“People generally, even country music magazine writers, can’t seem to separate me from Maow. I’m never a country & western singer; I’m always ‘punk rock drummer sings country,’” laments Neko Case. She might not have to worry about that much […]
Leaving St. Louis in late September, Highway 61 takes one north, Missouri into Iowa, along the Mississippi, twin lanes unraveling past cornfields dying or not quite ready to die, silos overrun with reddening vines, beanfields, the river appearing aquamarine for […]
Mike McGonigal: Damned entertaining Please give Mike McGonigal a regular column. His essay on Harry Smith (and Alan Lomax, and Richard Davies, and Camper Van Beethoven, and Eugene Chadbourne, and Yo La Tengo, and Eleventh Dream Day, and many more) […]
The desert can be a hostile place. Just ask Lawrence Zubia, lead singer of the Pistoleros. “I think the weather here has a lot to do with our songwriting,” he says. “It’s just searing heat from May to October. A […]
The paint wasn’t even close to being dry on Studebakersfield, Charlie Chesterman’s winsome 1996 collection of meditations on love both lost and found, when he began thinking of what to do next. But not in the context of where to […]
“Most of us like our jobs,” Bill Herzog says, and he isn’t referring to those hours each week he, Joshua Medaris, Chad Shaver and Eric Akre spend together as Citizens’ Utilities. Indeed, the first news he shares isn’t about No […]
If a good ol’ boy such as Garth Brooks can fill Central Park, clearly the world needs a book (or two) that dismantles the machinery of Nashville, pokes around and finds out exactly how it operates. With his Unwritten Rules, […]
Jimmy Day walks into the ballroom of the Regal Riverfront Hotel with a hard-earned grace. It’s Labor Day weekend 1997, and about two blocks from the statue of Stan Musial, in the sweaty heart of St. Louis, the songs of […]
Every so often an artist appears on Canada’s geographically challenged musical horizon who seems to have been created in a vacuum. Oh Susanna, a.k.a. singer-songwriter Suzie Ungerleider, has become a musician to be reckoned with — although her marriage of […]
Former Byrds leader Roger McGuinn billed this concert as a “one-man play” based on his 1996 CD Live From Mars, which features a collection of live recordings that chronicle his career up to the dissolution of the Byrds in 1972. […]
