John Cowan–Comfort and Joy–Koch Other singers would crawl through broken glass to borrow John Cowan’s larynx for 15 minutes. While Cowan has always remained loyal to the progressive bluegrass he helped define in the ‘70s as the singer/bassist for New […]
As of this writing, there have been 46,837 rootsy singer-songwriter album releases in 2009. So what is veteran folk-rocker Catie Curtis to do to stand out among the overwhelming glut of strumming and emoting? Not by going back to the […]
As of this writing, there have been 46,837 rootsy singer-songwriter album releases in 2009. So what is veteran folk-rocker Catie Curtis to do to stand out among the overwhelming glut of strumming and emoting? Not by going back to the […]
There’s a nice song deep on Phonograph’s sophomore album, OKNO, that drifts along in a euphonious swirl of ambient-roosty, quiet-noisy, mainstream-indie, organic-electronic, Brit-influenced Americana. The song is called “American Music”, and ain’t it the truth. Indie-rock is a head-swimmingly dense […]
Brandi Carlile’s third full-length album, Give Up the Ghost, opens with a single strum and then the cuffed chugging of her acoustic guitar as the 28-year-old Seattle native starts singing in her warm alto. The song, “Looking Out”, builds to […]
The tendency among rock fans might be to dismiss David Mead as a lightweight on his new album, not with respect to his obvious prodigious ability, but for the softness of his music. One can imagine, for instance, the indie-rock […]
The obvious question is, “Why?” That is, why would a legendary artist go back into the studio and re-cut her best-loved hits for a new release? What makes Carly Simon’s new project especially confusing is that no one thinks her […]
Contuining a collaboration with producer Don Was that began with A Moment of Forever (1995) and This Old Road (2006), Kris Kristofferson went back into the studio this year with Was to make Closer to the Bone, a spare, mostly […]
Attention, Lyle Lovers: Your man is back with a new album, Natural Forces, his tenth studio album, and third consecutive for the Lost Highway label. Although, as you’ve no doubt learned, if he were always the man that you wanted, […]
Something unusual was present at the press conference before the Farm Aid 2009 concert in St. Louis: a sense of optimism. Obviously, the situation in which family farmers in America find themselves is bleak, but the activists, farmers, and artists—including […]
