Midnight. September 10, 2005. Nashville, Tennessee. Joe McMahan, Kevin Gordon’s guitarist, engineer and co-producer, stands back by the Station Inn bar and watches the John Cowan Band play to a packed room. “I don’t know about this crowd,” he says. […]
“I feel like we warned people pretty fair. We’d kind of hint that we might make a record like this someday. We tried to brace people a little bit.” In the days before they changed almost everything, things had not […]
This magazine exists largely to draw attention to undervalued artists, and yet in ten years we have managed to devote only one feature and a few small reviews to Gatemouth Brown, who died September 10 at age 81. He should […]
On consecutive August nights at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, Neil Young performed the entirety of his new Prairie Wind with close to three dozen musicians coming and going to fulfill the roles they played on the original recordings. Then, after a […]
The pair of tracks that open I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise, the transfixing new album by soul singer Bettye LaVette, vividly map the record’s prickly yet fecund emotional terrain. The first is an a cappella reading of Sinead […]
In a time when simply making music for ten years can count as a robust career, a near-decade-long hiatus from music may seem excessive. But Ottawa’s Black Boot Trio can honestly account for their time away from the fray. After […]
The subtitle signals Entertainment Weekly writer Chris Willman’s interest in a topic that, while maybe not the hot-button issue it was a year ago, till warrants attention. Why, Willman asks, was Natalie Maines condemned by country fans, radio, and conservative […]
Join Coinman wants to talk about his song “The Hero”. Although he’s never enlisted, “The Hero” is his war experience. Having found the place from which to write it, he’s haunted by it, like a crisis he can’t quite seem […]
For an artist as ethereally inclined as Laura Veirs, it was perhaps not the ideal weekend to be playing her first major Chicago gig. The music density level around town was way high, what with Farm Aid and the Hideout […]
There was a lot to absorb even before the first act took the stage at the fifth annual Spread Your Wings benefit concert. Spread Your Wings began in 2001 when Missi Ivie and Bob Graham, great friends to Charlotte’s Americana […]
