“When Atlantic first recorded me, you know, I did ballads like ‘So Long’ and stuff from Broadway shows; Ethel Waters stuff, too. But one day I looked around and I had a tune with the tempo changed. And that they […]
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Watching Theater Fire onstage is like watching a ghost band. Instruments and voices fade in and out of the rootsy mix like weary apparitions. Donald Feagin and Curtis Heath, the group’s main songwriters and vocalists, appear at the microphone like […]
Thirty-odd years and a thousand songs ago, Pat MacDonald got the shit kicked out of him by members of the Green Bay West High School football team. MacDonald wore his hair long and in those days, particularly within three miles […]
It would be easy to dismiss Norfolk & Western as just another band in a long line of self-consciously antiquated alt-country acts (see Woven Hand, et al.). Consider the evidence: the gramophone they used to play onstage; their fondness for […]
“She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” Flannery O’Connor wrote in the short story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”. The nearness of death brought […]
What a bizarre artifact this book is! We can start with the title. Has anyone out there ever seen the word “dance” spelled like that? And just what are Texas music’s “badlands”? The place where nothing grows? It gets weirder […]
Plopped down within shouting distance of the replica of the Parthenon that dominates Nashville’s Centennial Park, the Springwater Supper Club & Lounge is a classically dysfunctional breeding ground for talent. A dingy, intermittently friendly place where musicians can try out […]
“I didn’t plan on jumping around from one arena to the next. But I love so many different kinds of music, I don’t find it difficult to go from one world to the next.” Joan Osborne It was heard by […]
A self-described late bloomer, Jenny Whiteley didn’t decide to dedicate her life to music until she was 24. That she eventually chose art over a steady paycheck wasn’t, however, overly shocking. The Toronto-raised singer-songwriter, whose third and latest solo album […]
“I was ignorant back then. I probably thought the size of the blues and soul field was greater than it really was. I should’ve known better, because records had to cross over to become monumental hits. And today, it’s not […]
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