We can glean at least two insights from the release of the third Flatlanders album of the millennium, following a hiatus of three decades. First, the Texas trio of buddies since boyhood has renewed its commitment to becoming more a band than a legend. Second, there is such a thing as quintessential Flatlanders music that [...]

NPR ran a feature a couple Sundays back on the new Marianne Faithfull record, playing snippets from a couple of songs in between interview segments. One week later, they read a purportedly representative letter of complaint, saying that Faithfull’s voice is something “nobody wants to hear on a Sunday morning.”
Hard to believe 30 years after [...]

With her third album, Boston bar-band chanteuse Sarah Borges sounds like a work in progress. There’s nothing wrong with that: In gravitating from the frisky roots and country of her debut to an eclectic, guitar-driven pop-rock sound that sometimes recalls fellow Bostonian Jen Trynin, she has been honing her artistic voice the way all young [...]

Quiet Please is, as it subtitle indicates, not Nick Lowe’s first Best Of (that’s 16 All Time Lowes), his biggest Best Of (The Doings), his most hits-packed Best Of (Basher), or his most rarities-filled Best Of (The Wilderness Years). But this two-disc collection is his most comprehensive Best Of, and, perhaps, his best Best Of. [...]

Tribute albums are inherently mixed bags, a challenge compounded when the subject is as much a myriad of musical possibility as the Texas Tornado. In his various incarnations, Doug Sahm embodied pretty much every musical strain of his native state – from Tex-Mex conjunto to garage-band psychedelia, from the purest country to the purest blues. [...]

Is it permissible to have a mulligan in music? In casual golf, if you miss a shot you sometimes get a do-over, known as a mulligan. I ask because in September 2004 I said this about Blackie & the Rodeo Kings in The Washington Post: “. . . a band that was never intended to [...]

Four years ago Aoife O’Donovan, Ruth Ungar Merenda, and Kristin Andreassen spent a dozen hours recording ten songs, and casually slipped them into the marketplace, housed in a lovely black and silver letterpress package, an edition of one thousand.
It was and is a fetching record, both gloriously informal and gorgeously professional, for in their day [...]

John Wesley Harding has long been one of our most literary singer-songwriter types and a true cineaste. After all, he’s had two novels published under his given name, Wesley Stace, with a third on the way, plus his first two full-length releases were named after Frank Capra movies and his third after Capra’s autobiography.
Thus, it’d [...]