Maybe all Kim Richey wants to do is have some fun. She’s contended that her 1995 self-titled debut, produced by Steve Earle collaborator Richard Bennett, was considered a country album only because she was signed to a country label — […]
0
Once upon a time, the Handsome Family hated music and they took it all out on you. Rennie Sparks, a solo performance artist and author of comically disturbing fiction, would cover a show’s many flaws with off-the-cuff non-sequiturs about, say, […]
Given the elasticity of his imagination, you’d think Johnny Dowd could write a simple love song. With “I Love You”, he gives it a valiant try. The result is a ballad clocking in at 1:16 that’s suitable for the Shangri-Las, […]
The Arizona-Sonora border is a long expanse of fragile ecosystems interrupted by less than a handful of legitimate border crossings surrounded by desperately poor and ramshackle villages. It’s also disrupted regularly, often tragically, by crossings of the illegitimate sort. The […]
It’s all probably a Zen thing, or that resolution of crisis and opportunity promised by a single Chinese symbol. When Howe Gelb was flat broke with a baby on the way, he qualified for the City of Tucson to foot […]
Patty Griffin has a voice as true as a bell, explosive as a firecracker, broken as a heart. It could hold its own with Natalie Merchant’s, Alanis Morisette’s or Jewel’s, but it swells and ebbs and breaks subtly with the […]
Fourkiller Flats is all but belligerently uncowed about wearing its Uncle Tupelo and Whiskeytown influences on its guitar straps. It’s a refreshing posture in the wake of the occasional anti-alt-country drift, and besides, on them it sounds good. The band’s […]
In sixteen short song-poems, Nina Nastasia fixes images of emotional realism as a curator would hang paintings in an exhibit. This is your life. It’s mostly alarmingly ordinary, its dark edges lending substance to your commitment to soldier on through […]
Almost from the time Troy Olsen was old enough to drive (that’s age 10 for a rancher’s kid), he’d take a truck up from his family’s canyon home to the highest point around, plug a TV into the cigarette lighter, […]
Howe Gelb’s instrumental Lull (Some Piano) might just make believers of those put off by previous outlets for his mainline to the muse. Somehow, with Gelb turned loose on keys, the sonic meandering that occasionally jars and wrenches from his […]
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
AVAILABLE NOW
AVAILABLE NOW
