Frannie Kelley
Frannie Kelley is co-host of the Microphone Check podcast with Ali Shaheed Muhammad.
Prior to hosting Microphone Check, Kelley was an editor at NPR Music. She was responsible for editing, producing and reporting NPR Music's coverage of hip-hop, R&B and the ways the music industry affects the music we hear, on the radio and online. She was also co-editor of NPR's music news blog, The Record.
Kelley worked at NPR from 2007 until 2016. Her projects included a series on hip-hop in 1993 and overseeing a feature on women musicians. She also ran another series on the end of the decade in music and web-produced the Arts Desk's series on vocalists, called 50 Great Voices. Most recently, her piece on Why You Should Listen to Odd Future was selected to be a part of the Best Music Writing 2012 Anthology.
Prior to joining NPR, Kelley worked in book publishing at Grove/Atlantic in a variety of positions from 2004 to 2007. She has a B.A. in Music Criticism from New York University.
-
Musicians have to spend money and a lot of time to hit their crowd-funding goals, so failure is expensive. But for some people, at specific moments in their careers, crowd funding can be a piece of the puzzle. -
Gospel, R&B, politics, family and commerce (and 400,000 fans) all merge at a music festival in New Orleans. -
Solo rappers might be the norm, but one Los Angeles management company is hitting with a group. -
In Washington D.C., Brown is revered as the Godfather of Go-Go. So to have Brown play in a corner of the NPR Music offices with an 11-member group was dream come true for a lot of NPR staffers. -
Read an interview with the 44 year-old rapper, who's been defying conventional wisdom since 1988. -
In this unreleased track, the Alabama rap duo tells a familiar story conversationally and visually. -
Metronomy, recently nominated for the Mercury Prize, calls its song "Some Written" "a bit weird." -
A stunt, a joke or a big lie? There was nothing special in the story behind the New Jersey-based band Delicate Steve. A press release used to promote the band, on the other hand, was something altogether more fantastic. -
The elder statesman of West Coast rap says his new single is punchlines and fun. Don't overthink it. -
On the Houston-based singer's new song he needs help; then he asks for it, and he gets it. And after he's got some help, he gets a little playful -- drops a trill, brings in more dynamics. "I've wasted so much time," he says 45 seconds in -- and by minute four he's decided to stop doing that. -
Many of the songs on this, the soul singer's third album, are speedy, more purposeful and insistent than the songs for which Bilal is known, like 2001's steamy "Soul Sista" and "Reminisce." But the tiny details make Airtight's Revenge surprising. Hear the album in its entirety until its release on Sept. 14.
-
It's not quite right to suggest that Wilson transformed NPR Music's office into a church earlier this summer. It's more like he made us realize that church music can be played just about anywhere.
