Dan DeLuca's Mix Picks: Todd Rundgren, John Lee Hooker, and a hip-hop summit with Talib Kweli
Upper Darby's own Todd Rundgren, a John Lee Hooker box, Sirius XM deejay, singer Elizabeth Cook, a hip-hop symposium in South Jersey, and Julie Byrne at the First Unitarian Church.
Todd Rundgren. Upper Darby's own wizard and true star's 2017 album White Knight is a collaborative album with surprising partners, including old-school R&B singer Bettye LaVette, Swedish pop star Robyn, Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, and Philly blue-eyed soul man Daryl Hall. The song that's gotten the most attention, though, is "Tin Foil Hat," an anti-Trump pairing with Donald Fagen of Steely Dan whose video premiered this year on Fox News. Sunday at Keswick Theatre.
John Lee Hooker, King of the Boogie. Born in 1917 in the Mississippi Delta, Hooker was a sharecropper's son who invented a wholly urban, hypnotic, foot-stomping sound after migrating north to Detroit. (He steered clear of Chicago to avoid competition.) This 5-CD box traces his career over three studio discs — kicking off in 1948 with "Boogie Chillen' " — plus one live disc and one with collaborators like Carlos Santana and Los Lobos. On Craft Recordings.
Elizabeth Cook. Cook is the Florida-born, Nashville-based songwriter who's the twangy host of the daily "Apron Strings" radio show on Sirius XM's Outlaw Country channel. After a six-year layoff, she moved away from an alt-country blueprint and dug into a droning, bluesy sound on last year's "Exodus of Venus," with impressive results. Tuesday at World Cafe Live.
Talib Kweli. The Brooklyn rapper, activist, and one half of Black Star is featured speaker at a South Jersey hip-hop "Stay Woke" summit this week at Stockton University. The theme is hip-hop as a tool for consciousness raising. 3:30 p.m. Thursday at the Stockton University Campus Center Theater in Galloway, Atlantic County.
Julie Byrne. New York songwriter and finger-picking guitarist whose songs are informed by her travels and who recorded her calm and beautiful sophomore album Not Even Happiness in her childhood home in Buffalo. With Nadia Reid. Thursday at First Unitarian Church side chapel.