The tall elegant Allison Moorer had barely taken the stage and said hello when the evening’s moderator, NPR correspondent Melissa Block, had a few words of warning for the audience: “It’s going to get pretty heavy real soon.” Inside the intimate Jammin’ Java, a club in Northern Virginia just outside Washington, D.C., arriving patrons has […]
“Maybe someone knows what fate is, maybe someone just knows why,” Gene Clark posited in a wistful melancholic meditation that makes “Some Misunderstanding” one of the climactic moments and centerpiece of his 1974 album No Other. Looking back the singer seems to be sharing the most intimate and vulnerable details of his complex character, the […]
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It could have been just a trip down memory lane but it wasn’t. When Blondie landed in Washington, D.C. this summer, Debbie Harry, 74, stood before a visual of Donald Trump as she sang the theme song played from “To Russia With Love.” The band, helped propelled by drummer Clem Burke, upstaged headliner Elvis Costello […]
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Carlene Carter first stepped onstage at the age of four next to her mother June Carter and aunts Helen and Anita. She’s spent the next sixty years solidifying her place as a “Carter Girl,” the title she used on her 2014 homage to the original Carter Family who changed the landscape of country music since […]
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You could say that Kelsey Waldon’s life has been a whirlwind of late. For one, there’s her new album White Noise/White Lines which after several years in the making is finally out. The record which feels like a breakthrough, has been highly anticipated ever since John Prine announced onstage at the Grand Ole Opry that […]
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The recent passings of Donnie Fritts and Jimmy Johnson—two iconic figures who helped shape what we call the Muscle Shoals Sound and left us within ten days of each other—casts a sadness that will be particularly heartfelt when Jason Isbell comes home to his native Alabama and sets foot onstage in Florence for the inaugural […]
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As a 21 year old in 1965, Roger Daltrey once sang the defiant words of Pete Townshend “I hope I die before I get old.” And when asked by an interviewer if he could see himself singing “Satisfaction” at age 40, Mick Jagger, not yet thirty, said “I hope not.” But here it is five […]
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Sid Griffin said he shouldn’t but couldn’t resist jumping anyway during the Long Ryders’ finale and signature song “Looking For Lewis & Clark” at Pearl Street Warehouse in Washington, D.C. Not even the suspenders that held up Griffin’s Levi’s and a bad knee could keep the lead singer of the Long Ryders earthbound for a […]
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Early in the evening of what would be a ten-hour event at the Outlaw Music Festival in Virginia Beach, Bonnie Raitt was still thinking about the night before. She had to follow Warren Haynes at the Mann Center in Philadelphia. “Phew,” she said her eyebrows rising and facial expressions saying she had her work cut […]
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“The name of the man you need to see is Stanley Coles.” I can still remember the stern British accent and directness of the words. I was a fifteen-year-old aspiring music writer standing in a hotel lobby near the Springfield Civic Center in Massachusetts. A publicist from A&M Records had confirmed I’d be on the […]
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