Hollywood may be its cultural capital, but parts of California are as real as Missouri or the Carolinas. Fans of Dave Alvin or Chuck Prophet may already have gotten this drift, but Jeffrey Halford’s Hunkpapa offers a more focused guidebook […]
Adam Carroll might be peddling short stories to the New Yorker today had he not fallen into a rock ‘n’ roll fantasy, namely the notion that he could get girls with a guitar. He’s not saying if it worked, but […]
For six weeks at all times of day, in every weather and circumstance, Viewfinder has made me feel good, and still does. I like it best driving along I-10 through the desert among distant rings of navy, red and smoke-colored […]
No less a figure than Greil Marcus said of Teddy Morgan’s 1999 HighTone release Lost Love And Highways that he would “have Hank Williams and Kurt Cobain high-fiving if they weren’t so pissed they didn’t see this coming.” That’s some […]
Kelly Hogan was perfection singing Richard Buckner’s “Blue And Wonder”, accompanied only by Andy Hopkins’ sensitive guitar and the melancholy keening of Jon Rauhaus’ almost human pedal steel. Perfection was the signature of this show, an evening of all but […]
“South By So What?” No doubt that song on Ronny Elliott’s 2000 release, My Nerves Are Bad Tonight, speaks for hundreds of artists for whom the annual confab is a boondoggle. Elliott thinks the song hurt his career, but more […]
This is the record to buy and learn, as Bucky Halker says in the liner notes, “for rebels who ain’t so jaded as to think that what’s good for Bill Gates is gonna be good for the rest of us.” […]
It snowed last night, and the trees are heavy clumped with white. Marc Benning is describing the view from the telephone in his recording studio, home of his record company, Hideaway. Out his window he can see Pike’s Peak, and […]
Johnny Dowd’s third release, Temporary Shelter, establishes him convincingly as one of the most talented depressives in popular music. He is also perhaps the most frightening. While Leonard Cohen and especially Nick Cave have trod that ground before, the gleaming […]
You don’t want to go down that old dirt road. That hundred yards of 45-degree incline pocked and puddled by yesterday’s monsoon wants something more agile than a nine-year-old Ford. A mule maybe. At the foot of it, though, is […]
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