Although younger than Willie by almost 30 years, Warren Haynes is maybe the last leaf on a different tree. With the recent passing of Dickey Betts, Haynes is now the elder statesman in a large group of southern rock and jam band musicians building on the legacy of The Allman Brothers Band. He just released […]
Jeremy Dion – Bend In the Middle
It’s not unusual for musicians to have day jobs while they’re getting established, and frequently continuing it throughout their careers. You can read about many of them in our Why It Matters column. This is the first time, though, I’ve heard about the day job being a mental health therapist. Such is the case with […]
Yonder Mountain String Band – Nowhere Next
Although the roots go back further, the progressive, jam grass arm of the itself-upstart bluegrass genre really started hitting its stride about 25 or 30 years ago. One of the handful of bands that’s been around since then is Colorado’s Yonder Mountain String Band. Their 11th studio album, Nowhere Next, has just come out, and […]
West Of Texas – Hot Motel Nights
There’s a memorable line in The Blues Brothers movie where Jake asks the proprietor’s wife what kind of music they play and she confides, “oh, we have both kinds, country AND western.” I get that same sentiment from the latest album out of L.A.’s West Of Texas, their sophomore release Hot Motel Nights. Although front […]
The W Lovers – For A Day Or A Lifetime
I’ve heard many chefs wax poetically about how their success came not from 10,000-hour-developed technique or an encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s cuisines, but rather from the restraint needed to let really good ingredients showcase themselves. I get that same sense of coaxing the beautiful out of the basics from the latest album from Seattle-based […]
Loose Cattle – Someone’s Monster
Everyone is someone’s monster. That’s the premise of New Orleans musical duo Kimberly Kaye and Michael Cerveris, and their band Loose Cattle, on their new album. Although it could have been the theme for a Halloween release, the pair focused not on the monsters but on how people deal with them and, sadly, how society […]
Teddy and the Rough Riders – Down Home
If you’ve been to Nashville recently you know the city has grown like a weed. Whether you’re in the music industry, the medical industry, or the bachelorette party industry, everyone is from somewhere else. Everyone, that is, except Teddy and the Rough Riders front men, Jack Quiggins and Ryan Jennings. They actually grew up just […]
Garrett Owen – Memoriam
The words “surprising” and “folk music” rarely appear together in the same sentence. There are plenty of good reasons for that. Perhaps the most common is just that people like what’s familiar. Most artists are trying, at some level, to perform music their fans like. So picking up where you left off the last time […]
Long Prairie – By Sunrise
Movies made the transition to color from black-and-white along about the time of The Wizard of Oz, held back only by the economics in the years of the Depression. Photography, on the other hand, maintains a vibrant vein of black-and-white artistry to this day. Monochrome enhances the effect of light and shadow without the distraction […]
Amy Speace – The American Dream
In this year of election divisiveness perhaps no topic separates people more than what it means to live the American dream. When I saw the title of Amy Speace’s latest album, I wondered how she was going to address the issue. Instead of painting a picture of what it is, Speace instead offers vignettes of […]