On Strange Conversation (Thirty Tigers), vocalist Mandy Barnett ventures into the undiscovered country. From Tom West’s opening organ notes on “More Lovin,” it’s clear that Strange Conversation is a different kind of Mandy Barnett album. Barnett, with producers Marco Giovino and Doug Lancio, has made an album that’s as much Memphis as Nashville, as much […]
In 1987, nine years prior to forming the Drive-By Truckers, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley started another band, Adam’s House Cat. In 1990-91, Adam’s House Cat recorded an album, Town Burned Down, previously unreleased, lost and believed to have been to destroyed. A few years ago, the tapes surfaced. They were baked and mixed, and […]
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Though the name John Howie Jr. may not be familiar, many readers will be familiar with his band, The Two Dollar Pistols. A collaboration in 1999 with Tift Merritt launched the solo career of that highly-regarded alt-country singer-songwriter. Though Not Tonight (Suah Sounds) is not a Two Dollar Pistols release, it is closer, sonically, to […]
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This is western Americana guaranteed to get you up in the saddle.
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I had high expectations for Billy Gibbons’ new solo record, The Big Bad Blues (Concord Records), and the man with the Texas goatee did not disappoint. The ZZ Top frontman’s new collection of original songs and classic blues covers gets deep down in your soul and in your bones and will have you shaking your […]
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This electric take on the Hill country blues, written and performed by an artist with generations of the music in his blood, brings the style to the modern day while losing nothing of its distinctive traditions
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Through hard work (and his share of the hard life), Alejandro Escovedo transformed himself into one of the premier artists in Americana, a smooth stylistic shapechanger capable of stunning literary and sonic flourishes. The Crossing (Yep Roc), Escovedo’s new 17-track concept album about the immigrant experience in America, delivers everything you would expect from a […]
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Singer-songwriter Karen Jonas released her third album, Butter, earlier this year. I caught up with her and her guitarist and producer, Tim Bray, before a show at Washington, DC’s Pearl Street Warehouse. In a wide-ranging interview, we discussed topics ranging from musical genres to discrimination against mothers to arts in the schools, as well as […]
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According to the story behind newly released album, Burn Band (Scriptorium Rex), while surveying the land, “Mary,” who inherited her father’s Texas ranch found a tape of the mysterious “Stryker Brothers” in a burned-out prison. Meeting multi-instrumentalist (Terry Allen, Guy Clark, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Golden Bear, Butch Hancock, Jerry Jeff Walker) and Grammy […]
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One of the great joys of writing about music about is discovering artists, and while Bloomington, Indiana band Murder by Death have been around since the early 2000s, they’re new to me. I enjoyed The Other Shore (Bloodshot Records) so much that, before I sat down to write my review, I listened to their entire […]
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