A niece once pronounced to me that all the great blues musicians are dead. Alvin Youngblood Hart, Guy Davis and Corey Harris show that’s not true, as they are among the best blues masters of my own generation. With Fight On! True Blues Vol. 2, these masters have created an acoustic blues timepiece that is […]
Tim Nielsen of Drivin N Cryin on Pop-up Gigs and Merch Sales
Tim Nielsen of southern rock stalwarts Drivin N Cryin talks about how he keeps busy, what sustains the band financially, and what the band’s drummer eats most nights while on tour.
Monday Morning Video – Dallas House Show Preview
There’s something about a Sunday afternoon in a Dallas backyard — relaxed, sunny, the kind of day that makes you remember why you love live music in the first place. We’ve been lucky enough to host some incredible artists at the Sunday Social over the years, and if we’re being honest, we’ve gotten a little […]
Now & Then: Charley Crockett’s Age of the Ram and the reach of Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs
Charley Crockett’s Age of the Ram arrives as the third and final entry in his Sagebrush Trilogy, a 20-song, 45-minute set built around the outlaw figure Billy McLane and cut again with Shooter Jennings in Los Angeles. The obvious move would be to compare it to some other modern revivalist country record, but Crockett is aiming farther back than that. This album is trying to turn country songs into a movie, or maybe into the memory of one, and that points straight to Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, the 1959 western cornerstone that helped teach later songwriters how to make myth feel personal.
Readers’ Pick: Charley Crockett – Age of the Ram
You picked Charley Crockett – Age of the Ram as your favorite new release for the week of April 3, 2026.
Built with an Old Hammer: Dale Watson’s Honky-Tonk Truth
Photo: Jacob Blinkentaff For Dale Watson, music started at home, not on a stage. It came from the next room, early in the morning, when his father picked up a guitar. “I would wake up to my dad playing,” Watson says. That introduction opened the door to a lifetime of listening. Records spun by George […]
Jennie Arnau on Sentimental Things and Touring in Hazel the Honda
Singer-songwriter Jennie Arnau talks about her favorite day job, the best payment found in playing music, and the lie that fear can be debilitating.
Kalyn Fay on Alliteration and Working as a Museum Curator
Oklahoma-based singer-songwriter Kalyn Fay talks about being gentle in spirit and song and offers some tax season advice.
Monday Morning Video – Tom Petty “You Got Lucky”
I have to admit that I was long jaded by the original video for Tom Petty’s “You Got Lucky” as it had little, if anything, to do with the song. Once I got past that, however, the song became a fave among faves within the Petty catalog. The song is, at its core, a pointed […]
Now & Then: Drayton Farley’s A Heavy Duty Heart and the reach of Trace
Drayton Farley’s A Heavy Duty Heart arrives like the sound of a songwriter stepping out of the dim room and into the bandstand without giving up the bruises that got him there. Released March 27, 2026, the record was cut live to tape in Nashville with his touring band and produced again by Sadler Vaden, which matters because these songs are still built on Farley’s plainspoken honesty, but they now hit with more lift, more room, and more faith in momentum. For the “Then,” Son Volt’s Trace from 1995 makes the most sense. Not because Farley sounds like Jay Farrar in some copycat way, but because Trace helped define how alt-country could carry working-class weariness, road-dusted poetics, and rock-band force in the same frame.