Seven hours with with the King of Lo-Fi. What to do? Start with soundcheck, detour to a homemade dinner and the kindness of strangers, end up backstage with a scaredy cat poster, drink beer, rock out, then laugh a lot. Here’s a photo gallery of the first day of summer, BackstageRider-style. There’s even rockhands.

FROM THE VAULTS: Another random diary entry from the BSR, in which our heroine finds herself hanging out with one of her fave bands from Cincinnati, Afghan Whigs, while they watched porn and chuffed up lines. “Now, THIS is the rock n’ roll life,” she thought. “Holy crap, it’s pretty sad.”

NXNE has grown like Galactus over the years, and might soon be ready to eat a small planet or two. And in our so-far short lifetime, Backstage Rider has been all about bringing you the rock (and punk and alt-folk and dance and stuff). Here we combine bands we’ve covered, with bands that are playing this week at NXNE. See what we did there? Clever, no?

Few two-pieces make as much wonderful noise as Becky Black and Maya Miller from The Pack a.d. Bask in their rocktacular glow with a gallery from June 4, with ADDED ROCKHANDS.

Massive Attack live and blindingly good at Vancouver’s Malkin Bowl, May 29th. Behold this gallery with light show bonanza. The Backstage Rider celebrated her birthday remembering time she had a chance to meet Massive Attack, but couldn’t think up a good enough opening salvo, so walked on by. Nevermind, they were still fugging awesome. Even in the rain.

The National are back! The National are back! High Violet launches today and comes with a marketing juggernaut. Also find out why on May 15 you should be glued to your computer and turn up the speakers.

Aren’t awesome international media darlings supposed to play awesome venues when they’re back in their hometown? Yeah, that’s what we thought. But nevermind, we will let you live, Japandroids. For you have brought the punk rock back.

Pictures of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Axl Rose, John Taylor from Duran Duran, oh and the new video from The Nervous Wreckords featuring one Mr. Brian Karscig and the hot Lindsay Matheson. They’re just “Doin’ it to do it”, don’tcha know.

Guilty About Girls has a new video out for the poppy little number, “Candy Candy”. They shot it this past weekend. Here it is in all its black and white glory, served up with some colourful anecdotes. Would you like fries with that?