Twangville

A music blog featuring Alt-Country, Americana, Indie, Rock, Folk & Blues. Est. 2005.

Monday Morning Video – Joe Strummer

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Joe Strummer never stopped being Joe Strummer. Long after the Clash, long after the revolution was supposed to have been televised and filed away, he kept showing up — in dive bars, on festival stages, at record stores in lower Manhattan — still swinging. This 2001 clip finds him in a New York record store […]

Now & Then: Hiss Golden Messenger’s I’m People and the reach of Veedon Fleece

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A good Hiss Golden Messenger record does not arrive like a statement from a mountaintop. It pulls up beside you at a gas station, coffee gone cold, with a half-finished thought about mercy, children, money, God, and whether the map is helping. I’m People fits that line perfectly: a road record with home on its mind, full of M.C. Taylor’s worn-in gospel of doubt and persistence. For a “Then,” Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece makes the sharper companion, not because Taylor sounds like Morrison, but because both albums use travel as a way to measure the soul’s weather.

Good Taste and Short Songs: Teddy Thompson on Influence, Restraint, and Never Be The Same

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Teddy Thompson doesn’t talk about influence so much as drift—what finds its way in early, what stays, and what quietly shapes a life without ever announcing itself. On his new album Never Be The Same, Thompson returns to original material after a stretch of country covers records, this time working with producer David Mansfield. The […]

Now & Then: The Milk Carton Kids’ Lost Cause Lover Fool and the reach of Bookends

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Some duos sing together. The Milk Carton Kids still seem to share one lung. On Lost Cause Lover Fool, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan return to the close-mic folk architecture that made them feel less like revivalists than custodians of a fragile old machine. The “Then” is Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 Bookends, a record that proved two voices and sharp writing could carry the weight of memory, aging, distance, and national unease without raising the temperature much above a murmur. Lost Cause Lover Fool was released April 24, 2026, with nine songs on Far Cry Records/Thirty Tigers.