Blame Bob Dylan and his laying waste to the Brill Building division of labor between singers and songwriters for the lingering critical prejudice against pulling from someone else’s songbook. Herein, Canadian singer-songwriter Serena Ryder argues persuasively that there’s no reason […]
Reference points for this second release from longtime Lyle Lovett bassist Viktor Krauss are plentiful — Daniel Lanois, Bill Frisell and Ennio Morricone all spring to mind — but somehow Krauss comes off as more original than derivative. Employing effects-laden […]
Having transitioned from violin to fiddle, from instrumentalist to vocalist, Carrie Rodriguez is mesmerizing in her coming-out as a soloist and songwriter. Her mentor and duet partner Chip Taylor is still on hand, writing and co-producing, but the result is […]
There wasnt really a plan here just a few days of hanging out at Charlie Sextons home studio shortly after he and Shannon McNally had toured together which explains the hodgepodge of the material on this seven-song EP: two Sexton/Tonio […]
Songwriters are as properly wary of cliche as critics, but both know cliches often earn that designation because they’re true. So here goes: Chip Taylor’s new two-CD set — one disc is titled Unglorious Hallelujah, the other Red Red Rose […]
It’s difficult to re-create the songs of your youth without coming across as revisionist or overly reverent, but Dos Amigos finds Freddy Fender and Flaco Jimenez utterly relaxed and a trifle competitive on versions of tunes they heard on the […]
Few albums have been overtaken by unfortunate events as profoundly as Behind The Levee, the Subdudes’ now ironically-titled second album since their 2002 reunion. Understand, it’s a very nice record that won’t disappoint fans of the Subdudes’ second-line blue-eyed Creole […]
Fueled by the uncanny, sibling-tight vocal interplay and ambitious-to-eccentric songwriting of guitarists Sammy Llanas and Kurt Neumann, the BoDeans caught commercial and critical success in the late-’80s/early-’90s. Llanas’ keening, adenoidal gymnastics, the group’s most distinctive (and, occasionally, most annoying) feature, […]
The first surprise from the latest solo album by Frank Black is that the Pixies’ frontman has made a move (or at least a side trip) into Americana, with the alt-rock veteran playing acoustic guitar backed by session stalwarts such […]
Any recording that begins with invocations of whiskey, the devil, a full moon and mountains rolling to the sea to the accompaniment of a banjo industriously plinked in counterpoint to a fiddle and a harmonica is worth paying attention to. […]
