Band of Heathens at Union Stage in DC with Reed Foehl opening With album sales down and streaming paying next to nothing, most bands rely on touring and merchandise sales to make ends meet. The pandemic forced many musicians to turn to streaming shows, collecting funds via Venmo and PayPal. Some bands dredged through their […]
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Jason Isbell at Red Rocks with Waxahatchee Several years ago, as our kids started to leave the nest, my wife and I began to look at life’s next chapter. We knew we wanted to downsize and leave the suburbs. We knew we wanted to travel. And I knew I wanted to see — and photograph […]
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Allison Moorer and Shelby Lynne at the Birchmere Holding an acoustic guitar, Shelby Lynne stood on stage with her sister, describing a song she wrote almost a decade ago about following their father into the Alabama woods. “This is actually daddy’s,” Lynne said, putting a palm on the Gibson B24 that sister Allison Moorer has […]
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Amos Lee has always veered between the introspective and explosive, a singer-songwriter who brings elements of country, folk, R&B, soul and gospel into his emotional and observational lyrics and music. On Tuesday, touring for the first time in three years behind his new album Dreamland, Lee brought all those elements to the fore in […]
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It’s rare, but on occasion I go to concerts to see the opening act instead of the headliner. Out of respect to the artists, I typically stick around for both shows, reserving the right to leave early to beat the traffic if the headliner doesn’t live up to expectations. I didn’t leave early last Friday, […]
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Loose Ends — Spotify and Neil Young Prior to last week, the odds of David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young agreeing on anything in the 21st century were the same as the sales of music CDs increasing in the universe of anywhere, anytime streaming. But with a country split by Covid and […]
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Editor’s Note: For this week’s essay, I’ll start by violating two basic rules of journalism: “Don’t use an expletive” and “Never end a sentence in a preposition.” It seems like winter is a good opportunity for Morgan Wallen to stir up some shit. And he seems to have plenty of sticks to choose from. In […]
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Tommy Stinson — Show Review At first blanch, it might seem like connecting Tommy Stinson to Americana music is a bit of a stretch, given his role with The Replacements and Guns & Roses. But as too few people know, his talent goes far beyond playing bass with those iconic bands. And too few people […]
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Robert Earl Keen with Waylon Payne at the Lincoln Theatre on 12/6 I’m not a traditionalist about Christmas. Part of it stems from growing up in a family where adults made routine visits to the hospital during the period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s.Part of it is having four children, including “Irish triplets,” all born […]
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From the Familiar to the Discovery: 2021 in Music Almost four years ago, I started shooting photos and writing about music for the website Americana Highways. It has been a fun adventure, except for that 18-month period in which my camera sat largely in its bag and the music I heard was mostly on wireless […]
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