What’s this, two releases in a year? Did Jon Carroll discover Red Bull or something? It was a decade between Home & Away and last year’s Love Returns, and now the most reliable sideman in Washington, D.C., puts out another just mere months later. The two-disc, eighteen-song Live Returns was recorded at the acoustically-pleasing Barns [...]

To those of us who discovered Loudon Wainwright III in the mid-1980s, going back and listening to his early albums was slightly jarring. Oh, sure, there was the same combination of sardonic, self-deprecating humor and wistful, elegiac observation, the same melodic expansiveness and even the same ability to push his vocal delivery outside the bounds [...]

Amy Ray’s solo albums have indulged the punk spirit that lurks underneath her work with Georgia duo the Indigo Girls. On her own, Ray unleashes a rebel yell through insurgent rock styles from rockabilly to reggae. Didn’t It Feel Kinder, released on the label she owns, is her third and best album, one that shows [...]

If Ryan Adams were a politician, he’d be the sort that pundits enjoy describing as a “polarizing figure.” His detractors – including Robbie Fulks and Paul Westerberg, the latter of whom obviously inspired Adams – consider him arrogant and derivative. His defenders – including Elton John – regard him as raggedly brilliant.
Both camps will find [...]