Music, The Features, We Love Music

We Love Music: Moogfest Pt. 2 (Asheville, NC—4/24/14)

Janelle Monae speaks (Photo courtesy Moogfest)

Janelle Monae speaks (Photo courtesy Moogfest)

Generally speaking, I’m a night owl, and when I travel I revel in my rare opportunities to own the night–even if owlishly.

That said, my capacity for enjoying the day programming offered by Moogfest was admittedly limited. Out of intense curiosity, however, I was able to rise early enough on Thursday, April 24, to catch some of a presentation by Janelle Monae and her collaborators Chuck Lightning and Nate Rocket Wonder.

The session, titled after Monae’s work “The Electric Lady,” took me to the Diana Wortham Theatre in downtown Asheville’s Pack Place for the first time. The 500-capacity theatre is a great place to catch a chat or a performance of any sort, and I found myself comfortably listening to Monae recount her experiences on tour, creating a series of paintings on stage during performance depicting the self-titled “Electric Lady” in question.

Monae related some of her experiences around the art (music and painting), her feelings about it and her longing for some sort of perfection. She and her cohorts were humbled to report performing at the White House for President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama a total of five times so far. It gave Monae perspective and inspiration to hear that the First Lady often listened to her music during workouts; she and the others agreed that it gave them an added depth of responsibility to consider the messages behind their music when they knew such influential people were listening to it.

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Music, The Features, We Love Music

Q&A with Steve Hackett (performing @Lincoln Theatre, 3/26/14)

Steve Hackett live color publicity photo credit www.iconphoto.chSteve Hackett, formerly of Genesis, is one of the world’s greatest guitar players. And he’s bringing the classic Genesis catalog to a tour of the United States starting with a show in DC at the Lincoln Theatre in a little over a week on Wednesday, March 26. We Love DC had the remarkable opportunity to chat with Hackett about the show, what else the future may hold for him and his advice for young guitarists! We also couldn’t resist asking a bit about Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins, his old bandmates in Genesis (with whom he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010).

Mickey McCarter: I’m excited to see you’re coming to DC next week. Can you tell us a little bit about the show? What can we expect?

Steve Hackett: It’s a show of Genesis music that was written between ’71 and ’77. It’s classic Genesis. I’m doing exclusively Genesis music on that show. We have a six-piece band.

It hails from the era when we worked as a five-piece and we had five different writers — Peter Gabriel, myself, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins. I’m highlighting the era when the band was at its most creative, I think.

I took this show last year on the road and it took off in such a big way. We ended up doing a show in London and we have a DVD from that which is just finished.

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