Some records feel assembled; Delusions of Grandeur feels inherited. The Family is Dylan LeBlanc, his father James LeBlanc and James wife and stepson Angela Hacker and Bay Simpson. The album carries the unmistakable weight of shared history, where blood ties matter less than the lived experiences that shape every lyric and harmony. Recorded at Muscle […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Naked Sun – Mirror In the Hallway
One of the vivid memories I have as a child is the annual county fair and carnival where I experienced my first hall of mirrors. As a kid it’s a wonderment: you see yourself fat, skinny, multiple eyes, all kinds of variations of what you know is you. Philadelphia’s The Naked Sun took a very […]
Chip’s Best of 2025
As seems to be the case every year, selecting a top 25 was difficult task for 2025. There are so many good albums not on the list, that I liked almost as much as what was included. However, selecting the top album was not hard this year. Wednesday – Bleeds was an obvious choice to […]
The Grahams – The Bridge
When we last checked into our Americana travelogue protagonists, Alyssa and Doug Graham, they had just finished the third segment in a 3-part journey across the landscape. It was a motorcycle ride down Route 66, and was preceded by a train tour of the country and a Mississippi riverboat cruise. For their newest release, The […]
Chip’s Best of 2025 – So Far
I thought I would kill two birds with one stone. My year end best of is a daunting task, so I am going to cut the challenge in half and try to get the Twangville readers to think about what their favorites are so far in 2025. No better to do that than give you […]
SXSW 2025: The Scene
For me, the true harbinger of spring is the arrival of the SXSW conference and festival in Austin, Texas. Or rather, spring begins for me when I arrive in Austin for the annual event. With upwards of 1,000 artists and tens of thousands of attendees from around the world, SXSW is the world’s premiere music […]
Blue Moon Marquee – New Orleans Sessions
Going to sound like my dad here, but I’ll challenge anyone not to tap your toes listening to the new upbeat, old-timey New Orleans Sessions from Canadian duo Blue Moon Marquee. The duo, which features A.W. Cardinal on vocals and guitar and Jasmine Colette on vocals and upright bass, captures a unique feel they’ve dubbed […]
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 […]