Writing a simple, direct song is hard to do, but there are those musicians who have made it look easy. Roger Miller and Nick Lowe quickly come to mind. Across four previous albums, including a terrific collaboration with Scottish popper Frances Macdonald under the name Cheeky Monkey, Michael Shelley has demonstrated that he’s of that [...]

“I overheard you sayin’ that it ain’t cheating/If it takes less than a tank of gas/So who am I to believe, you could be true to me?” This anguished lyric comes from the twangy lament “Alone In Tennessee”, one of many standouts on Heather Waters’ first full-length disc.
Part of the song’s poignancy comes from its [...]

For a number of years I worked with one of the foremost tapers and traders of live concert bootlegs. He has a remarkable memory for nuance and can distinguish small details between performances of the same song throughout a tour. I could never figure out how he had time to listen, nor reason to care.
Most [...]

Chris Stuart has been knocking around the bluegrass scene for a while, writing songs (including the fabled “Twenty Naked Pentecostals In A Pontiac” as well as more serious entries such as “Paul And Peter Walked”, recorded by Claire Lynch) and playing banjo with upstate New York’s Cornerstone. Now ensconced in southern California, he’s finally found [...]

Tucson the sunny resort and retirement mecca is a thing apart from the Tucson where real folks have lived out generations in blue collars, abiding in trailers with broad vistas of creosote, lavender mountains and endless glare. Swamp coolers hum between their biennial maintenance while contemporary cowboy-equivalents boast their boasts, spin big dreams and oppose [...]

John Evans doesn’t get much notice outside Houston. The winner of numerous Houston Press awards (Artist of the Year, Best Roots Rock, etc.), Evans never jumped on the idiotic “Shiner Bock-rhymes-with-Luckenbach” trend. Instead, Evans borrowed heavily from punkabilly for a hair-on-fire stage presence, and from the country side of rockabilly and the power-pop of the [...]

Greg Cahill, banjo player and leader of Special Consensus, has for 30 years led one of the most consistently good and highly respected bands in bluegrass. The group’s newest release showcases what they have always been good at: rendering a variety of styles – country, Celtic, western, swing – from a bluegrass point of view.
Cahill [...]

Larry Campbell has been a respected sideman as a member of Bob Dylan’s touring band for seven years and has worked in the studio with Rosanne Cash, Jim Lauderdale, the Dixie Hummingbirds and others. Campbell shows he’s capable of being a frontman with Rooftops, his debut disc, which serves as a showcase for his considerable [...]

Planes, trains and automobiles travel through Crashyertown. So do suicide, pregnancy, hard-luck lovers and one admitted “white trash fool.” While these are common topics in country music, Craig Aspen and Cynthia Frazzini — the restless spirits behind the Believers — display a sharp eye for life on the other side of the tracks, elevating their [...]

“California Dreamin’”? Nightmare is more like it. To hear this impassioned, longtime Los Angeles roots quartet tell it, the land of milk and honey is now homogenized milk and sour honey, a bleak, rocky landscape populated by former Red Staters who don’t realize they’re prisoners in a self-deluding hell of their own making.
In eleven originals [...]