American Aquarium’s New Ways to Lose puts BJ Barham back in familiar territory, but with a wider lens. The songs still come from bars, back roads, family memory, and bad decisions, yet the focus has shifted from private wreckage to the social pressures around it. For a useful older reference point, Lucero’s Tennessee makes sense. Released in 2002, it helped define a Southern alt-country lane where punk urgency, country phrasing, and bar-band durability could sit in the same set without apology.
Readers’ Pick: American Aquarium – New Ways to Lose
You picked American Aquarium – New Ways to Lose as your favorite new release for the week of June 26, 2026.
Studio Spotlight/Tree Sound Studios, Paul Diaz
Back in the year of our Lord 2001 (in the year 2000…in the year 2000…) I ventured with my band to Tree Sound Studios to record. We liked what we’d heard with The Tender Idols’ album Distressor and saw that the guitar player produced it. So we struck a deal with the young Dave Cobb […]
Tony Kamel – Live at The Bunker
Over the years, releasing a live album has been a bit of a double-edged sword. Back in the day it gave bands who excelled in front of an audience a chance to show that off. Unfortunately, the sound quality coming off the sound boards back then was suspect, and sometimes just plain bad. Technology has […]
Low Cut Connie’s Adam Weiner on Parking Lot Meals and Touring with a 400-Pound Piano
Adam Weiner, pianist and frontman of Low Cut Connie, talks about driving himself to gigs in his own Hyundai while the band and crew travel in a 15-passenger van, rehearsing in a 200-year-old barn in New Jersey, and why he wishes he had learned the business side of music earlier than he did.
Monday Morning Video – Golden NYC
There’s a lot to celebrate when Golden Everything and Danny Golden come to Groove on July 9th for a Twangville showcase. Golden Everything’s Down Time drops July 17th — an EP recorded in a single afternoon, just acoustic guitar and two voices. They made it in the middle of another project, with day jobs and […]
Now & Then: Swamp Dogg’s Swamp Dogg Contemplates The Afterlife and the reach of Solomon Burke’s Don’t Give Up on Me
Swamp Dogg’s Swamp Dogg Contemplates The Afterlife belongs in the long line of soul records where age sharpens the writing instead of softening it. The album looks at mortality, memory, belief, and unfinished business with the plain speech that has always made Swamp Dogg hard to categorize. A useful earlier reference is Solomon Burke’s 2002 album Don’t Give Up on Me, a late-career soul record that gave an older singer room to use experience as the central instrument.
Readers’ Pick: Swamp Dogg – Swamp Dogg Contemplates The Afterlife
You picked Swamp Dogg – Swamp Dogg Contemplates The Afterlife as your favorite new release for the week of June 19, 2026.
The Palomino Club
If the Ryman is the mother church of country music, North Hollywood’s Palomino was its tent revival/medicine show cousin–a lot more raucous, less bound to tradition, but with no less passion about its spiritual foundation. I had the good fortune last week to attend a private screening of the soon-to-be-released documentary, simply called The Palomino, […]
Fruit Bats – The Landfill
If you’ve lived in the Midwestern United States you’re undoubtedly familiar with the trope about the highest elevation point being the nearby interstate highway overpass. Fruit Bats’ front man Eric D. Johnson realized that near larger towns and cities, those structures were surpassed by another manmade edifice of sorts, the landfill. Standing on these mountains […]