Almost immediately after I get them on the phone, it becomes reasonably clear that, in the background, the members of Grace Potter & the Nocturnals are beating themselves senseless with something. “Tubes,” Potter reports, when I ask after the splendid, […]
The scenes that open Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, with Harry Dean Stanton alone in the desert and the sound of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar curling around like a memory or a premonition, are among the most striking and beautiful images […]
Don’t let the name, or the lush landscape depicted on the cover of their debut disc Invitation Songs, fool you. Seattle trio the Cave Singers are city boys. Guitarist Derek Fudesco hails from upstate New York, and singer Pete Quirk […]
In 1999, Cary Fridley left the Freight Hoppers to settle in Asheville, North Carolina. A year later, she released Neighbor Girl, showcasing the traditional Appalachian music she loves, on her own Juba label. While performing locally in various traditional contexts, […]
To that list of storied musical roads — Route 66, Highway 61, Broadway — Blackie & the Rodeo Kings’ Tom Wilson wants to add Highway 6. It’s a less-heralded stretch of blacktop that knifes through southern Ontario and, according to […]
A DAY THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMOUS: Sugar Hill Records band the INFAMOUS STRINGDUSTERS were big winners at the eighteenth annual International Bluegrass Music Awards Show held October 4 at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, Tennessee. The Stringdusters […]
King Wilkie: And deeper ruminations… After I got over the surprise of the unexpected name-check [in Barry Mazor’s feature on King Wilkie, ND #70, July-August 2007], I started thinking about music — hey, not as rare an event as you’d […]
A dozen paces behind me, in a double closet filled with camping gear, winter coats, a box of stray patch cords and, perhaps, the family of mice our declawed cats chase in the midnight hours, there lurks a cheap acoustic […]
He’s one of the most creative, unpredictable, fun-finding, fundamentally alive personages to have graced rock, country, and (but of course) Hawaiian and polka music over the past 50 years or so, but the first chance for most people to really […]
In Sia Michel’s heartbreaking yet inspiring January 2007 New York Times profile, Lee Hazlewood, dying of kidney cancer, summed things up succinctly: “I’m 77. I’ve been around long enough now. I’ve lived a pretty interesting life — not too much […]
