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It’s the perfect time to release an album that invokes the happy, lazy days of summer. And Gypsy Blue Revue plans on doing just that on May 29.

JP Soars and the Red Hots is one of the tightest, most talented trios on the music scene today. As a follow-up to last year’s Brick By Brick, the group set their sights on a new project this spring.

Soars is a guitar virtuoso, excelling in a number of instruments. On this album he contributes electric guitars, Merlin Stick Dulcimer, two-string Cigar Box guitar, acoustic guitars, Cavaquinho, dobro, lap steel, slide guitar, cowbell, shekere, whistle and vocals. ‘Underrated’ is not descriptive enough of his seemingly unlimited artistry.

Drummer Chris Peet and bassist Cleveland Frederick both possess timing and talent that rival any rhythm section in the business today.

Although they have been teaming up in live performances for a number of years, this is their first recording with Anne Harris, an accomplished violin and mandolin player. All four are critically acclaimed for their ability to blend gypsy jazz, blues, and southern rock.

Harris is a much-in-demand performer who appears solo and with groups Cracker and Halo Rider. Harris also just finished a tour accompanying legends Keb’ Mo’ and Taj Mahal (TajMo). A second tour has just been announced. She also spent some time touring with Otis Taylor, among others.

The collaboration, known as the Gypsy Blue Revue, creates a sizzling, jaw-dropping live show and this self-titled recording was inevitable.

The album, Gypsy Blue Revue, includes five exceptional instrumental pieces laying bare the raw talent of these five remarkable musicians. (Mixed and mastered by Jeremy Staska, he also contributes shakers and tambourine.) Seven of the pieces were written by Soars. For “Jessie Mae,” he provided music for lyrics by Rev. Billy C Wirtz.

Soars told Blues Rock Review (BRR), “We approached it (the album) exactly like a show. We wanted it to sound like we do live. We recorded all together in the same room with very minimal overdubs and no click track.”

Harris added, “We’re excited about this new album; to finally record together. JP is one of my favorite people on the planet and an amazing artist.”

The opener “Jessie Mae” is a swampy, southern example of Soars’s ability to combine storytelling with highlighted solos as his slide guitar yields to Harris’s fiddle, and back again. An accompanying release explains, “’Jessie Mae’ transforms a real-life encounter with Hill Country blues legend Jessie Mae Hemphill into a tale of strength, humor, and authenticity.” Soars added, “I was lucky enough to meet her, and this song is for her.”

“Go With The Flow,” the first instrumental, begins with the attention-getting, driving tom-toms of Peet. Soars delivers a clean virtuoso guitar passage before Harris seamlessly joins in on fiddle with a brief rendition of “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” deftly inserted. It is a brilliant and bright piece, aided considerably by Frederick’s solid bouncy rhythms driving it forward.

“Viper” is a live-show favorite that effectively conjures up the image of a couple engaged in a tango in a smoke-filled night club in some exotic land. It is filled with attitude and drama. The release notes offer; “Viper is a cautionary narrative inspired by a friend’s romantic misadventure, warning against getting involved with someone who’s nothing but trouble.”

“Paradise” is another instrumental showcase as Soars demonstrates his versatility with some sensational work on the Cavaquinho (a four-stringed Portuguese instrument) and, once again, Harris matches his contribution on fiddle in this Latin-influenced piece.

“Goin’ to South Carolina” is tinted with the hue of bluegrass and is a perfect lazy, summertime piece. With a nostalgic nod to Arkansas, where Soars grew up, it mentions apple pie, Saturday night dances and porch swings, conjuring the carefree image of man who knows what’s important.

Harris has a background in dance and during live performances it’s obvious her body is a conduit, transforming fluid cosmic energy into her distinctive music. Classically trained as a youngster, Harris told BRR, “I knew that wasn’t going to work because they wanted me to stand still and I just can’t do that.”

Her own composition “May Mountain,” offering a Celtic feel, is a beautiful, stunning piece of violin work, providing a transcendently uplifting showcase for Harris and she contributes with mandolin on this one as well.

“Old Silver Bridge” features Soars playing Merlin Stick Dulcimer, married perfectly to Harris’s sweet fiddle. This song shifts to autumn recollections. Soars, an avid fisherman, is able to impart to the listener — with remarkable acuity — the joy he experiences lazing by a tranquil river. During these unsettled times, the lyrics and music here impart warmth and hope. There’s a line that says, ‘Everything’s going to be just fine,’ and, at least for the 58-minute duration of the 9-track album, you believe they just might be.

“Minor Blues,” a Django Reinhardt original, best showcases Soars’s remarkable guitar abilities as he presents a bold and innovative arrangement. Starting with a sweet, slow duet between Soars and Harris, the piece shifts gears and launches into brilliant guitar and fiddle virtuosity. Frederick displays his mastery of jazz and he and Peet provide a sharp and memorable bridge to the final few bars.

“Cigar Box Jam” features an opening that builds suspense like a well-crafted movie. It is a rousing, high-energy instrumental that often closes their live performances. And, as in any live closer, it includes a featured section for each artist, including a superb performance from Peet.

Overall, this is a great recording, best served by a listener who provides a quiet respite to give it the attention it deserves and to welcome the restorative elements it returns.

The Review: 9/10

Can’t Miss Tracks

– Viper
– Jessie Mae
– Goin’ to South Carolina
– May Mountain Waltz
– Old Silver Bridge

The Big Hit

– Viper

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Immediate attention is required to address the issues.

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Introduction

As the Romantic philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling emphasizes in the following passage, art is the most direct expression of nature’s truth, and philosophy can only artificially reconstruct the natural truths that art is able to access so intimately: “Art is paramount to the philosopher precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where it burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart. The view of nature which the philosopher frames artificially is for art the original and natural one.”[1]

From this view that art holds such an exalted status in conveying nature’s truths, even above philosophy, it becomes productive to examine one of the most celebrated composers of the Romantic period, Richard Wagner, for the sheer fact that he constructed what he believed to be the culmination of art itself in his notion of Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work of Art) as expressed in his essay The Art-Work Of The Future,[2] which factors in nature as a fundamental element of art.[3] Such an inquiry involves not only the philosophical influences that shaped his thought, including the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach and Arthur Schopenhauer, but also how these thinkers themselves revered nature. By placing these influences alongside Wagner’s own writings, we can better assess the extent to which his conception of the relationship between art and nature aligns with Schelling’s espousal of art as the best conduit for nature’s truths. However, before turning to that comparison, it would be remiss not to address Wagner’s relationship with Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche

Wagner was immensely drawn to philosophy,[4] and evidence of his engagement with it can be found in his personal relationship with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, with whom he initially shared a close friendship before their eventual falling out. In the early years of their association, Nietzsche regarded Wagner as the heir to Dionysian music in Germany. As he put it in The Birth of Tragedy: “Out of the Dionysian foundation of the German spirit a power has arisen which has nothing in common with the most basic assumptions of Socratic culture, something those assumptions cannot explain or excuse. Rather from the point of view of this culture it is experienced as something terrible which cannot be explained, as something overpoweringly hostile – and that is German music, above all as it is to be understood in its forceful orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner.”[5]

However, his tone shifted after the two had a falling out. By 1888, according to Nietzsche, Wagner seemed to be everything wrong with German music. He thus attacked Wagner on multiple levels in The Case of Wagner.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] The most relevant Nietzsche excerpt for this project comes from Nietzsche’s other book attacking Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner: “Let us remember how enthusiastically Wagner at one time walked in the footsteps of the philosopher Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s words “healthy sensuality” struck Wagner in the thirties and forties very much as they struck many other Germans – they called themselves the young Germans – that is to say, as words of salvation.”[14]

Feuerbach

Ludwig Feuerbach is mainly relevant today because, as Nietzsche said, he was one of the young Hegelians (what Nietzsche called the “young Germans”). His philosophy serves as a bridge between Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. However, it is important to understand Feuerbach’s reverence for nature and his view that theological concepts are projections of it, as he seems to have had a profound influence on Wagner, as Nietzsche alluded to.

One might argue that Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, reflects an inherent Feuerbachian perspective, insofar as the Germanic deities Wagner remythologizes, such as Wotan, can be understood as projections of human nature. This would be in league with Feuerbach’s view that theological concepts are, in essence, expressions of mankind’s ontological place in natural world. As Feuerbach explained in The Essence of Christianity: “Man – this is the mystery of religion – projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject; he thinks of himself as an object to himself, but as the object of an object, of another being than himself. Thus here. Man is an object to God.”[15]

Here, we are drawn back to the natural world for higher truths, and Feuerbach is not hesitant to express his reverence for nature, that it thereby exists, for us, as the foundation for the theological hypotheses that we project onto it, which is nature expressing itself through us. As he further elucidates in The Essence of Religion: “That being which is different from and independent of man, or which is the same thing, of God, as represented in the Essence of Christianity, – the being without human nature, without human qualities and without human individuality is in reality nothing but Nature.”[16] He further clarifies that theological hypotheses are derived from the nature world: “The Divine Being which is revealed in Nature, is nothing but Nature herself, revealing and representing herself with irresistible power as a Divine Being.”[17] This leads us back to how we ourselves are conduits for nature:

The belief that in Nature another being is manifested, distinct from Nature herself, or that Nature is filled and governed by a [difference] from herself, is in reality identical with the belief that spirits, demons, devils etc., manifested themselves through man, at least in a certain state, and that they possess him; it is in very truth the belief, that nature is posses by a strong, spiritual being. And indeed Nature, viewed in the light of such a belief, is really possessed by a spirit, but this spirit of man, his imagination, his soul, which transfers itself involuntarily into Nature and makers her a symbol and mirror of his being.[18]

While Feuerbach never explicitly mentions art as expressing nature’s truths, Wagner, being influenced by this philosophy, makes the connection: “AS Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man.”[19] Here we see that Schelling’s view of art expressing nature’s truths better than philosophy finds some basis in Wagner. For him, under Feuerbach’s influence, nature pervades man, and as art pervades man, it too becomes an expression of nature. Here nature is the fundamental principle that drives mankind and its expressions.[20] As Bryan Magee reinforces in his book Wagner and Philosophy in the chapter titled “Wagner, Feuerbach and the Future”:

Nature exists independently of all philosophies. It is the foundation upon which we, who are ourselves products of Nature, are constructed. Beyond man and Nature nothing exists, and the higher beings that our religious fantasies have created are nothing but the imagined reflections of our own individual existence.”[21]

Schopenhauer

While Feuerbach’s early influence on Wagner makes it clear that nature played a crucial view in his artistic output, and that the Germanic deities in the Ring Cycle function as expressions of human nature rather than divine figures, later in life he came to admire the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer more. It was while Wagner was writing the second part of the Ring Cycle, The Valkyrie (Die Walküre), when he first read Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation. Magee provides full articulation:

Obviously Wagner must have been working at the same white heat as his music. This makes it all the more difficult to grasp, though it is neverless a fact, that it was during the autumn of 1854 that he read for the first time Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, one of the longest, most demanding masterpieces in this history of philosophy – two large volumes totalling well over a thousand pages. And not only did he read it, he was bowled over by it; it was to have more influence on him than anything else in his life. Thomas Mann puts this badly: ‘His acquaintance with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer was the great event in Wagner’s life. No earlier intellectual contact, such as that with Feuerbach, approaches it in personal and historical significance’ (Essay of Three Decades).[22]

Wagner’s love for Schopenhauer’s philosophy is as well-documented as his tumultuous relationship with Nietzsche. Moreover, Wagner tried to contact Schopenhauer by sending him his libretti. Wagner recalls this event in his autobiography titled My Life (Mein Leben):

All my subsequent occasional writings about artistic matters of special interest to me clearly demonstrate the impact of my study of Schopenhauer and what I had gained by it. Meanwhile, I felt impelled to send the esteemed philosopher a copy of my Nibelung poem; I appended to the title in my own hand only the words ‘With admiration’, without any other communication. This was in part a result of the great inhibition I felt about confiding in him, and also due to the feeling that if Schopenhauer could not figure out from my poem what kind of person I was the most comprehensive letter on my part would not help him to do so. Thus I renounced any vain wish to be honoured by a written response from him. . .[23]

Schopenhauer did receive Wagner’s libretti. Unfortunately, the occasion proved to be futile, as Wagner failed to gain his admiration. Schopenhauer had much to say about the literary shortcomings of the Ring Cycle, as he scribed an abundance of harsh criticisms throughout the pages Wagner had sent.[24] For the composer with such a penchant for philosophy, his attempts to befriend philosophers proved to be blunders: Schopenhauer mocked his writing style and Nietzsche wrote two works (The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner) lambasting him and his music.

One could argue that if Schopenhauer had actually heard the Ring Cycle instead of merely reading and dismissing its libretti, his opinion of Wagner might have been different. This remains true even though programmatic music such as opera did not hold his highest ideal of the arts, for that is reserved only for absolute music; music for its own sake. As Nietzsche originally observed, Wagner’s musical innovations represent the culmination of the path that Ludwig van Beethoven had set in motion, a composer whom Schopenhauer greatly admired.[25]

Regardless, Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, does indeed express reverences for nature that prove productive for this project. In league with Feuerbach’s perspective, Schopenhauer stated: “Dogmas change and our knowledge is deceptive, but nature does not err: her action is sure and certain, and she does not conceal it. Everything is entirely in nature, and she is entirely in everything.”[26] Moreover, Schopenhauer also deployed quotes from Romantic poets who revered nature. An example of this is how Lord Byron is conjured to express the unity of the individual with nature:

Now whoever has… become so absorbed and lost in the perception of nature that he exists only as a purely knowing subject, becomes in this way immediately aware that, as such, he is the condition, and hence the supporter, of the world and all objective existence, for this now shows itself as dependent on his existence. He therefore draws nature into himself, so that he feels it to be only an accident of his own being. In this sense, Byron says: ‘Are not the mountains, waves and skies, a part of me and of my soul, as I of them?’[27]

This unity that Schopenhauer is conveying is that everything of the same metaphysical principle, the will, thus nature in all its phenomenal manifestations and the individual are objectifications of the same substance, which only appear different from us because of the modes of our cognition.[28] And, because our cognition is more advanced than animals, which Schopenhauer draws a blunt picture of how rational people hold their heads freely on their shoulders unlike animals with their heads oriented towards the ground being ruled by their carnal bodies,[29] we can thus gain insight into nature itself.[30] This insight into nature, however, doesn’t lead to what Schelling described as the “holiest of holies,” but rather that the will is an insatiable blind force that produces suffering; a most hellish of hells.

It is often claimed that Wagner was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer’s account of the will after the completion of the Ring Cycle and incorporated aspects of it into his later operas. One such work, Tristan und Isolde, is often considered thematic of Schopenhauer’s ideas.[31] However, the Romeo and Juliet–like love-death (Liebestod) in the opera is not Schopenhauerian by any meaningful measure. It distorts Schopenhauer’s concept of the renunciation of the will, in which suicide is only conceivable as an extreme form of asceticism where one starves oneself to death in sheer denial of the will rather than as a response to the loss of a romantic partner.[32] Such a suicide that Wagner depicts is in fact an affirmation of the will, not a renunciation of it.[33] Schopenhauer makes this very clear: “The suicide wills life, and is dissatisfied merely with the conditions on which it has come to him. Therefore he gives up by no means the will-to-live, but merely life, since he destroys the individual phenomenon.”

Parsifal, the other opera often considered Schopenhauerian, makes a better case, as it espouses asceticism. Milton E. Brener concurs: “Schopenhauer’s book is filled with the call to asceticism. It oozes likewise from the pages of the Parsifal text.”[34] Worldly distractions are stripped away to reach a purer understanding of life.[35] This understanding returns to the unity outlined in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics; the pain of another is not truly different than one’s own.[36] This gives rise to compassion, which Schopenhauer sees as the foundation of his entire ethical system and one that he ultimately grounds in the concept of Eternal Justice.

Wagner

While Wagner’s admiration for Schopenhauer resulted in some of his ethical sentiments being expressed in Parsifal, it must be stressed that Wagner was not a strict Schopenhauerian. In his essay Beethoven, we see how the composer reinterprets Schopenhauer’s aesthetics in his own way, with what seems on the surface to be a lingering Feuerbachian belief that nature pervades all. Music is not given metaphysical autonomy as it is in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics,[37] but is rather dependent on the external world. Wagner makes clear his position:

Our consciousness, which only in gazing at a semblance is enabled to grasp the Idea manifested by it, might at length feel impelled to exclaim with Faust: “What a show! But, alas! a show only! Where shall I grasp thee, infinite nature?” Music gives the very surest answer to such a question. Here the external world speaks to us with such incomparable distinctness, since, by the effect of sound upon the ear, it expresses the very essence of our relations towards it. The object of the tone heard coincides immediately with the subject of the tone emitted; without any mediation of rational conceptions we comprehend the cry for help, or of plaint or of joy, and we answer it at once in a corresponding sense.[38]

This makes it clear that Wagner diverged even from his philosophical heroes and developed his own original philosophical positions. He wasn’t joined at the hip with the ideas of Feuerbach nor Schopenhauer as Bryan Magee infers. As such, more often than not, he should be approached as an independent thinker. As Michael Steinberg declares in The Philosopher’s Ring, the Ring Cycle itself has its own philosophical framework and culminates in a materialist idealism:

[Wagner] was not a philosopher of the first rank, it is true, but his talents in that direction were substantial. Though he was strongly influenced by many of the better-known thinkers of his day, he developed his own theories on topics as diverse as humanity’s place in the larger world, the limitations of human knowledge and the pitfalls of self-consciousness, the social function of art, the historical and cultural influences and constraints on artistic creativity, and the prospects for political transformation. More impressive than that was his ability to bring those ideas together into a single, surprisingly coherent world view.[39]

Conclusion

As influences, Feuerbach and Schopenhauer serve Wagner well in shaping his own outlook, in which art and nature appear as a convergent morphogenesis rather than entirely separate domains. What is needed, then, are further philosophical inquiries along the lines of Michael Steinberg’s work in The Philosopher’s Ring, which seeks to illuminate the originality of Wagner’s thought on its own terms rather than that of his influences. From there, perhaps it will become clear where his theoretical philosophy with its reverence for nature ends and where it is realized more fully in practice through his music, which is in line with Schelling’s proposition that art, not philosophy, is where nature’s truths are laid most bare. But for now, until that task is undertaken, we can always turn to Wagner’s music itself in order to experience those truths.

 

 

References

Brener, Milton. 2014. Wagner and Schopenhauer: A Closer Look. Xlibris.‌

Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1989. The Essence of Christianity. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

Feuerbach, Ludwig. 2006. The Essence of Religion. London, England. Kessinger Publishing.

Guthke, Karl. “Schopenhauer Reads Wagner.” Wagnersite.nl. https://www.wagnersite.nl/Schopenhauer/Arthur.htm. Republished from Harvard Magazine. Accessed: May 4, 2026.

Magee, Bryan. 2001. Wagner and Philosophy. ePenguin.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Peter Gay, and Walter Kaufmann. 2000. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2011. The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. Gloucestershire: Dodo Press.

Schelling, F.W.J.. 2001. System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2012. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1. Newburyport: Dover Publications.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2012. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2. Newburyport: Dover Publications.

Steinberg, Michael. 2026. The Philosopher’s Ring – Wagner as Thinker and Dramatist. Camden House.

Wagner, Richard. 1903. Beethoven. Third Edition. William Reeves Bookseller Limited. London, England.

Wagner, Richard. 1983. My Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

‌Wagner, Richard. 1995. “The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1): 104. https://doi.org/10.2307/431755.

 

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[1] Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, pp. 231-232.

[2] Wagner, The Art−Work Of The Future, p. 10. “The great United Art−work, which must gather up each branch of art to use it as a mean, and in some sense to undo it for the common aim of all, for the unconditioned, absolute portrayal of perfected human nature, this great United Art−work he cannot picture as depending on the arbitrary purpose of some human unit, but can only conceive it as the instinctive and associate product of the Manhood of the Future.” Gesamtkunstwerk is translated here as “great United Art-work” but is typically referred to as “Total Work of Art” in English.

[3] Ibid., p. 2. “AS Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man. When Nature had developed in herself those attributes which included the conditions for the existence of Man, then Man spontaneously evolved. In like manner, as soon as human life had engendered from itself the conditions for the manifestment of Art−work, this too stepped self−begotten into life.”

[4] Wagner, My Life, p. 429. “I had always felt an inclination to try to fathom the depths of philosophy.”

[5] Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 53.

[6] Ibid., p. 622. “Wagner represents a great corruption of music.”

[7] Ibid., p. 626. “Wagner begins from a hallucination – not of sounds but of gestures.”

[8] Ibid., p. 630. “To say it plainly: Wagner does not give us enough to chew on.”

[9] Ibid., p. 631. “Very decadent.”

[10] Ibid., p. 640. “Wagner has the same effect as continual consumption of alcohol: blunting, and obstructing the stomach with phlegm. Specific effect: degeneration of the sense of rhythm.”

[11] Ibid., p. 641. “Wagner is bad for youths; he is calamitous for women.”

[12] Ibid., p. 642. “[…] I declare war upon Wagner […]”

[13] Ibid., p. 647. “If Wagner was a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a church father!” This one is especially poignant, being that Liszt was heavily involved in the church and was trained as an exorcist.

[14] Nietzsche, The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, p. 70.

[15] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, pp. 29-30.

[16] Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, p. 7.

[17] Ibid., p. 12.

[18] Ibid., p. 13.

[19] Wagner, The Art−Work Of The Future, p. 2.

[20] Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, p. 40. “As the world, as Nature appears to man, so she is, i.e. for him, according to his imagination; his sensations and imaginations are to him directly and unconsciously the measure of truth and reality; and Nature appears to him just as he is himself.”

[21] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, p. 49.

[22] Ibid., p. 133.

[23] Ibid., p. 136. Wagner’s account in his autobiography of writing to Schopenhauer.

[24] Guthke, “Schopenhauer Reads Wagner.” Wagnersite.nl. https://www.wagnersite.nl/Schopenhauer/Arthur.htm. “Schopenhauer was particularly annoyed, as his vigorous question marks and critical underlinings (sometimes accompanied by multiple exclamation marks) suggest, by Wagner’s artificially archaic vocabulary. Nobody but an expert in things medieval would know today, any more than Schopenhauer did then, that a freislicher Streit is a ‘terrifying quarrel.’ Nor did infelicitous constructions, stylistic awkwardness, and illogical turns of phrase escape Schopenhauer’s angry pencil. Some of these passages are mildly funny, like the one suggesting that Erda does not know–to judge by her syntax in Rheingold–whether she gave birth to her three daughters or whether they were created at the dawn of time. Another such stylistic aberration, which rated one of Schopenhauer’s quizzically amused exclamation marks, eventually caught the dull eye of Wagner himself when he revised his text slightly: Wotan originally says about Wala in Walküre, ‘News I received from her; / but from me she received a child.’ What Schopenhauer found consistently exasperating about Wagner’s style were his characteristic composite nouns, like Felssteine, Felsensaum, Felsspitze (rocks, rocky edge, rocky peak). ‘Ears!’ Schopenhauer repeatedly penciled in the margin in his powerful hand, ‘he has no ears! the deaf musician.’ It is the sound of these and other such difficult words that go against Schopenhauer’s grain. The implication is, clearly, that Wagner is a poet-composer who is at odds with the building materials of his trade, “the deaf musician.” Schopenhauer summed up this criticism in large letters: ‘Language should be the serf of the master.’”

[25] Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Volume II, p. 450. “Now if we cast a glance at purely instrumental music, a symphony of Beethoven presents us with the greatest confusion which has yet the most perfect order as its foundation; with the most vehement conflict which is transformed the next moment into the most beautiful harmony. It is […] a true and complete picture of the nature of the world, which rolls on in the boundless confusion of innumerable forms, and maintains itself by a constant destruction. But at the same time, all the human passions and emotions speak from this symphony; joy, grief, love, hatred, terror, hope and so on in innumerable shades, yet all, as it were, only in the abstract without any particularization; it is their mere form without the material, like a mere spirit world without matter. We certainly have an inclination to realize it while we listen, to clothe it in the imagination with flesh and bone, and to see in it all the different scenes of life and nature. On the whole, however, this does not promote an understanding or enjoyment of it, but rather gives it a strange and arbitrary addition. It is therefore better to interpret it purely and in its immediacy.” Unfortunately, Wagner’s operas do not fit the Schopenhauerian ideal of absolute music.

[26] Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Volume I, p. 281.

[27] Ibid., p. 181.

[28] Ibid., p. 161. “Here I must refer once more to the larva of the male stag-beetle which gnaws the hole in the wood for its own metamorphosis twice as large as does the female, in order to obtain room for its future horns. Therefore the instinct of animals generally gives us the best explanation for the remaining teleology of nature. For just as an instinct is an action, resembling on according to a concept of purpose, yet entirely without such concept, so are all formation and growth in nature like that which is according to aa concept of purpose, and yet entirely without this. In outer as well as inner teleology of nature, what me must think of as a means and end is everywhere only the phenomenon of the unity of the one will so far in agreement with itself, which has broken up into space and time for our mode of cognition.”

[29] Ibid., p. 177. “This distinction between man and animal is outwardly expressed by the difference in the relation of the head to trunk. In the lower animals both are still deformed; in all, the head is directed to the ground, where the objects of the will lie. Even in higher animals, head and trunk are still far more on than in man, whose head seems freely set on to the body, only carried by the body and not serving it. This human superiority is exhibited in the highest degree by the Apollo Belvedere. The head of the god of the Muses, with eyes looking far afield, stands so freely on the shoulders that it seems to be wholly delivered from the body, and no longer subject to its cares.”

[30] Ibid., p. 177. “As it is the principle of sufficient reason that places the objects in this relation to the body and so to the will, the sole endeavour of knowledge, serving this will, will be to get to know concerning objects just those relations that laid down by the principle of sufficient reason, and thus to follow their many different connexions in space, time and causality.” Basically, human consciousness for Schopenhauer means coming to know the law of causality as it is present in time and space to then know its character outside of time and space (the will).

[31] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, p. 219. “Readers will remember that in Wagner the idea of a man and a woman being united in death, released by their love from the need for any further life in this world, goes back through Tannhäuser to The Flying Dutchman; but previously it had been based on rationally unsupported intuition, whereas now [in Tristan und Isolde] it has behind it the whole magnificent edifice of Kantian-Schopenhauerian philosophy.” This is a bad understanding of this line of philosophy.

[32] Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Volume I, pp. 400-401. “There appears to be a special kind of suicide, quite different from the ordinary, which has perhaps not yet been adequately verified. This is the voluntarily chosen death by starvation at the highest degree of asceticism. […] Yet it seems that the complete denial of the will can reach that degree where even the necessary will to maintain the vegetative life of the body, by the assimilation of nourishment, ceases to exist.” This is the only kind of suicide Schopenhauer condones, which is also practiced in Jainism.

[33] Ibid., p. 398.

[34] Brener, Wagner and Schopenhauer: A Closer Look, p. 168.

[35] Ibid., p. 161. Purity is required to drink from the grail.

[36] Ibid., p. 162. “I saw the wound bleed. Now it bleeds in me!”

[37] Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, p. 257. “[…] Music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are Ideas. For this reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.” Being that music is a copy of the will, it is not bound by the external world. This is what grants it metaphysical autonomy. Wagner denies this sentiment by making music dependent upon the external world.

[38] Wagner, Beethoven, p. 17. Wagner denies Schopenhauer’s notion that music has metaphysical autonomy by expressing that music is dependent upon the external world.

[39] Steinberg, The Philosopher’s Ring: Wagner as Thinker and Dramatist, p. iv.

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Dari Bay’s two Surprise Wish singles — last year’s “The Joke” and last month’s “We’re Gonna Be Okay” — both made our lists of the best songs of the week. Now, the project of Burlington’s Zack James is back with a third preview called “Chevy,” and it’s even better. “‘Chevy’ is me trying and failing…

The post Dari Bay – “Chevy” appeared first on Stereogum.

PETER AMISANO | Go Venue Magazine

Starlight Theatre hosted two rock legends on Saturday, May 16th, 2026. Hailing from Canada, both Triumph’s Rock & Roll Machine Reloaded tour brought two 80s legends, delivering nostalgic, 80’s hits to the outside crowd at the Starlight amphitheater.

While both bands had multiple hits back in the 80s, both got their start in the 70s and had hits from the same era. April Wine with “Roller” & “I Like to Rock” and Triumph with “Hold On” & “Lay It on the Line.” But the 80s is when they came alive. April Wine’s album, The Nature of the Beast, gave us multiple hits as did Triumph’s Allied Forces.  I was very much looking forward to this show!

April Wine came out swinging starting the evening with “I like to Rock” and from then on the crowd was on their feet. Next was “Big City Girls” and “All Over Town” both great songs from “The Nature of the Beast” album. Now I am a huge April Wine fan, have been for decades, as a matter of fact they were my very first concert. So, when Myles Goodwyn passed in 2023, I feared that was the end. However, Brian Greenway, long time member of April Wine continues to carry the torch. The music brought me back to very fond memories. The set ended with “Sign of the Gypsy Queen” and then “Roller” and they went out with a bang. Great show!

Next Triumph took the stage celebrating 50 years since the late 70s release of Rock & Roll Machine and it was a full-on rock concert. Starting the show with pyro and great songs. The show started with “When the Lights Go Down”, “Somebody’s Out There” & “Spellbound” a special treat was Rik Emmet being joined on stage by none other than Phil X to help share 50 years of incredible guitar work. It was a high energy show from start to finish filled with amazing musicianship and fist pumping rock and roll. The show ended with the hit “Magic Power” followed by encores of “I live for the Weekend” and of course “Fight the Good Fight.” It was an amazing show.

There are many more dates left in this tour, if you have the means to make it to one, I highly recommend catching this tour!

Triumph

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April Wine

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This is one of those things that is not terrible, but also is not good enough that you would seek it out again, mainly because this IPA still tastes like a normal beer with some lemon juice added.

The fermenty flavors of regular American beer, tamed a bit, intrude on the IPA nature of this beer, so that instead of a nice lemony bitter diatribe of forgotten hopes and failed dreams, you get a Michelob that someone poured a little bit of a real IPA into.

It is not bad. Far from it, it is very pleasant. But like most things California, it is mostly hype, and so you get fooled in the moment, but once you go home to think it through, you see the self-interest behind the hype and never will return.

The Smashing Pumpkins will return to the road this fall with The Rats In A Cage Tour, a North American run built around the 30th anniversary of the band’s 1995 double-album opus Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The trek opens September 30 in Columbus, Ohio, and runs through mid-November, with each show promising two distinct sets: one devoted to Mellon Collie and another spanning nearly four decades of Pumpkins material, from fan favorites to deeper cuts.

The band says the Mellon Collie portion of the night will be presented in a “highly theatrical setting,” while the second set will pull from the rest of the catalog, including songs from Gish through the band’s most recent album, 2024’s Aghori Mhori Mei. Corgan called the idea of a Mellon Collie-themed show something the band has discussed “for over a decade.”

Tickets go on sale to the general public Thursday, May 21, at 10 a.m. local time, following Citi and Verizon presales beginning Tuesday, May 19, and a VIZ CLUB fan-club presale on Wednesday, May 20. VIP packages will include a pre-show acoustic performance and Q&A with the band, lounge access, memorabilia, exclusive merch, and priority merchandise shopping.

The announcement follows several days of teasing that culminated in a “Requiem For ZERO” event at the Hollywood Legion Theater in Los Angeles, where 300 guests witnessed a symbolic funeral for ZERO, the silver-pants-and-star-shirt avatar Corgan first inhabited during the original Mellon Collie era. Before the tour begins, the Pumpkins will headline Lollapalooza in their hometown of Chicago on July 31, marking their first return to the festival in more than 30 years.

The new tour also arrives after an unusually active period for Corgan and company. The Smashing Pumpkins released Aghori Mhori Mei on Aug. 2, 2024, through Martha’s Music and Thirty Tigers, their first album after longtime guitarist Jeff Schroeder’s departure. Following an open audition that drew more than 10,000 applicants, the band brought in guitarist Kiki Wong for its touring lineup.

In 2025, Corgan also launched Billy Corgan and The Machines of God for the “A Return To Zero” tour, revisiting material from Mellon Collie, Machina/The Machines of God, Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music, and Aghori Mhori Mei. That same anniversary cycle included A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness, Corgan’s collaboration with Lyric Opera of Chicago, which reimagined the album with orchestra, chorus, and operatic soloists.

Corgan has also been busy behind the mic on his podcast, The Magnificent Others, with Billy Corgan, which recently featured a 97-minute conversation with David J of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets. In the May 13 episode, David J discussed growing up in working-class England, discovering reggae and punk, the accidental birth of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” and Bauhaus’ mission to dismantle rock conventions.

See the full list of The Rats In A Cage Tour dates below.

The Smashing Pumpkins — The Rats In A Cage Tour:

Sept. 30 — Columbus, OH — Schottenstein Center
Oct. 2 — Boston, MA — TD Garden
Oct. 3 — Baltimore, MD — CFG Bank Arena
Oct. 4 — Brooklyn, NY — Barclays Center
Oct. 6 — Pittsburgh, PA — PPG Paints Arena
Oct. 7 — Hamilton, ON — TD Coliseum
Oct. 9 — Montreal, QC — Bell Centre
Oct. 11 — Madison, WI — Kohl Center
Oct. 13 — St. Paul, MN — Grand Casino Arena
Oct. 14 — Chicago, IL — United Center
Oct. 16 — Charlotte, NC — Spectrum Center
Oct. 17 — Jacksonville, FL — VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena
Oct. 18 — Tampa, FL — Benchmark International Arena
Oct. 20 — Indianapolis, IN — Gainbridge Fieldhouse
Oct. 22 — Nashville, TN — The Truth
Oct. 24 — Oklahoma City, OK — Paycom Center
Oct. 25 — Austin, TX — Moody Center
Oct. 27 — Denver, CO — Ball Arena
Oct. 29 — Salt Lake City, UT — Delta Center
Oct. 30 — Las Vegas, NV — MGM Grand Garden Arena
Nov. 1 — Portland, OR — Moda Center
Nov. 3 — Calgary, AB — Scotiabank Saddledome
Nov. 5 — Vancouver, BC — Rogers Arena
Nov. 6 — Seattle, WA — Climate Pledge Arena
Nov. 8 — San Jose, CA — SAP Center
Nov. 11 — Phoenix, AZ — Mortgage Matchup Center
Nov. 12 — Los Angeles, CA — Kia Forum
Nov. 14 — Huntington Beach, CA — Darker Waves Festival

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The post The Smashing Pumpkins Announce “The Rats In A Cage Tour” Celebrating 30 Years of “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” and More! appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

STREAM THE FULL LOADED RADIO PODCAST INTERVIEW BELOW:

 

Tarja Turunen is currently standing at the precipice of her most aggressive musical chapter to date. As the Finnish soprano prepares for the June 12, 2026, release of her tenth solo studio album, Frisson Noir (Free-sohn Nwahr), she is finally addressing the high-octane evolution of her sound and her high-profile creative reconciliation with a former brother-in-arms.

In an expansive new sit-down on the Loaded Radio Podcast, the symphonic metal pioneer reveals why her new record is the “heaviest of her career,” the truth behind working with extreme metal icon Dani Filth, and what it really feels like to share a stage with Marko Hietala again in 2026.

Frisson Noir: Beauty Meets Brutality

After years of traversing cinematic orchestrations and rock landscapes, Tarja’s 2026 return to pure metal is a deliberate, hard-hitting statement. Produced by Tarja herself and mixed by the Grammy-nominated Neal Avron (Linkin Park, Disturbed), Frisson Noir marks a significant departure from her previous solo efforts, leaning heavily into industrial textures and aggressive riffing.

The album’s second single, “I Don’t Care,” features a shocking collaboration with Cradle of Filth frontman Dani Filth. Tarja describes the track as a “fierce declaration of independence,” pitting her soaring operatic soprano against Filth’s razor-sharp screams. “I have always admired how Dani has created a brand that stands out,” Tarja explains. “I truly believe he is perfect for this song, where I praise individualism and simply don’t give a shit about what others have to say.”

We Also Recommend – The Most Influential Women In Modern Metal Right Now (2026 Ranking)

The Hietala Connection: ‘Leap of Faith’ and the 2026 Reunion

Perhaps the most significant development for fans is Tarja’s renewed partnership with Marko Hietala. Following their overwhelmingly successful “Living The Dream Together” European tour circuit, the duo has officially immortalized their creative reconnection on the new track “Leap of Faith.”

The collaboration follows eighteen years of silence between the two icons, a gap that was finally bridged during their 2024–2025 world tour. On the podcast, Tarja reflects on the “natural and easy” chemistry she still shares with Hietala, noting that their shared history allows them to reinterpret their musical legacy with a fresh, modern perspective. The track is already being hailed as a centerpiece of the new album, combining Hietala’s gritty, introspective vocals with Tarja’s unparalleled power.

FAQ: Tarja Turunen ‘Frisson Noir’ and 2026 Updates

When is the new Tarja Turunen album being released?

Tarja will release her new metal album, Frisson Noir, on June 12, 2026, via earMUSIC.

Who is the guest singer on Tarja’s song ‘Leap of Faith’?

The track features Marko Hietala (ex-Nightwish), marking a major studio reunion for the two symphonic metal legends.

Is there a collaboration with Dani Filth on the new album?

Yes. The second single, “I Don’t Care,” features Dani Filth of Cradle of Filth.

Check This Out – “Female-Fronted Metal” Isn’t A Genre—These 13 Bands Prove Why That Doesn’t Matter

Artist Bio: Tarja Turunen

Tarja Turunen is a world-renowned Finnish singer-songwriter and a pioneer of the symphonic metal genre. After rising to global fame in the late 1990s, she successfully transitioned into a prolific solo career that spans ten studio albums and multiple chart-topping releases. Known for her three-and-a-half-octave vocal range and her ability to blend classical opera with heavy rock, Tarja remains one of the most influential and respected women in the history of heavy music.

STAY LOUD: Catch the full breakdown of today’s stories on the Loaded Radio Daily Podcast with Scott Penfold, or crank the hard rock and metal 24/7 on our live digital stream at LoadedRadio.com.

TL;DR:

Tarja Turunen has completed her heaviest album to date, ‘Frisson Noir,’ featuring collaborations with Dani Filth and Marko Hietala, marking a massive new era for the symphonic metal queen.

Does Tarja’s move into a heavier, more collaborative sound prove she is still the leading force in symphonic metal, or is the reunion with Marko Hietala the real reason 2026 is her biggest year yet? Let us know in the comments below.

The post The Heavy Evolution of Tarja Turunen: ‘Frisson Noir’, Reuniting with Marko Hietala & More on The Loaded Radio Podcast appeared first on Loaded Radio.