On this, the last day of The Bridge's "Fall" (we know, it's been extremely hot out) Funding Drive, we are asking you to help us meet – and perhaps exceed! – our goal by making a donation that's comfortable for you and your budget. When you do, our friend Caleb Hearon – comedian, actor, podcaster, all-around incredible human being – is going to match your gift up to $10,000 (dollar-for-dollar). All you have to do is type "Caleb Match" in the comments field when you give. Please help us make sure that none of this invaluable funding is left on the table! 

Besides having your gift MATCHED and your impact DOUBLED, when you donate today, you'll automatically be entered to win two General Admission PIT tickets to Sombr with Hannah Jadagu and The Last Dinner Party at the T-Mobile Center on October 31!

Thank you for investing in Kansas City’s musical ecosystem!

We’re celebrating 25 years of music discovery thanks to 25 years of generous community support. Help write the next chapter in The Bridge’s story; start or increase your ongoing monthly gift today! When you do, you’ll automatically be entered to win a pair of GA tickets to see Bill Murray and his Blood Brothers at Knuckleheads on October 9 (five winners will be chosen, so your odds are pretty good)! Donate now — it’s a great day to keep the music playing.

Thank you for investing in Kansas City’s musical ecosystem!

We’re celebrating 25 years of music discovery thanks to 25 years of generous community support. Help write the next chapter in The Bridge’s story; start or increase your ongoing monthly gift today! There are a couple extra special reasons for you to give today. First, we have a generous $3,000 dollar-for-dollar match on the table today, offered by our dear friends in honor of their 30th wedding anniversary. We love you, Carl and Carlene! In addition to this chance for you to double your impact, make a gift of $200 or more and you will also receive a pair of tickets to see Foster the People with Goth Babe at Starlight Theatre on September 24 (while supplies last)! Donate now — it’s a great day to keep the music playing.

Thank you for investing in Kansas City’s musical ecosystem!

We’re celebrating 25 years of music discovery thanks to 25 years of generous community support. Help write the next chapter in The Bridge’s story; start or increase your ongoing monthly gift today! When you do, you’ll automatically be entered to win 2 FRONT ROW BALCONY tickets to see Beck at the Uptown Theater on October 4. Thank you for investing in Kansas City’s musical ecosystem!

We’re celebrating 25 years of music discovery thanks to 25 years of generous community support. Help write the next chapter in The Bridge’s story; start or increase your ongoing monthly gift today! When you give this weekend, you’ll automatically be entered to win an invitation to our next 909 Session for you and one guest (one winner chosen each day). Thank you for investing in Kansas City’s musical ecosystem! 

Donate today!

Today we are Pledging It Forward on 90.9 The Bridge, a program we started to highlight the meaningful work being done by our partner organizations around the city. As we celebrate The Bridge’s 25th year, we know we couldn’t have made it this far without our friends by our side. Today only, your gift to The Bridge will be matched – up to $7,500 – for The Walker Foundation by our partners at Cornerstones of Care.

As music lovers and music makers, we all know how the right song has the power to inspire confidence and give us the boost we need to get through the day. Our friends at The Walker Foundation are doing similar work in an incredibly meaningful way. Their mission is to provide support to children experiencing hair loss, making sure every child has the opportunity to feel confident, cared for, and proud to wear their crown.

The Walker Foundation...

• ... serves children and families in foster care, hospitals, schools, and underserved communities.
• ... empowers children and families through hair education, wellness, personal development, and confidence-building programs.
• ... helps children feel confident, seen, and proud of who they are.

Throughout the day, we’ll hear from our Pledge It Forward partners at The Walker Foundation about the important work they do for our community. When you donate to The Bridge, you’re sustaining a musical ecosystem that delivers joy, respite, inspiration and connection through music. And when you give today, thanks to Cornerstones of Care, your gift will be matched for The Walker Foundation. Double the impact of your generous support by donating to The Bridge right now!

Today, on the first day of our Fall Funding Drive, we are asking you to support 25 years of exceptional, independent music discovery on The Bridge! Your ongoing monthly support strengthens the music ecosystem that adds meaning and joy to our lives. We have even more 25th anniversary gear to thank you for your support — a new t-shirt design, a tote bag, and a 3-sheet sticker pack to turn anything you own into a piece of beloved Bridge swag — plus, today only (while supplies last), your gift of $300 or more will also score you two tickets to Jack Johnson with Lake Street Dive at Morton Amphitheater on September 1.

Give now and help get The Bridge’s Fall Funding Drive off to a strong start! Your ears will thank you, and so will we!

She was, as many tributes published since her death have noted, the one person whose presence everyone welcomed, no matter what hostilities their politics or social status otherwise inspired. Parton was our favorite aunt, our imaginary president. She was also the composer of a career's worth of indelible hits that emblematized America's cultural life, and particularly the changing experiences of women, in ways that place her in an elite category: a songwriter whose greatest works, considered together, are their own version of the American songbook.

Country singer Dolly Parton performs onstage, circa 1977.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The story of this country as told through Parton's best-known songs begins in the mid-1960s, when many aspects of the country she knew and loved so well were in flux. She didn't write her first charting country single, 1967's "Dumb Blonde" (that was Curly Putnam) but it set the tone for her amiable, uncompromising version of women's liberation, distilling the frustration of countless underestimated women in the home and the workplace into an actionable rallying cry.

This was one aspect of Parton, the adventurer whose insistent self-respect would carry her beyond any limitations others tried to impose on her. The other, the keeper of home truths, surfaced in 1971's "Coat of Many Colors," an expertly embroidered portrait of Appalachian rural life that also stands as one of the most powerful reminders of poor people's dignity to ever grace the airwaves. With those two singles and others that quickly followed, like 1972's cozily erotic "Touch Your Woman" and the same year's pastoral "My Tennessee Mountain Home," Parton — the rare Nashville songwriter who wrote her greatest songs alone — established the multifaceted world view that made her music so mobile, such a popular well for other artists to tap for inspiration, and so insightful about America.

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Album cover for "Jolene" by Dolly Parton which was released in 1974.

Donaldson Collection/Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives

Parton's legend was secured in 1973, when she released "Jolene," a song that transcended its moment by perfectly capturing the primal intensity of insecure romantic desire. With a melody redolent of a century of folk ballads and, as Parton told NPR in 2008, a chorus "even a first-grader or a baby could sing," this true-ish tale of rivalry among women is fluid enough that a man could take it on, as Jack White did in The White Stripes' 2001 version. "Jolene" is a murder ballad whose victims all survive, a cry of revenge in the face of betrayal that puts a woman in charge and unexpectedly creates a bond between two rivals. Beyoncé's version of the song on her Grammy-winning country album Cowboy Carter, blessed by Parton, heated up that eroticism to show that "Jolene" is as much about one woman appreciating another as about the murderous restrictions of monogamy.

"Jolene" was, in fact, one of the less dramatic songs Parton wrote in her gothic mode, a style that allowed her to expose many of the burdens women endure under patriarchy; her early songs that never made it to the Top 40 dared to broach topics like emotional abuse, stillbirth, forced institutionalization, a birthmother's grief and a pregnant, abandoned lover's suicide. Her deep knowledge of the dark lent substance to the songs that expressed her belief in transcendence. The masterpiece that she released the following year showed her rising upward with unrivaled grace. Like "Jolene," the majestic "I Will Always Love You" is ripe with particulars and anchored in the country realm of adult dreams and regrets, but is open-ended enough to invite myriad interpretations. Parton wrote it as a forgiving farewell to Porter Wagoner, the duet partner who had helped launch her career but also tried to restrict her when her genius took her beyond their partnership.

Country singer Dolly Parton and her collaborator Porter Wagoner perform onstage in circa 1967. Mr. Wagoner is wearing a Nudie Suit designed by Nudie Cohn of Nudie's Rodeo Tailors.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

"I Will Always Love You" was a hit for her in 1974 and again in 1983, as part of the soundtrack to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, where it served as a lament about the forbidden (though ultimately triumphant) romance between the madam played by Parton and Burt Reynolds' local sheriff. The song reached its full potential, of course, in the hands of Whitney Houston, whose sublime 1992 version exposed the damage done by arbitrary divisions between Black and white radio formats, crossing into every corner of pop to become the definitive expression of the era's blockbuster-besotted grandeur. "I Will Always Love You" is the musical equivalent of Star Wars, an epic that encompasses many epochs. Houston could soar within it because Parton imbued it with a musical and sentimental purity that made room for the enormity of her expressiveness.

Even as Parton secured her status as a writer of timeless tunes with these megahits, she remained the quintessential modern woman chronicling her times, via her own songs and ones written by others. The hits that took her from the 1970s to the '80s form a vivid portrait of the power-suited working woman who enjoyed her pleasures with men from whom she demanded freedom and equality. "Here You Come Again," written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and her own "Two Doors Down" are jaunty artifacts of the era of swinging and the pill, while "9 to 5," along with the comedy film classic whose soundtrack it graced (and in which Dolly starred), became the era's working woman's anthem. These songs made Parton not just the era's most adorable embodiment of American values but a global icon, culminating in her duet with Kenny Rogers, the Bee Gees-authored "Islands in the Stream." Parton's vivacious touch on that song is the electricity that carries it beyond genre and makes it a definitive example of global pop.

American Country musicians Kenny Rogers (1938 - 2020) and Dolly Parton perform together onstage at Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, New York, August 29, 1985.

Gary Gershoff/Getty Images

After the 1980s, Parton remained musically prolific while easing into the exalted yet somehow always accessible position she maintained until her death. She won a new generation of fans at the turn of the 21st century by returning to the bluegrass that inspired her as a child and continued to build a discography that would ultimately include more than 50 solo and collaborative studio albums, and remain as eclectic as it had been in the beginning.

Continually taken up by would-be protégés to whom she was characteristically generous, she kept winning hearts on stages with the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Lainey Wilson and Post Malone. Her final album, Rockstar, celebrated a 2022 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame that Parton had greeted, at first, with great skepticism. In the end, though, America's sweetheart took on that quintessentially American musical form with the same let's-get-it-done energy she'd applied to every challenge she'd faced. "I just went for it," she told NPR. Luckily for every last American, we could always follow wherever she went.

LOS ANGELES, CA - FEBRUARY 08: Dolly Parton performs onstage during MusiCares Person of the Year honoring Dolly Parton at Los Angeles Convention Center on February 8, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)

Rich Fury/Getty Images for NARAS/Getty Images North America

If you, like us, cannot get enough of Dolly, head to the NPR app for a Dolly Parton playlist from our archives, or check out the NPR Network podcastDolly Parton's America.

There’s an inevitable darkness to the songs on “Everybody You Know,” but right along with it are textures of hope.

“It's about how everyone's living a separate, individual life, but we're all tied together by the same basic truth: none of us get to live forever,” Roper said. While writing the album, the artist lost his brother and went through a significant breakup, both forcing him to confront important truths in the music. “There's fear and anxiety around mortality in here, but also the idea that the limited time we have is what makes life worth living.”

The new album also marks the first time Roper would cede some creative control to a new collaborator, guitarist Darin Breeden.

“Having Darin come in and start writing guitar parts and helping me write smarter songs has really challenged me to make songs in ways that I wouldn't normally do them,” Roper said in a recent Bridge interview. Listen to the full interview below!

"Everybody You Know” officially drops this Friday, Aug. 28, via The Record Machine, and will be available on Hotel Leo’s Bandcamp page. The band celebrates the album release that same night, with support from Teri Quinn & the Coyotes and The Creepy Jingles. Tickets are available.

Courtney Barnett brought her Creature of Habit tour to The Truman on Saturday, Aug. 15, brimming with her signature dry humor and supported by the enigmatic Zoh Amba. Barnett released her fourth studio album in March on Mom + Pop Music after moving from Melbourne, Australia to Los Angeles.

Zoh Amba was already playing as I entered the venue, their wild, unbridled sound immediately catching my attention. The music incorporated elements of rock, folk, Americana and even jazz, with Amba breaking into a screeching saxophone solo during the bridge of one song. Their vocals were intense and inconsistent, strategically breaking on certain notes and phrases. The audience was enthralled, whooping and cheering as Amba created beautiful discord.

A few minutes past 9 p.m., as the stage was soaked in red lighting, Courtney Barnett emerged with her band, kicking the set off with “Stay In Your Lane,” the first song on “Creature of Habit,” and blasting through the first of many guitar solos before briefly greeting the crowd. Barnett performed from stage right for most of the show, fitting for such a subtle artist, sidestepping the obvious choice and holding our attention all the same.

Barnett kept the dialogue to a minimum, opting to pack the set with music. It was a thrill to hear “Avant Gardener” live, one of my favorites, and Barnett made me laugh with her delivery of, “The paramedic thinks I'm clever 'cause I play guitar / I think she's clever 'cause she stops people dying.”

Several songs later, Zoh Amba joined Courtney Barnett onstage for “Canned Tomatoes (Whole),” where the opener played a passionate saxophone solo near the end of the song.

The lighting was tightly coordinated with the set, maintaining a deep saturation throughout while changing colors to convey each song’s mood. The energetic “History Eraser” began with a white spotlight on Barnett before the stage was flooded with a deep orange. “Another Beautiful Day,” hopeful and upbeat, alternated between swaths of blue and yellow.

The set moved quickly, mostly made up of songs from “Creature of Habit,” with a few favorites pulled from each of Barnett’s other albums. Although this was my first time seeing her live, Barnett was exactly as I expected, letting her guitar prowess and cutting lyricism do the talking.

Barnett thanked the crowd for a beautiful evening and ended the set with “One Thing At A Time,” about the overwhelming but mundane nature of life. The audience barely moved, maintaining their high decibel of sound. 

Moments later, Barnett came back out, alone, confessing, “I did lie to you, we have more songs,” and earning cheers from the audience. The encore began with a solo rendition of “Mostly Patient,” before the band rejoined her for “Pedestrian At Best” and “Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go to the Party.”

SET LIST

Stay In Your Lane
City Looks Pretty
Avant Gardener
Small Poppies
Mantis
Canned Tomatoes (Whole) - ft. Zoh Amba on saxophone
Same
History Eraser
Need a Little Time
Another Beautiful Day
Depreston
Site Unseen
Great Advice
Elevator Operator
Sugar Plum
Wonder
Before You Gotta Go
Write a List of Things To Look Forward To
One Thing at a Time

Encore

Mostly Patient (solo)
Pedestrian At Best
Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go to the Party

The 22nd annual Crossroads Music Festival will feature 25+ musical artists across seven stages in the Stockyards District of the West Bottoms, featuring Amanda Fish, Womanish Girl, Zee Underscore, Son Venezuela, Kat King and many more. Several stages will host live bands – Lemonade Park, Stockyards, Campground, Voltaire and a free day party at Rock Island Bridge from noon to 3 p.m.

Don Felder is a true 21st century renaissance man for all seasons. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee is probably most known for his contributions as an Eagles lead guitarist, co-writing and performing the memorable solo on the band’s “Hotel California” with Joe Walsh, while contributing songs such as “Vision” (where he sang lead vocals) on One of These Nights in addition to earning writing credits on “Victim of Love” and “Those Shoes” from Hotel California.

His fourth solo album, “The Vault (Fifty Years of Music),” is a look back at his half-century in the music business, consisting of re-recorded demos from throughout his career that were never finished, including several originally submitted for Eagles records.

Join us at Boulevard Tours & Rec Center for FREE, all-ages live local music and good times on Wednesday nights! Beer, bevvies and non-alcoholic options available for purchase, plus a full kitchen menu with pizza, sammies and snacks. Doors at 6 p.m., show starts at 7 p.m. Drink with friends, in bed by 10.

The Early Show schedule:

• Aug. 5 - Copper Threading
• Aug. 12 - Carswell & Hope
• Aug. 19 - Marty Bush
• Aug. 26 - The Bluebird Ramblers
• Sept. 2 - Shakedown Strings
• Sept. 9 - Kirstie Lynn & the Lucky Strikes
• Sept. 16 - Stranded in the City
• Sept. 23 - Old Sound
• Sept. 30 - SouLuna

Fiercely independent, Nashville-based recording artist, Ron Pope, carved his niche in the digital era’s early days with his breakout hit, “A Drop in the Ocean,” which has amassed over 1 billion streams, earning platinum status in the US, alongside double platinum status in Sweden. His prolific songwriting is a natural fit for Music City’s Americana, roots, and country communities, garnering praise from publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, CMT, Relix, and The Tennessean. With each release, including his most recent album, American Man, American Music, released in February 2025, Pope continues to captivate audiences with his raw authenticity and profound storytelling, soul-stirring melodies, and introspective lyricism.

Beyond his own musical endeavors, Pope writes and produces for other artists, and serves as a guiding light for aspiring musicians navigating the ever-changing landscape of today’s music industry.
 

In support of her new album, "No Lube, So Rude," Canadian electropop star Peaches extends her 2026 North American tour. The new album, her seventh studio effort, is her first in more than 10 years.

For nearly two decades, Austin’s The Band of Heathens have carved their own lane – pairing sharp songwriting with a sound that’s long outpaced the Americana curve. With their new album, “Country Sides,” the band reflects on 20 years of building something entirely their own.

Formed in 2005, the Heathens broke through with their soulful blend of country and rock, earning memorable spots on Austin City Limits and growing a loyal fan base one show at a time. Though the lineup has evolved, founding songwriters Ed Jurdi and Gordy Quist remain the creative core, shaping the band’s voice and steady rise.

A DIY ethos has always defined the Heathens – no label machine, no shortcuts, just an unwavering commitment to honest, organic music. That independence is woven throughout “Country Sides,” an 11-song collection pulled from dozens written during a period of looking inward and taking stock.

They'll be joined by Texas singer-songwriter Vincent Neil Emerson, touring on his latest album, "The Golden Crystal Kingdom."

Folk icon Judy Collins has inspired generations for over six decades. Now, the luminary is bidding adieu to the road with her Sweet Judy Blue Eyes Farewell Tour.

Jefferson Starship, formed by Paul Kantner in the '70s, embraced his vision of musical exploration and concept albums. The current lineup, united since 2012, views themselves as a close-knit “family” and “gang.” Their energetic performances have spanned all 50 U.S. states and five continents. Despite Kantner’s 2016 passing, his spirit of cosmic musical exploration lives on, inspiring the band’s ongoing journey, symbolized by his mantra: “Onward.”