It is the century’s final winter solstice — the beginning of the solar calendar, the darkest day of the year, the point from which daylight begins to unspool itself in lengthening threads each 24-hour period until a midsummer night’s eve, […]
George Frayne may wear the tag of Commander Cody, but the original Commander Cody & the Lost Planet Airmen were always greater than the sum of their parts. Still are. Audiences were reminded of that for the first time in […]
Jim Lauderdale was an instant fan from the moment he saw Donna The Buffalo perform at Merlefest in 1998. They crossed paths again on the Newport Folk Festival tour that summer, and cemented their kinship onstage at Telluride the following […]
Anyone who has ever seen Lambchop in concert will know what an extraordinary sight it is. Thirteen musicians playing an assortment of instruments, mixing country, soul and rock. Often such overflowing undertakings result in a wishy-washy mess that pleases no […]
They were playing an Irish pub, and as the night wore down, the singer told the crowd that she knew a traditional Irish ballad. A simple a cappella piece, she’d learned it from a Dolores Keane record. The crowd cheered […]
For true music junkies, there is no pleasure greater than “the living room listening session,” an evening digging through record collections, sharing old favorites with friends, and, hopefully, picking up some new “old favorites” from them. On a cold January […]
Snow fell on a vacant Indiana University, and the campus lay quiet enough for visitors to hear the buzz of streetlamps. But inside Second Story, pretty little Bloomington turned dank and loud, smoked unfiltereds, refused cups and chugged pitchers of […]
The urge to write about music is rivaled only by the desire to play or listen to it. Outlets for music journalism — from mainstream newspapers and magazines to alternative weeklies and fanzines to the internet — have mushroomed, making […]
Thinking back, it seems the day Jim White got saved was really the beginning of everything. White would later embark in earnest on a life that was complicated, circuitous and frequently unpleasant. He would be a cab driver, a fashion […]
Woody Guthrie once said you can’t write a good song about something you’ve not directly experienced. But while Jason Wilber is neither a conjoined twin nor an ephedrine-addled trucker, he puts us in the freak show, in the fast lane, […]
