Elvis has inspired many a musician over the years, but rarely, if ever, in the way he catalyzed Virginian Karen Jonas. Watching an Elvis biography on the plane home from SXSW she was incited to write 8 songs in 8 days and add a few others pulled off the shelf from a previous writing spurt […]
Solid Gold Stranger – Closer to the Flame
One of my discoveries at this year’s Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival up in Grass Valley was a San Francisco Bay Area band, Solid Gold Stranger. In addition to their sets on both the Main and Pioneer stages, the members sat in individually with various other bands at multiple points in the weekend. All that in-demand […]
Lasers Lasers Birmingham – Mystery Highway
If you’re a musician in California, you can feel a bit cloistered. Between Palm Springs and Lubbock there’s a lot of not much. So faced with an 8+ hour drive to the next gig east of the Mojave, or picking up 4 gigs in the 400 miles from LA to San Francisco or Sacramento, it’s […]
AJ Lee & Blue Summit – City of Glass
Some bands have a birthing moment, a specific date they first played together. Others form in what is probably best described as an organic fashion. The latter is the case with Santa Cruz’s AJ Lee & Blue Summit. Two of the members, mandolinist AJ Lee and guitarist Sullivan Tuttle, first performed together with his siblings […]
Melissa Carper – Borned In Ya
A couple of years ago, at AmericanaFest, one of my highlights was seeing a trio that later called themselves Wonder Women Of Country; Kelly Willis, Brennan Leigh, and Melissa Carper. I was familiar with the beautiful voices of Willis and Leigh, but Carper was new to me. She added an authenticity and balance to the […]
Alice Wallace – Here I Am
Back in the day, the normal way to make an album was for the vocalist to go into the studio with musicians that did little else besides play on recordings being made for the name on the cover. Whether or not they knew the singer didn’t matter: they were musical craftsmen punching a time clock. […]
Nick Taylor – Not Alone
Over the years I’ve developed a knack for figuring out if I’m going to like a record pretty quickly. If it doesn’t pull me in after 10-15 minutes, another listen or two isn’t going to change my mind. Where I do get tricked occasionally is in the mood or style of the music. Bluegrass is […]
Matt Hillyer – Bright Skyline
One of the by-products of our social media driven lives is that nothing can be just OK anymore. You can’t be good at something, you have to be fantastic. There’s no such thing as a bad day; it was terrible. Despite the sparkle from your feed, the unfortunate reality is most of us are just […]
2024 Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival
Back in the mid-90’s I went to the Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival on a whim. I was staying nearby, didn’t have plans, and I like bluegrass. Voila. Now, thirty years later, the festival is still around and stronger than ever. So I decided to go up to Grass Valley again and see what’s special about […]
Cosmic Guilt – Palace of Depression
A friend of mine noted earlier this year there has developed a tiny silver lining to the Cat 5 hurricane of the pandemic. He observed that anyone still in the music business now is in it because they can’t live without it. The people who were doing it because they could, or because of peer/family […]