Blame Springsteen, maybe, for Nebraska suggested anew the possibilities of raw home recordings. Paula Frazer’s soaring vocals (it’s tempting to call her the country Kate Bush, and doubtless many have) were the focal point of Tarnation, a band that eventually became a foil simply for her work, and so she has more recently recorded under [...]

When Spain first attracted national attention in 1995 with their debut The Blue Moods Of Spain, some critics expressed surprise that the quartet hailed from Los Angeles. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense. No doubt plenty of Angelenos found their glacial tempos and minimal arrangements a refreshing break from the perpetual sunlight and Hollywood excess [...]

Waiting in an airplane on the runway in Denver, ready to depart from a Colorado sojourn that had left things at loose ends. Pushed play on the old Walkman; the guitar slowly creeped in, gradually built, finally crashed into the chorus, relentlessly ringing as the singer was slinging my heart into the void: “Get offa [...]

These two albums, out-of-print for many years, provide proof of the unheralded diversity of the late-’80s Los Angeles music scene, at a time when to many outsiders it seemed to be drowning in a sea of hair-metal bands. Band co-founders Jeff Clark (on vocals) and Grant Lee Phillips (on guitars) opted to concoct something much [...]

Mac Wiseman, “The Voice With A Heart”, was inducted into the bluegrass Hall of Honor ten years ago, but he’s been woefully underrepresented on CD, and consequently is probably the least familiar of the Hall’s members to anyone not immersed in the genre and its history. Though they are not without their packaging flaws, these [...]

As titles go, Conway Rocks is a lot like, say, Elvis Acts: Because it addresses the least interesting part of the story, its appeal is mostly historical. Conway Twitty, born Harold Jenkins in Helena, Arkansas, was a country fan when he entered the service in 1954. By the time he returned home two years later, [...]

Texas honky-tonker Moe Bandy came up the hard way, playing San Antonio clubs and recording for little regional labels before scoring his first top-20 hit for the short-lived GRC label with “I Just Started Hatin’ Cheatin’ Songs Today” in 1974. He made his Columbia debut at the end of the following year with Paul Craft’s [...]

Kinky Friedman has been getting by on the same punchlines for 30 years now. But back in the day, they were some disturbingly funny punchlines. And long after his mystery novels have gone out-of-print, what is likely to linger in the cosmos is 1973′s Sold American — the Kinkster’s masterpiece, and an ahead-of-its-time landmark of [...]

Singer-songwriter Judee Sill embraced the rebelliousness and self-destruction of the early 1970s. She sang like a world-weary angel rising above her world of hard drugs, jail and reform school (where, according to her myth, she learned to play gospel piano). Sill’s self-titled debut album was the first released on Asylum Records, David Geffen’s haven for [...]

In 1966, Gene Clark left the Byrds at the peak of their fame for a solo career that must, at the time, have seemed a sure thing. The most prolific and talented songwriter in the group, Clark was also their quietly charismatic focal point onstage, joining in the three-part harmonies and singing lead on his [...]