Minnesota is a strange place. It enjoys nearly equal fame for its fertile local music scene and its unforgiving winters. In that light, it seems only marginally ironic that the birth of The Billy’s occurred when the infamous “Halloween Blizzard” […]
Music by normally electric artists in an acoustic setting is supposed to bring out subtle nuances and showcase the strengths of both the songs and the artist. That’s the motivation behind Wooden Ball, an series of occasional acoustic sets by […]
For two mild winter nights, S.P.I.T.T.L.E. Fest (that’s Southern Plunge Into Trailer Trash Leisure and Entertainment, folks) transformed Raleigh’s premier frills-free nightspot, the Brewery, into a dance held at the grange hall on the other side of Mayberry’s tracks. Loosely […]
Monday night. It’s cold. I have one operational windshield wiper, and one headlight. I’m very sick of seeing snow. In this case, it’s that dirty snow that builds up on the sidewalks after the plows have their way. It’s five […]
A throng of friends stood mid-floor in the barn-like structure that plays home to the Student Union at the University of Texas during SXSW last March, and watched Lucinda Williams tear up the place. Sure, the band had only rehearsed […]
“Ladies and gentlemen…Jack Logan & Liquor Cabinet.” Doesn’t quite have the impact of “…The Rolling Stones,” but if the band continues to roll out the raging full-on show on display recently, it could. It was a revelatory live experiences, and […]
For the last few years, Drivin’ ‘n’ Cryin’ frontman Kevn Kinney has come up to the Northwest during the holidays to visit his father and play a few shows with his old friend from Georgia, Peter Buck of R.E.M. Kinney’s […]
For the second year in a row, winter was a little warmer in Seattle, thanks to this weekly series of midweek gigs by bandleader Ron Bailey and his cast of local yokels yodelin’ and pickin’ and moanin’ and grinnin’ through […]
Since Uncle Tupelo split and moved on, and The Bottle Rockets left town to tour about 366 days a year, the question has been nagging: Is the community that spawned these seminal bands still vital? By the end of the […]
Nowadays, it seems almost every musician in the incestuous Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle music scene moonlights in at least one country band. Two of the Triangle’s better side-project bands opened this show for Dallas’ Old 97’s, who were as charming as […]
