Songs change your life. Maybe it was a record spinning in sleepy coastal town on a trip to Europe, a dubbed cassette you used to listen to each morning on dawn patrols or a surf journey detoured to ...

“I made up songs as soon as I could speak,” says Gordon Gano, the jovial singer and guitarist of Violent Femmes, a band that seemed fully formed when Gano was still a teenager. The band’s self-titled ...