It’s no surprise by now that the opening, title track on Heather Myles’ new record Sweet Talk & Good Lies is a straight-ahead honky-tonk shuffle in the classic Bakersfield/Buck Owens mode. Nor that another, “One And Only Lover”, summons up […]
“I have pretty small dreams,” says Toby Burke. “And most people probably wouldn’t understand, but I’ve accomplished some of them.” Burke accomplished a dream from his boyhood in April, when he picked up the LA Weekly and saw his band, […]
Kelly Willis is out of control. And she loves it that way. “Life is really easy when you just let things go out of control,” she says. “You have to lose control to have control. That’s sort of a theme […]
The first time Leslie Woods went to an old-time music jam at a South Knoxville hardware store, she was too nervous to even take her Gibson J-45 acoustic out of the trunk. One of the regulars in the store’s Thursday […]
A voice we thought we would never hear again has unexpectedly returned. In 1987, Linda Thompson was recording a country album for Columbia Nashville with Herb Pedersen producing and David Lindley and David Grisman playing the session. It was meant […]
There are five of them now, these albums credited to a California desert aggregate called the Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers — or, in the case of the two most recent releases, Mark Olson & the Creekdippers. Five records in six […]
As dedications go, it’s refreshingly short, sweet and to the point: “Thank you to the people and places I come from,” singer-songwriter Pieta Brown writes in the CD booklet of her debut album. It’s how she sums up the close-knit […]
On Chuck Prophet’s gripping 2000 album The Hurting Business, one track stood out from the rest. On “Dyin’ All Young”, amidst a soulful but depressed groove, Prophet sang of a mother’s anguish upon discovering her son’s fatal drug overdose. “Something […]
UFOs spotted over Music City, USA? Just maybe…alien meddling is a pretty plausible explanation for Starlings, TN and its otherworldly hybridization of Celtic-flavored bluegrass, old-time string music and they-are-out-there psychedelia. On its debut disc The Leaper’s Fork (Chicken Ranch Records), […]
The musical partnership at the core of the Wichita Shut-Ins began a couple years ago at the Hideout, where Lawrence Peters played regularly with a loose outfit known as Deanna Varagona’s Gospel Jubilee. The crowd usually amounted to a dozen […]
