Pop Quiz: Maroon 5

Pop Quiz: Maroon 5

Aidin Vaziri | Maroon 5 returns this week with "It Won't Be Soon Before Long," its highly anticipated follow-up to the Grammy-winning multiplatinum debut, 2002's "Songs About Jane." The Los Angeles band is playing a handful of small club shows (including a stop at the Great American Music Hall on June 1) before taking the album and No. 1 single "Makes Me Wonder" to the world later this summer. We spoke with singer Adam Levine.

Adam Levine of Maroon 5
Q: So the story goes that you couldn't finish "Makes Me Wonder" before you took a trip to Las Vegas and met a girl.
A: It's true. The song doesn't have anything to do with the girl I met. It was the first thing we started writing for this album about four years ago and it was just sitting around. It just needed a chorus. And after that trip it all fell together. So the oldest song we wrote became the first single.
Q: Are most of the songs on this album inspired by prostitutes?
A: Watch it, buddy. Be nice.
Q: Wait, you're still with this girl?
A: Yes.
Q: Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you just met her in the lobby bar of Caesars Palace and it was like, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."
A: Caesars Palace? Do they even have Caesars Palace anymore? Man, you're out of the Vegas loop.
Q: I know. I need to go meet some prostitutes.

Review: Elliott Smith

Review: Elliott Smith

Elliott Smith 'New Moon': Aidin Vaziri | Elliott Smith's second release from beyond the grave is a whopper -- a double-disc set loaded with demos, outtakes and studio scraps recorded in the prime years stretching from 1994 to '97. Because most of the stuff is so poorly produced, with just a voice and acoustic guitar, it won't make any sense to newcomers. Because it doesn't include every burp and gurgle, hard-core fans will moan that it's incomplete. Who cares? It's a chance to spend some quality time in the company of one the most delicate and brutal songwriters we've ever known as he explores every crevice of his damaged psyche in minor masterpieces like "New Disaster" and "Going Nowhere." We won't see the likes of him again anytime soon.

Pop Quiz: Dolores O'Riordan

Pop Quiz: Dolores O'Riordan

Aidin Vaziri | As the lead singer of the Cranberries, Dolores O'Riordan owned the '90s. Named the highest-earning woman in Ireland, she married Duran Duran's tour manager in a transparent dress, relegated her band members to separate tour buses and feverishly battled anorexia rumors. The Irish band sold more than 30 million albums before imploding after its fifth release, "Wake Up and Smell the Coffee," in 2001. After taking six years off to raise her family, O'Riordan, 35, returns with her solo premiere CD, "Are You Listening?"


Dolores O'Riordan
Q: Britney Spears shaved her head after she had her babies. You did it before you had yours. What was your problem?
A:I was 18 years old when I joined the 'Berries. The first album was huge. Six million is an awful lot to sell for a bunch of kids from a small town in Ireland. It was all a big party, and then the pressure was on to make another. The next one was even bigger, so there's even more pressure. We were living in buses for five years now. No sense of normality. No friends. No freedom. I overdid it. I was obviously losing too much weight and getting depressed from working too much. I had no normality, no sanity.
Q: How did you get through it?
A: It was just getting away from the public eye. You have to jump off the treadmill because you're going to break your neck otherwise.
Q: Do you feel sane now?
A: Totally. You relax more in your 30s. You realize the most important thing is that you have to look after yourself and get dinner on the table. It's grand when you find that head space.
Q: So people shouldn't be afraid of you anymore?
A: No. I don't bite at all.

Review: Rufus Wainwright

Review: Rufus Wainwright

Rufus Wainwright 'Release The Stars': Aidin Vaziri | Since touching down nearly a decade ago with his spectacular debut album, Rufus Wainwright has been hooked on crystal meth, temporarily gone blind, gotten shipped to rehab by Elton John, played Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall, started work on an opera and, most unexpectedly, fallen in love. But even as his personal life has gone topsy-turvy, the son of folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle has grown only more determined musically. Rufus self-produced his fifth and latest disc, "Release the Stars" (with assistance from mixer Marius de Vries and executive producer Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys), and it's the closest he's come to capturing his original vision: a dramatic convergence of Verdi and the Velvet Underground, heavenly choirs and world-weary words, black-tie orchestras and Moroccan strings. It's not the sort of album that will draw in the casual listener (not with that love-it-or-hate-it voice, anyway) and, like everything after his first album, it's too uneven to be truly great. At the same time, it wouldn't be an understatement to call it Wainwright's most user-friendly offering yet, particularly in its more uncomplicated moments such as "Not Ready to Love" and "Going to a Town." The latter sees him take a pointed political turn with the lines, "You took advantage of a world that loved you well/ I'm going to a town that has already been burned down/ I'm so tired of you, America." But the album at large finds Wainwright mostly with his head in the clouds, either meditating over beautiful melodies like "Sanssouci" or dreaming up his personal lewd rock opera in "Between My Legs." If you didn't know any better, you might suspect he's finally gotten it together.

Pop Quiz: Feist

Pop Quiz: Feist

Aidin Vaziri | We have a love-hate relationship with Leslie Feist. We love her breakthrough 2004 album, "Let It Die," but hate her for taking a million years to record a follow-up. Now that the Canadian singer- songwriter has finally gotten around to issuing the equally spectacular "The Reminder," all is forgiven. Recorded in less than a week at a rented home outside of Paris, the disc offers a treasure trove of subdued folk-pop gems, including "My Moon My Man" and "1234." The only problem is, it's already left us wanting more.

Leslie Feist
Q: So are you topless on the album cover because you are using sex to sell your music?
A: Americans get right to the dirt. No, I am wearing a shirt. It was the summertime, so it's one of those shirts that just wraps around your body. Sorry to disappoint you, you sensationalist journalistic pervert.
Q: Is that why you sound so depressed on this album?
A: Do I? Well, the way you look at a man, so he appears to you; the way you hear a song, that's the way it sounds to you.
Q: Can you say that again, slower and more like you're speaking to a dumb person?
A: It's an old saying: The way you look at a man, so he appears to you; the way you hear a song, that's the way it sounds to you. See how I flipped that back on you?
Q: Are you saying I'm depressed?
A: I'm saying that's up to you to determine. Any album, if it's open enough and it has a lot of hinges and pivots in it and doesn't nail itself down to one concrete reality, it's basically a mirror. That's why the title is what it is. I'm not on a podium saying anything. I'm just asking myself a bunch of questions, and they're audible in the form of song. Any potential perspective could be true -- it's just not necessarily my truth. It's yours.
Q: I kind of feel like I need a therapist after that answer.
A: I'm only 70 bucks an hour. We can just keep talking now, and I can start asking you questions.

Review: Bjork, Bebel Gilberto

Review: Bjork, Bebel Gilberto

Bjork 'Volta': Aidin Vaziri | Björk has made entire songs out of shuffling playing cards. Where normal pop stars use strings, she uses an Inuit choir (and possibly their dog leashes). She is so experimental that the only instruments on her previous proper album were body parts (mouths mostly, not like when you cup your armpit with your hand and try to make a farting noise). By those standards, the Icelandic singer's sixth full-length studio disc is quite normal. Three songs even feature Timbaland, the hip-hop producer behind the current hit streaks by Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado. But it's unlikely anyone will confuse the pointless industrial clangor of "Earth Intruders" or the fluttering National Geographic rhythms of "Hope" as an attempt to bring sexy back, forward or any other way -- especially when on the latter Björk sings, "What's the lesser of two evils/ If a suicide bomber made to look pregnant manages to kill her target or not?" No, "Volta" is a teeth-gnashingly difficult album to penetrate all around, rife with intentionally harsh sound effects, ugly melodies and inane lyrics. With "Declare Independence," Björk somehow even manages to combine all of the above. And as much as it's hard to fault the excess of ideas and unbendable desire to tear up convention, it kind of sucks that just a handful of tracks -- including the towering "Wanderlust" and a pair of ghostly duets with New York singer Antony Hegarty -- make you consider coming back for more. Is she trying too hard -- or maybe just not hard enough?

Bebel Gilberto 'Momento': Aidin Vaziri | Bebel Gilberto is a freak. She's that rare offspring of pop royalty that has actually managed to pretty up the family business rather than take it down, a doubly impossible feat when you consider that in Brazil her father, João Gilberto ("The Girl From Impanema"), is known simply as "the legend." On "Momento," her latest solo release, Bebel doesn't stray too far from the soothing bossa nova rhythms and sleek electronic flourishes on which she's built her own name, which is just fine. She's got a lovely voice, knows the right collaborators and doesn't really need to do much to make a very good album. That she manages to rejuvenate Cole Porter's dusty old "Night and Day" with a gentle Latin sway only makes it that much better.

Live Review: Fountains of Wayne at Great American Music Hall, 04/30/07

Live Review: Fountains of Wayne at Great American Music Hall, 04/30/07

Fountains of Wayne just do that thing they do. Apparently, it isn't very much: Aidin Vaziri | "The last time we played this room was for some weird corporate party," Fountains of Wayne bassist Adam Schlesinger said at the band's sold-out show at the Great American Music Hall on Monday, surveying the audience -- most of whose members, incidentally, wouldn't have looked entirely out of place at a company function. "I think there were more sushi trays than people." The uneasy smile on his face suggested that he wasn't joking.

While the maguro and unagi platters may have cleared out, a sense of disenchantment clung to the air. Despite a near breakthrough with the 2003 hit "Stacy's Mom" (now best remembered as a Dr Pepper jingle), 12 years after forming the New Jersey power-pop quartet, Schlesinger and singer Chris Collingwood have once again made an album full of songs about lonely commutes and hopeless cubicle romances set to a roaring FM radio soundtrack.

That "Traffic and Weather," the group's most recent release, finds Collingwood singing about the tedium of other peoples' 9-to-5 lives -- from the crush-worthy DMV clerk in "Yolanda Hayes" to the television news anchors who fall for each other on the title track -- isn't as much of a surprise as watching him deliver the material with the detachment of someone who can't wait to punch out his own time card. Not many singers greet a second encore with the sort of enthusiasm normally reserved for being asked to work overtime. Click for more.