“I got a rock.” When Charlie Brown first uttered those words one fateful Halloween, he sounded crushed. But for Seattle producer and engineer Tucker Martine, the exact same discovery — albeit many years later — triggered an epiphany. As a […]
Since the release of her self-titled Rounder debut in 2004, Alecia Nugent’s pretty much heard it all — the bluegrass “rules” that insist an artist is supposed to play an instrument; that a bluegrass album is supposed to have banjo […]
One year, just before the International Bluegrass Music Association left Louisville’s Galt House hotel complex for Nashville, the Avett Brothers were invited to join the festivities. “For three or four days the hotel is bluegrass central,” remembers bassist Bob Crawford. […]
Except for those rare out-of-the-way primitive societies untouched by current events, everyone’s life is different after a world war, usually for the worse. Technologies which would ordinarily (that is, in peacetime) take decades to develop through the organic and creative […]
I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. –Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” “It’s not like we’re abandoning […]
The third album from Dave Knudsen leads off with the subtle sounds of birds chirping and dogs barking, and then Knudsen’s voice, which sounds a lot like Steve Forbert — that is, if Forbert could sing. He makes J.J. Cale […]
He knew it was a dream, for he’d nurtured it carefully all those years back home in Cougar, Washington, and then down the road in Portland, Oregon, where he tried it out onstage in some pretty bleak bars. But even […]
“For every Jeff Tweedy or Kelly Hogan,” Bloodshot Records founder Rob Miller says, “there are two or three people behind them who you don’t see. They’re the ones helping this community to survive.” Miller was explaining the importance of sound […]
Journalists writing about Jackie Greene generally fixate on three main topics: his youth, his uncanny similarities to Bob Dylan, and the perceived bluesiness of his music. While it’s true that Greene released his first three albums before turning 25, and […]
“Storms never last, do they, baby?” she’d asked — no, maintained — in a celebrated song she wrote and recorded in 1975, a tune later recorded by her husband Waylon Jennings, and by the two of them together. “Bad times […]
