“Breaking up” with a musician is a hard thing to do. A lot of folks, including myself, purportedly ended their Ryan Adams fandom after the 2019 New York Times piece that revealed several inappropriate relationships Adams had with women, especially those over which he exercised a considerable amount of career power. There’s no need to […]
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Adeem the Artist — White Trash Revelry If I’m being honest, I started following Adeem the Artist on Twitter because folks I listen to like them, and it turns out they’re damn funny. With that surface knowledge, I wasn’t sure what to expect when the non-binary country musician’s latest album hit my inbox. Before I […]
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Harvest (50th Anniversary Edition) — Neil Young As we approach the holidays, we find ourselves awash in reissues. And, while each one will find its niche, it takes not just great source material but exceptional bonus, “new-to-us” music to rise above the glut of old-white-guy box sets. Neil Young’s 1972 essential Harvest has received the […]
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Take the Southern rock fandom you’ll find every October during Jason Isbell’s week-plus run at the Ryman Auditorium, mix in the recent ticket frenzy over Taylor Swift’s stadium tour, and you might get a wisp of an idea of the fuss over Tom Petty’s 20-show stand at San Francisco’s Fillmore. Nearly a month of seatless […]
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Bo Armstrong — If your tired heart is aching… Let’s be honest for a minute – the reason we listen to the music we do is not because we hope to learn some grand, worldly truths. It’s because it taps into something we’re feeling. Songwriters don’t have many different experiences than we civilians do – […]
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The work of Brooklyn-based artist Moon Shine reflects the varied background of its creator, Angie Glasscock. Memphis soul, Nashville country and LA polish are combined on Moon Shine’s debut album, The Land in Between, named after Glasscock’s familial itinerance and the search for a home of her own. Glasscock’s origin story is explored in the […]
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Dropkick Murphys at Paramount Theater Denver There was a fear amongst longtime fans that Dropkick Murphys’ recent album, This Machine Still Kills Fascists, a collection of unpublished Woody Guthrie songs released in September, would shave some of the edge off the legendary Celtic punk band. Couple that with an all-acoustic, reserved seat-only tour, and concerns […]
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As a kid growing up in rural New York state, I may have idolized Springsteen, but I identified more with Mellencamp. Both Rock & Roll Hall of Famers were progenitors of the loosely termed “heartland rock,” but Upstate NY resembles southern Indiana much more than coastal New Jersey. Hell, I even grew up on what […]
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The Great Divide — Providence Far too many bands have started out with the self-imposed mission to “save” country music. Oklahoma’s The Great Divide is one of the few that succeeded in that quest, at least in their part of the world. The Red Dirt purveyors, emerging from the late 90s era of pop-country, recorded […]
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Kenny Foster — Somewhere In Middle America An old friend of mine was fond of the term “home truths,” a phrase which evokes a basic brand of wisdom, but can also represent an uncomfortable fact. Missouri native Kenny Foster takes a look at both of these sorts of home truths on his new album, Somewhere […]
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