Since his big-screen debut in 1981's Ragtime, and particularly since his 1983 breakthrough in Terms of Endearment, Jeff Daniels has been one of America's most familiar and sought-after character actors, with memorable roles in such films as The Purple Rose of Cairo, Something Wild, Arachnophobia, Speed, Dumb & Dumber, Pleasantville, The Hours, The Squid & the Whale, and Good Night, and Good Luck.
If
you're a fan of Bo Ramsey - the Iowa-based guitarist and producer
- you take what you can get in terms of records bearing his name.
REO
Speedwagon lead singer and primary songwriter Kevin Cronin said the
band spent more than three years making Find
Your Own Way Home, which
came out last year. "There was no pressure to release it sooner,"
he said last week. "There was no record company, no contract, none
of that bullshit. It was strictly a labor of love on our part."
Although
singers/songwriters Adrianne "Dri" Verhoeven and Suzannah
Johannes both call Lawrence, Kansas, home, their styles and their
paths to musical careers couldn't be more different.
When
the two performers in the cello-guitar duo Montana Skies - Jennifer
and Jonathan Adams - began playing together in 1997, the impetus
was "curiosity," Jennifer said in an interview last week.
The
future of Ra Ra Riot sounds as if it's in doubt.
The
Envy Corps hail from Iowa, but the plan is to try to make a splash in
Great Britain before the United States.
Philip
Dickey had a burning question about Huckleberry's, the pizza place
in downtown Rock Island that his band, Someone Still Loves You Boris
Yeltsin, will be playing next week.
Mason
Proper's debut album, There Is
a Moth in Your Chest, is
utterly scattershot. It's a 12-course meal for which there appears
to have been little thought put into the progression or the entirety.
Like many noted directors of opera, Bill Fabris has a résumé that boasts a number of heavyweight titles, among them Bizet's Carmen, Puccini's Tosca, Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, and Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto, which Fabris stage-directs - with Ron May music-directing - for Opera Quad Cities on January 18 and 20.






