(The Indigo Girls, Larry Campbell and Brandi Carlile) As Marty Stuart once said of the Ryman Auditorium, you can hear music in the rafters and you can feel the spirit of country music running through the building. As legend has it, Bill Monroe met Hank Williams in the Ryman dressing room and the two shook […]
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Southside Johnny — at Stone Pony in Asbury Park, NJ Labor Day typically marks the end of summer but some holdouts are reluctant to declare it formally over until the calendar turns on the 21st. At the Stone Pony Summer Stage, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes did their best to try and keep the […]
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(Wilco photo by Don Principe) A stadium in the shadow of the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut used to be the place that tennis players tuned-up before heading to the US Open that starts the last week of August. But since remaking it into an outdoor music venue, the intimate setting has been transformed […]
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Springsteen & Us In order to make sense of the present, sometimes you have to go back to the past. When The Rolling Stones wanted to charge eight dollars for their show at the Los Angeles Forum in 1969, there was considerable outrage and Rolling Stone ran the headline “The Rolling Stones Impose High Ticket […]
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When Americana Highways columnist Bill Bentley was a fledgling concert booker back in the early Eighties, he slotted an aspiring young singer named Dwight Yoakam to open up for Billy Joe Shaver. Bentley had to work some magic as Shaver, who had written virtually all of Waylon Jennings’ Honky Tonk Heroes, insisted his band back […]
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Timothy B. Schmit photo by Dove Shore Timothy B. Schmit possesses one of the most distinctive voices with an imprint that stretches over the decades with such standards as the Eagles’ “I Can’t Tell You Why” and “Love Will Keep Us Alive,” Poco’s “Keep On Tryin’” and the plethora of songs he sang background on: […]
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When The Rolling Stones landed in New York on the worldwide Licks tour, New York’s Madison Square Garden was a venue that they’d played numerous times and was hallowed ground for the live recording of Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out. “I hope my trousers don’t fall down,” Mick Jagger teased New York in November 1969 […]
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On a June Saturday that felt unseasonably cool and more like early fall, Bonnie Raitt looked up to the lawn seats high on the hill of those we’ve lost at the Filene Center at Wolf Trap and seemed overcome with emotion. After being shut down during the pandemic, the joy of being back onstage at […]
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Stephane Wrembel photo by Casey Ryan Vrock Stephane Wrembel has been described as the greatest living acoustic guitar player alive. But when you speak with him, he seems less interested in talking about himself and more about the mystery of making music. In his native French accent, Wrembel passionately philosophizes about the irrational response we […]
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(Gareth Dunlop at the Birchmere. Photos by Kelly Wosahla) The path that took Gareth Dunlop to the US and a solo set at the famed Birchmere outside Washington, DC, can be traced back twenty years ago. There in the pubs of his native Belfast he and Lee Rogers, another aspiring singer-songwriter, spent time in pubs […]
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