Pop music has long made heartbreak hummable, but making it a feeling worth savoring? That’s a bit tougher to pull off. Yet Carly Rae Jepsen did just that Thursday night throughout her 90-minute headlining set at the House of Blues. In her first Dallas-area appearance in three years, the 33-year-old…

There is a song named “River” on Patty Griffin’s latest, self-titled album, which I’d played countless times since its March release. But it wasn’t until Saturday night, when the 55-year-old singer-songwriter, making her first Dallas appearance in a little over a year, stood before a sold-out Granada Theater, that I…

Pluck any line at random from a Jason Isbell song, and more likely than not, you’ve got yourself a bit of poetry. Same goes for the singer-songwriter Josh Tillman, who performs under the moniker Father John Misty — his lyrics tend to linger, suffusing the body with a slow burn…

The word “therapy” is defined as the “medical treatment of impairment, injury, disease, or disorder.” Of those four, it would seem injury — primarily of a reputational sort — was being most thoroughly addressed Saturday night at Dos Equis Pavilion, as Hootie and the Blowfish brought its Group Therapy tour…

To step inside the American Airlines Center Tuesday night was to enter a hall of mirrors. On stage, white-hot pop superstar Ariana Grande cooed, belted, sashayed, dipped, twirled and reclined her way through a briskly paced 90-minute set. Off stage, from the arena floor to the rafters, a sold-out room…

It’s unlikely anyone, least of all the band itself,  would have imagined 15 years ago that the Killers would evolve into what they have become. The Las Vegas-bred rockers’ first studio album, 2004’s Hot Fuss, was full of arch, synth-laden decadence and frontman Brandon Flowers, eyes rimmed with kohl and…

Maren Morris The Bomb Factory, Dallas Friday, April 19, 2019 Before Maren Morris could move forward, she needed to step back. “I’m gonna conduct a straw poll,” the singer-songwriter told the sold-out Bomb Factory crowd Friday night, near the end of her performance, as she lightly strummed the opening chords…

Brandi Carlile The Bomb Factory, Dallas April 12, 2019 The cheers and applause seemed to rise and rise, as if the sheer force of it all would pop the roof right off The Bomb Factory. Brandi Carlile — singer, songwriter, mother, devoted activist and newly minted Grammy winner — stood…

A moment, late Friday night, perfectly crystallized Jenny Lewis’s particular blend of sweet and sour. As she brought “Born Secular,” a track from Rabbit Fur Coat, her 2006 collaboration with The Watson Twins (on hand Friday as a superb opening act, and participants in the encore), to its climax, a…

Take a listen to any track on Charley Crockett’s most recent album, Lil G.L.’s Blues Bonanza, and you can hear it. There’s a weariness in his voice on these last-call covers — it’s there in the obscure Ray Charles single “Here Am I,” seeping into the lyrics “Here am I/All…

What is love if not a mix of the sublime and the silly? Michael Buble acknowledged as much near the top of his two-hour performance Monday night at American Airlines Center. “There are 15,000 people in here,” he said, clad in a dapper black suit and sporting a light scruff…

A cynic might wander into a Pink show, take in all the Broadway-caliber sensory overload on display and assume the mononymous pop star is a one-trick pony. After all, she’s been soaring through the air for 15 years – since her 2004 Try This world tour – and continues to…

Kacey Musgraves stepped onto the Bomb Factory stage Friday night, clad in a dress the color of a freshly uncapped highlighter. A roar ripped through the sold-out room like a tornado. Such a visceral reaction was inevitable, given Musgraves’ standing as a hometown-ish girl (this Dallas gig is as close…

If over the next few days anyone who sat inside the Majestic Theatre on Sunday night comes up to you and starts raving about the Jeff Tweedy concert — well, just bear this in mind. “I’ve been telling everyone at these shows — it might be the greatest show, but…

Bliss is scarce these days. The relentless drumbeat of grim news, wretched behavior and ugly attitudes can make moments of unadulterated pleasure feel even more intense than they might otherwise. How else to explain exiting the Granada Theater into Dallas’ frigid dampness early Sunday morning, yet feeling as if you…

Lately, it seems as if nothing ever really ends in this era of endless pop-culture reboots, reimaginings and reconfigurings. Therefore, the notion of a definitive conclusion carries more weight these days than it might otherwise. That air of finality permeated Elton John’s Friday night performance at American Airlines Center, the…

What is there to say about Taylor Swift that hasn’t been said before? She’s the princess of pop, the queen of open letters to streaming services, the goddess of breakup and beef songs. There’s nothing she can’t or won’t do at this point. But even with all she’s accomplished, it…

In an age of such concentrated, oppressive isolation — faces affixed to screens, individuals locked in cozy, self-selecting bubbles of comforting affirmation — it can be a remarkable, galvanizing thing to be reminded of the humanity of the person standing right next to you. Such weighty realizations might have been…

As can often happen during a Mavericks concert, the tequila shots materialized mid-set. Carried on a tray by a man clad in black, who weaved between the nine musicians onstage inside the Statler Ballroom, each member of the Mavericks picked up a glass, swallowed the clear liquid contained within and…