Joan Baez sings and plays with such understated beauty and elegance that any song she interprets sparkles with glimmers of her just-right vocal phrasing and her cascading guitar work. Her newest album, Whistle Down the Wind, comes a decade after […]
The grand dame of modern folk music, Joan Baez, continues to command respect despite the fact its been more than 50 years since she first came to prominence. Baez will forever be considered an icon thanks to her role as […]
Dar Williams could be the most normal singer-songwriter to emerge from folk music in the last decade. That normality has worked in her favor: She stands out like a relatively uninjured thumb from the dogmatically angry and/or ethereally unthinking women, […]
1965’s Rubber Soul was the first Beatles full-length to drown out their fans’ screams with its musical innovations. It cut deeper lyrically, while interpolating the folk and country elements that were energizing contemporaries Bob Dylan and the Byrds. In light […]
Though Marshall Crenshaw has written plenty of catchy tunes about falling in love, the best cut on his first album of new material since 1999 is about falling out of love. Set to a buoyant melody that one could easily […]
A blast from the past kick-starts Deepcut To Nowhere, as stinging guitar lines and organ fills punctuate Graham Parker’s snarling vocals on the apocalyptic opening track “Dark Days”. Parker hits the ground running with the same soulful brew of gritty […]
By now you know the story. A seemingly motley assembly of musicians from some celebrated and semi-celebrated bands and of both the female and male persuasions fall in together over a number of years, drift across the continent from Los […]
The Continental Drifters’ 1994 self-titled debut sent a minor tremor through the roots-rock world. The fabled supergroup of Mark Walton (Dream Syndicate), Vicki Peterson (Bangles), Susan Cowsill (of those Cowsills), Peter Holsapple (dB’s), Robert Mache (Steve Wynn) and drummer Carlo […]
Dar Williams has never been afraid to see herself as a work in progress, and, as usual, it makes for fairly good art. Her acknowledgement of an ego apart from the Earth Mother most other female folkies bow to allows […]
Speaking with 16 Horsepower frontman David Eugene Edwards earlier this year, two things struck me. The first emerged from comments he made regarding his group’s fondness for “old things that have a timeless quality”; both 16HP’s typically old-timey, sepia-toned sleeve […]
