When Ricky Skaggs climbs into the saddle with Kentucky Thunder, it’s a mighty rush and flurry, and that power stands as a classic demonstration of how fiery bluegrass can be. Yet bluegrass also embraces a soft sweetness that seems polemic. […]
When you rise from the fire, there’s the danger of taking yourself too seriously. Then add the yoke of being the continuation of southern rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd, and there’s a certain frozen-in-the-spotlight nature that seems inherent. For brothers Donnie […]
You have to watch the quiet ones. Sometimes the loudest truths are served with a whisper. Gretchen Peters, who has written some of country’s most intelligent songs of life’s complications, offers a hushed benediction for a woman emerging from the […]
Lori McKenna has always loved the same boy. She first laid eyes on him in third grade. They started dating in their junior year, married when she was 19. To some people, that might seem crazy, penned in, missing the […]
When “Romeo’s Tune” bubbled out of late ’70s car radios, it was a wide-eyed kid from the small-town south trying to get the girl with every innocent fiber of his being. Three decades later, Steve Forbert — the Mississippi troubadour […]
Maybe the most perfect prayer is uttered on a National steel guitar. If Tools For The Soul is the hymnal, then Tulsa roots poet/guitarist Danny Flowers has created a compelling sanctuary for one’s faith. Be it the quiet meditation of […]
“I feel like I should say thank you when I finish my interviews,” says the always polite postmodern troubadour Willy Mason, voice creaking a bit like a rusty hinge. “Because they’re almost like therapy sessions.” Since being tagged as yet […]
You have to start at the end — where they paid respects to Townes Van Zandt, the songwriter/compadre who captured the essence of life after being on the lam in “Pancho & Lefty” with the snippet, “The desert’s quiet and […]
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 […]
Roger McGuinn’s pick prints are all over the tableau of pop music. Those 12-string jangles and cosmic hooks were the stuff that ignited the psychedelic folk-rock era. And from acts as diverse as Tom Petty to R.E.M., he also informed […]
