New Music From Wilco, Night Beds, Lianne La Havas, More

VPM | By Bob Boilen, Robin Hilton and Katie Presley

Published July 21, 2015 at 5:30 PM EDT

Updated February 20, 2024

Clockwise from upper left: Wilco, Lianne La Havas, Palehound, Night Beds

We kick off this week’s All Songs Considered with new music from Wilco. The band surprised fans by dropping a new album out of the blue late last week. It’s called … wait for it … Star Wars, and Wilco is letting everyone download it for free from the group’s website (for a month). But don’t let the playful name fool you. Star Wars is one of Wilco’s trippiest, most inventive and surprising releases in 20 years of making music.

We get another surprise this week from the new Night Beds album. The band, which released one of most memorable and beautiful folk-country albums of 2013, Country Sleep, is back with a head-turning R&B record, complete with deep bass beats and auto-tuned vocals. Ivywild opens with the cut we’re featuring on this week’s show, the strangely captivating, epic “Finished.”

Also on the show: bursts of joyful, idiosyncratic rock from the Ohio-based band Sports and the Ellen Kempner-fronted group Palehound; gnarled guitars and gorgeous atmospherics of Miya Folick and neo-soul from the English singer-songwriter Lianne La Havas.

Plus, we welcome back co-host Robin Hilton and bid a fond farewell to Katie Presley.

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Bob Boilen

In 1988, a determined Bob Boilen started showing up on NPR's doorstep every day, looking for a way to contribute his skills in music and broadcasting to the network. His persistence paid off, and within a few weeks he was hired, on a temporary basis, to work for All Things Considered. Less than a year later, Boilen was directing the show and continued to do so for the next 18 years.

Significant listener interest in the music being played on All Things Considered, along with his and NPR's vast music collections, gave Boilen the idea to start All Songs Considered. "It was obvious to me that listeners of NPR were also lovers of music, but what also became obvious by 1999 was that the web was going to be the place to discover new music and that we wanted to be the premiere site for music discovery." The show launched in 2000, with Boilen as its host.

Before coming to NPR, Boilen found many ways to share his passion for music. From 1982 to 1986 he worked for Baltimore's Impossible Theater, where he held many posts, including composer, technician, and recording engineer. Boilen became part of music history in 1983 with the Impossible Theater production Whiz Bang, a History of Sound. In it, Boilen became one of the first composers to use audio sampling — in this case, sounds from nature and the industrial revolution. He was interviewed about Whiz Bang by Susan Stamberg on All Things Considered.

In 1985, the Washington City Paper voted Boilen 'Performance Artist of the Year.' An electronic musician, he received a grant from the Washington D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities to work on electronic music and performance.

After Impossible Theater, Boilen worked as a producer for a television station in Washington, D.C. He produced several projects, including a music video show. In 1997, he started producing an online show called Science Live for the Discovery Channel. He also put out two albums with his psychedelic band, Tiny Desk Unit, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Boilen still composes and performs music and posts it for free on his website BobBoilen.info. He performs contradance music and has a podcast of contradance music that he produces with his son Julian.

Boilen's first book, Your Song Changed My Life, was published in April 2016 by HarperCollins.

See stories by Bob Boilen