As anyone in the industry can attest, building a life as a musician is not for the faint of heart. In the case of itinerant drummer and vocalist Darlin’ Brando, nee Brandon Goldstein, he’s moved across the country more times than I’ve moved my furniture. After a repeat stint in LA he’s back in Nashville […]
Ruby Dice – Take Me Back
Like John Muir’s move to Yosemite Valley or E.B. White’s move to a Maine farm, sometimes a simple next step in life’s journey becomes the focus of a writer’s career. Clearly without the hindsight of those two examples, I wonder if a similar pivot is happening with Gunnison, Colorado-borne, but now resident of Austin, bassist […]
Bronwyn – Rattlin’ Bones
It seems like there are two trajectories young bluegrass musicians follow when they break into awareness by the broader Americana audience. One arc is to toil away for years perfecting your entire craft before bursting onto the scene with arena shows. I’m looking at you Billy and Molly. The other, more linear path, is exemplified […]
Aaron Lee Tasjan – Get Over It, Underdog
Success as an artist can be hard to quantify. Many of the greatest painters the world has ever known died penniless. Most of us have favorite musicians that we’re mystified why they haven’t become superstars. The flip side of that coin is when some success does come, it can be hard to understand why you […]
Effie Zilch – Higher Calling
Back in the middle of the 20th century, the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper had a legendary columnist, Herb Caen, who wrote about the issues of the day affecting the working and middle class families that called the City home. To make sure he didn’t veer off into pedantic topics of interest only to insiders or […]
The Mike Jacoby Electric Trio – Welcome to the Family
In this day and age of social media, where influencers constantly woo sponsors and opinions are carefully crafted to enrage, it seems the willingness to not take oneself too seriously is becoming a lost art form. Southern California’s Mike Jacoby is a light in that darkness. From an album cover shamelessly imitating Elvis and The […]
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 […]
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 […]
Trever M. Keith – We Drank From a Poisoned Well
One of the popular plot lines in a number of current TV shows is about someone with a regular life who, it turns out, was trained as an assassin/spy/renegade. Then their memory was wiped so they could live a normal life until some trigger brings back the badass. There’s some parallel to that in musician […]