Author: Andrew Gulden

After less than 24 years on this planet, Colter Wall and his voice carry the gravitas of an elderly Johnny Cash if he’d been buried in the soil of Wall’s Saskatchewan home. On his second full-length album, Songs of the Plains (Young Mary’s Records), Wall uses original compositions and traditional tunes to tell lesser-known tales […]

Our collective favorite genre, Americana, has been around long enough to borrow from many musical sources – R&B, bluegrass, indie, etc. But the nebulous field of “80s music” has not had much of a presence here. Austin-based trio Nobody’s Girl looks to change that, bringing pop sensibilities to their new EP, Waterline. All three members […]

Some folks, once they reach adulthood, leave home and never look back. Others rarely leave home, dying mere miles (or even feet) away from where they were born. But it seems that wisdom and maturity is best gained by those who move and travel about but never forget whence they game. We’re All The Same, […]

Some music slides into everyday life and acts as wallpaper while not leaving much of an impression. Other music fits a time, or a mood, or a situation. Perhaps I was influenced by my surroundings while listening to it (a subtly stormy afternoon), but Courtney Hartman and Taylor Ashton’s Been On Your Side (Free Dirt […]

If you’ve listened to enough country radio, you start to feel like you can predict the next line of a song before the lyric’s been sung. However, listening to Meet Me At The River (Yep Roc), the gorgeous new album from Dawn Landes, will spin you off in new, unpredictable directions on common themes. The […]

Nine albums and 20 years into their career, Lucero has stripped down their Memphis sound and returned primarily to their guitar/rhythm/keys basics on their latest, Among The Ghosts. Despite origins in the late 1990s, much of the early songs on Ghosts have a late 80s/early 90s feel, perhaps owing to the band members’ formative years. […]

Boz Scaggs has a new release, Out of the Blues (Concord Records).  As a musically-inclined youngster, my first exposure to Boz Scaggs was seeing the dusty album cover (Hits!, perhaps?) in one of those wooden cassette crates (remember those?) Even then, it seemed “old” to me. Now, of course, we’d call it “classic,” and Scaggs’ […]

In 1988, a quartet of Canadians released The Trinity Session. In a world of boy bands and hair metal, few were ready for something as singular as Cowboy Junkies. 30 years later, with Americana staking its claim in the authenticity wing of country music, the Timmins clan may have finally found a home. Cowboy Junkies […]