When Calexico’s primary members and writing team, Joey Burns and John Convertino convened at the home studio of their keyboard player Sergio Mendoza last summer it may have seemed unlikely that the rock press would be discussing an 18 year-old album track off their Feast of Wire album by the end of 2021. Turns out…
Very few fans of The Hold Steady have any doubts about the story writing ability of singer/songwriter Craig Finn, but if anyone did by the release of the band’s sixth and last release, 2014’s Teeth Dreams, we now have three more solo albums by Finn that speak to his skill set. With the most recent…
With a band like The Charlatans, where they have overcome overwhelming odds while continuing to record music after 28 years, the fact that they are still at it is something worthy of acknowledgement. Coming up in the Manchester music scene in the wake of the success of the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, The…
Dan Auerbach is now at a musical level where everyone takes notice when he is involved with a project. It does not matter if he is producing records from the likes of The Pretenders, Cage The Elephant or Ray LaMontagne, playing in his side band The Arcs or his day job with The Black Keys….
Remember back to hazy, crazy days of the summer of 2008, when people were listening to folk music again, and we all fell in love with an indie act from Seattle that was leading the pack with their strong vocal harmonies and catch folk pop songs? Younger fans were intrigued with the new sounds that…
There are not many records that capture an era like the Singles soundtrack. Grunge stormed the scene in 1991 with the explosion of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains leading the way. It was a movement that single handedly halted the music world, ended hair bands as we knew them and birthed muscular…
Like most everybody else, I first discovered The Shins in that great scene in the coming of age movie Garden State (2004) where Zach Braff’s character tries on the headphones of Natalie Portman to hear a brief snippet of the song “New Slang,” from the band’s 2001 debut album, Oh, Inverted World. That exposure worked…
A decade into their relationship with Bloodshot Records, Ha Ha Tonka release their 5th album of rootsy Mid-American college rock and Ozark mountain music. Formed in West Plains, Missouri, way at the bottom of the state almost to Arkansas, named for a state park in the Ozarks, bar-tested in the college town of Springfield, Ha…
As an introduction to “Honest I Do,” on this second live album in just 3 years time, blues guitarist Gary Clark Jr. offers this shout out to his influences, “We wouldn’t be doing this thing if there weren’t great artists like Jimmy Reed, Albert King, Freddie King, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, so we’re…
It can be a humorous undertaking, if also frustrating as hell, to watch the music industry flail around in its search for the Next Big Thing only to play a seemingly endless game of “follow the leader” every time something fresh and unique breaks through the public consciousness. Once the British Mumford & Sons began…
