Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart, Lucinda Williams’ first album since suffering a stroke in November 2020, plays directly to those kids in the high school parking lot during a Friday night football game in the era when they’d […]
Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos is a collection that celebrates those who sat a piano or hunkered over a guitar with a paper and pen, scrawling, singing, strumming, and pounding until inspiration hit, either at home or […]
If there was any question about whether Tommy Prine would address the spirit of his late father, John Prine, on his debut album, This Far South, it’s answered handily on the record’s fifth track, “By the Way.” Being the child […]
A man of myriad moods, Matthew Stephen Ward from Portland, Oregon, can trade breathtaking tenderness for bitter despair in an instant, or display affection and contempt with a single breath. His transcendent Supernatural Thing captures indelible episodes of bright magic […]
On 2017’s Southern Gothic, Dan Tyminski headed down the roots music trail, and on last year’s One More Time Before You Go (ND story), he paid tribute to one of his dear friends and one of bluegrass and roots music’s […]
It’s been five years since the last Watson Twins album, the quite-good Duo (ND review). This week Chandra and Leigh Watson are back in a big way with the new LP HOLLER. Produced by Butch Walker, it’s a rollicking affair […]
Bobbie Lee Nelson is one of the great unheralded legends of country music. Her piano-playing — ranging from yearning contemplation to honky-tonk barrelhouse — provided the backbone for her brother Willie’s band on classic tracks like “Always On My Mind” […]
Perhaps there is some small comfort in knowing that musicians whose voices haunted your youth and whose songs drove your idealism are still making music that sounds like the music they made 50 years ago. Cat Stevens (now Yusuf/Cat Stevens) […]
There can be plenty of skepticism around joy, like it’s too pure, too earnest a feeling to be real. But when you give yourself over to it, as Detroit trio Bonny Doon seem to on their new album, the reward […]
It’s now been nearly two decades since Bettye LaVette’s debut, I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, on the indie behemoth ANTI- Records, which revitalized the R&B singer’s mostly thwarted recording career and sent her on a late-career hot streak […]
