Tagged: arts & life

The local folk/rock band The Maldives have performed everywhere from the back of a flatbed truck to the stages of Sasquatch, Bumbershoot, Capitol Hill Block Party and SXSW.

The Maldives are a seven-member band that started with lead singer and guitarist Jason Dodson over six years ago, and have established themselves as a quintessential band in the Northwest music scene. Jason Dodson joins us in studio to talk and perform live.

Leslie Helm was born and raised in Yokohama, Japan. Most of his family members are of European descent, and you would be hard pressed to look into his face and see his half-Japanese grandparents reflected back. When he adopted Japanese children, he started exploring his own roots. Leslie Helm takes us along on his journey as a "Yokohama Yankee" — a story that outlines the racial and economic tensions that defined US and Japanese relations for much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In her poem "What Stays Here," Colleen McElroy imagines life as a female soldier who must choose between loyalty to herself, and loyalty to a military code that says "keep quiet" and "get along." Like many of the poems in McElroy's ninth collection, "Here I Throw Down My Heart," (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) the poem awakens us to voices and stories we might otherwise never hear with such intimacy and power.

Seattle's music scene was booming in the mid-1990s. Four friends from different established bands decided to get together for a side project called Mad Season. Layne Staley sang in Alice in Chains, Mike McCready played guitar for Pearl Jam, Bassist John Baker Saunders toured with The Walkabouts and Barrett Martin was the drummer for Screaming Trees.