The back story for this enchanting debut is all about words, about how singer and principal songwriter Mark Ray Lewis was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and how he won an O. Henry and a Pushcart for his fiction. The […]
The back story for this enchanting debut is all about words, about how singer and principal songwriter Mark Ray Lewis was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and how he won an O. Henry and a Pushcart for his fiction. The […]
Writers fairly consistently and fairly accurately yoke Tom House to tradition — the mineshaft caterwaul of Dock Boggs, for example. But House also seems to occupy his own musical world, a surreal, American primitive landscape full of fleabag beauty, poetic […]
String-band music has transformative power. Though they began as punk rockers, Starlings TN found artistic fulfillment by tapping into the true world-on-a-string. Like the Gourds, Starlings TN emerged from Louisiana’s rich sonic gumbo with acoustic guitars. But where the Gourds […]
Graham Lindsey is nothing if not gutsy. A Wisconsin native, he played in punk bands before he could drive, left home at 14, and has lived in bare abodes and basements in New Orleans, Brooklyn and rural Nebraska. But all […]
It’s a little frustrating for reviewers, at least this one, when the record label gets off a pre-emptive-strike description that leaves you scrambling for a different angle. But why fight it? Barn Burning is early 80s Athens jangle gone Walden, […]
“I woke up hugging myself but I was calling your name.” That image of frustrated isolation fits so many of the trapped souls in Tom House’s work. It leads off his fine new album, Long Time Home From Here; and […]
Given the elasticity of his imagination, you’d think Johnny Dowd could write a simple love song. With “I Love You”, he gives it a valiant try. The result is a ballad clocking in at 1:16 that’s suitable for the Shangri-Las, […]
Marlee MacLeod’s resonant voice is reason enough to lend an ear to these eleven originals (and one cover), but her songwriting and lead electric guitar playing are two more reasons. We may as well throw in her mandolin, banjo, Wurlitzer […]
Gurf Morlix, the self-named producer and sideman for everyone, can, it turns out, write like a mother, sing like a mother: in short, deliver like a mother. Alt-country/folk-rock in the vein of once or future Gurflings such as Buddy & […]
Middle age may be discovered in that moment when life’s surprises are no longer viewed with hope but with trepidation, when dreams focus on the past, not the future. Tom House’s third and most fully realized album explores what comes […]
FRESH TRACK: Sue Foley – ‘Nothing in Rambling’Check it out
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