity – with six studio albums, nationally-charted songs in rotation on various radio platforms all over the world, The J.O.B. had big plans for 2020 that (like many musicians) came to a screeching halt when the pandemic hit. Eric Bandy, the band’s drummer for more than five years decided to step away from the project, providing room for replacement Brian Penczak, who auditioned for the band via Skype, becoming the newest addition to the band since bassist Jared Merrill joined in 2016.

The J.O.B. stands for the Jim O’Ferrell Band, led by (you guessed it) Jim O’Ferrell, a U.S. Army veteran who had enlisted guitarist Jason Crawford to help lay down some tracks for Jim between deployments in 2007. Jason and Jim would continue to collaborate through Jim’s eventual retirement from the military and pave the way for the numerous accolades and critical acclaim that would follow.

In 2017, Edward Miskie published a book called Cancer, Musical Theatre, and Other Chronic Illnesses. As you can probably imagine from the title, it broaches a very serious subject from as lighthearted a space as it can, attributed to Miskie’s experience as a singer and actor. He had never really considered himself a writer, but after experiencing cancer himself (Rare-Enlarged B-Cell Burkitt’s-like Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, to be exact) and speaking with other cancer survivors, Miskie was inspired to share his own experiences as a patient as well as the aftermath of survival.

“When you come on the other end of it it is just as much of a shit-show. When you’re a patient you have a team of nurses and doctors and other people kind of holding your hand and guiding you along, and telling you what to do. So once that’s over you’re kind of like, ‘Well, okay, I have to get back to some kind of life now.’ It’s weird. It’s jarring. It’s definitely a re-readjustment.”

Moozy is a fully independent band from Washington D.C. born from a collaboration of musicians Dylan Rockwell and Pat Gunning. They’re an extremely talented duo that has really caught our attention on their most recent release Tru Love. We had the opportunity to ask them some questions, which you can check out below!

What first got you into music?

A: I think originally we were just middle school kids looking for identities and we found one with music. I remember thinking as a kid “ok, if I practice really hard for like a year then I’ll probably be like the best guitarist at school and then I’ll be cool.” Pat had a similar high school experience thinking that playing in a band would increase his “cool” factor. I think he still does. I’ve always been slightly competitive with music, for better or for worse. Usually for better I think. It’s all for the sake of the art at the end of the day.