When Willie Nelson dueted with Toots Hibbert on “Still Is Still Moving To Me”, a tune written by Nelson but performed on Toots & the Maytals’ 2004 album True Love, it wasn’t merely an occasion to wonder which singer brought better ganja to the session. The track offered proof that certain Nelson songs could work [...]

The Volebeats wanna party like it’s 1966 or ’67. They always have, really, and unabashedly so. On their seventh album, Like Her, the guitar-pop quintet from Detroit invokes the more shimmering facets of Moby Grape, the autumnal brooding of Forever Changes, vintage Hollies minus the froth, the jingle-jangle of the Byrds circa “Feel A Whole [...]

Beginning with her 1996 solo debut Diary Of A Mod Housewife, Amy Rigby has released five solo albums that examine the balance between romance and domesticity with sparkling wit and a kind of goofy charm. In the hands of a lesser artist, this methodology might have become a shtick by now, but Rigby’s talents are [...]

The longer an artist sticks around, the more pronounced the struggle becomes between two conflicting impulses: the desire to indulge in weird tangents vs. the desire to please an audience by sticking to one’s strengths. Too much of the latter can put you in a serious rut. But too much of the former can result [...]

So what’s it like to listen to the Waco Brothers as a guy? Do you want to be them? Do you want to take them on? Do you want to drink them under the table? Or do they scare you, too? My fandom has always been complicated by fascination with all that fearsome, noisy manpower [...]

The Cowboy Junkies will probably always be caught between the desire not to mess with a good thing and the urge to break with formula. For the last fifteen years or so — that is, the period since the breakthrough of The Trinity Session — conflicting aspirations have caught most of the band’s work in [...]

You could almost call it the perfect storm for fans of Big Star: In addition to an exhaustive new biography of the power-pop godfathers (by U.K. writer Rob Jovanovic), In Space marks the group’s first studio recording in three decades. Not that the earlier storm wasn’t perfect; Big Star’s ’70s albums — #1 Record, Radio [...]

Twilight Of The Renegades begins with the sound of the sea, but Jimmy Webb’s piano sets a course closer to Procul Harum’s “Salty Dog” than to Frankie Ford’s rockin’ “Sea Cruise”. Leading with a song about painter Paul Gauguin searching for paradise but “never at home in this world,” Webb takes us further on the [...]

Wasting no time getting to the great stuff, the New Pornographers kick off Twin Cinema with a stone-cold killer. That would be the title track, and, as a slanted-and-enchanted dose of lethal anti-pop, the song doesn’t sound like the rest of the band’s third album. Over gloriously off-kilter guitars, ragged-glory bass and whipcrack drums, the [...]

If there’s a particular criticism to be leveled at Rosie Thomas’ previous albums, it’s that the sense of melancholy which pervades them can sometimes wear thin. Favoring languid tempos and singing in a delicate voice filled with folkie yearning, Thomas has, in the past, offered up sober introspection with unyielding earnestness. By no means does [...]