I recently had the pleasure of writing a hybrid review/interview about Kacey Musgraves’ new album, Pageant Material, for The Houston Press. It’s a lovely LP, but timeliness standards being as they’ve always been, I had to consume it like I […]
Saturday was fuckin’ perfect. For the first time in 37 years, a colt galloped to victory in the Belmont Stakes to claim horse racing’s Triple Crown. It was 80 degrees in Seattle–mild by Texas standards, but a scorcher to the average Northwesterner. […]
When Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow” won Song of the Year at the CMAs last year, it was heralded as something of a miracle, with Musgraves herself arriving at the podium and exclaiming, “Do you guys realize what this means […]
I have a day job which requires me to pay close attention to bullshit celebrity rivalries, which brings me, naturally, to Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. The two share some dancers, and enough of them purportedly chose Perry over Swift to […]
Everybody’s looking for the next Doug Seegers, the homeless Nashville singer who was literally discovered on the side of the road by a foreign film crew before he found himself cutting an album alongside the like of Emmylou Harris, Buddy […]
Falsetto singing can be lovely and all, but the practice has definitely reached its saturation point among male vocalists. It’s gotten to where a man simply sounding like a man over the course of an entire album seems downright revelatory, […]
One of the more unfortunate limitations of the word “Americana” is that it could give someone the impression that the genre’s music should be restricted to the Lower 48. That’s nonsense, of course. Artists like Kasey Chambers and Paul Kelly produce […]
The best thing about being a music writer is that you get sent a lot of free music. That’s also the worst thing. As with any art form, there’s a lot of crap out there. But oftentimes unexpected treasures will […]
Don Forgey was in his mid-20s when he met 18-year-old Kathy Ackerman at Washington state’s Whistlin’ Jack Lodge, a Depression-era hostelry in the woods east of Mount Rainier that’s named for a giant, noisy squirrel (the hoary marmot). Forgey, now […]
The Colorado bluegrass duo Taarka takes its name from the sound of Indian spices roasting. With these simple facts in mind, their music is just as rootsy and hippie-ish as you’d imagine it to be, and I don’t mean that in a […]
