The black granite headstone is lost among the other markers in the Live Oak Cemetery in deep South Austin. Several small objects including a small plastic toy truck scattered around the simple flat tombstone are the only indication the dead […]
Blood Meridian singer Matthew Camirand has probably told the story a hundred times, but that doesn’t make it any less entertaining. When not singing and playing guitar in Blood Meridian, the easygoing musician serves as the bassist in Black Mountain, […]
Her voice sounds like the smoke from a hand-rolled cigarette, the day’s sweat clinging to sun-baked flesh and the exhaustion of working in a sharecropper’s dusty fields. It is old-time, perhaps even out-of-time, and it draws you in with its […]
“There’s enough money in the world for everybody to have some, so what is really going on?” –Roger Lewis New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin was emotionally and physically exhausted September 1, 2005, when he gave the now infamous “I […]
As Brent Best talks, roosters cackle outside his back door. “A low-rent Shangri-La” is where he’s living these days outside Denton, a university town in north Texas that his former band Slobberbone helped put on the musical map. In Slobberbone’s […]
Music features don’t usually germinate like this: My initial contact with John Brannen comes not in a club or via a publicist, but at a local preschool where, it turns out, both his daughter and my son are enrolled. Despite […]
Despite fan-generated rumors to the contrary, Kurt Wagner does not hate his home turf of Nashville. The earnest leader of the sometimes fourteen-piece ensemble Lambchop still lives there out of a kind of loyalty to its history and aesthetics. “I […]
“We try to take the music to different places, to challenge ourselves to come up with something we haven’t done before. But at the same time, everything we do is rooted in American music or Latin American music.” — David […]
Scores and scores of twentysomethings were gyrating (but also, you noticed, singing the words), filling the orchestra pit at the apron of the hallowed Ryman Auditorium stage. The same thing was going on in the aisles, upstairs and down, and […]
In the beginning, for aspiring young singer-songwriters, it’s generally all about writing a few tunes, rehearsing them with a band, getting some gigs, booking some studio time…and, if you’re lucky, there’s a record deal, followed by a long stretch of […]
