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No Depression has been the foremost journalistic authority on roots music for well over a decade, publishing 75 issues from 1995 to 2008. No Depression ceased publishing magazines in 2008 and took to the web. We have made the contents of those issues accessible online via this extensive archive and also feature a robust community website with blogs, photos, videos, music, news, discussion and more.

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Artist: Gary Louris

Live Reviews from web archive February 15, 2009

Mark Olson & Gary Louris

A couple weeks back, we posted my colleague David Cantwell’s review of the new Mark Olson & Gary Louris album Ready For The Flood, and I’ve been thinking about his thesis contention that what was most missed in the work of both artists during their decade of separation was what he called “The Voice: the [...]

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Record Review from web archive January 27, 2009

Mark Olson & Gary Louris – Hawks of a different feather

We each inevitably hear music in the particular ways that we do at least partly because of all that we’ve heard before – because of the context and expectations we bring to new work. For instance, many of us have anticipated Ready For The Flood, an album by Mark Olson & Gary Louris, in light [...]

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Record Review from web archive December 5, 2008

Gary Louris

There’s little surprise that Gary Louris could make a solo album superior to or at least comparable with the seven albums he recorded with the Jayhawks. The band’s seventeen-year career required more the endurance of a marathon runner than of an afternoon jogger; successive lineups faithfully maintained the brand name even as the audience for [...]

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Column from web archive November 6, 2008

Kirsten Jones: More mad miles than money

About five years ago, singer-songwriter Kirsten Jones was in New Zealand, on holiday from her work as a major-label account executive in Toronto, when she took a sea kayaking trip that would change her life. The leisurely paddle on the open water took an abrupt, dangerous turn when a storm blew in, leaving the novice [...]

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The Long Way Around - Feature from Issue #74 March-April 2008

Gary Louris – Alone together again

Is there, perhaps, a distinction between stopping and ending? Maybe stopping is the absence — intentional or otherwise — of future plans to continue with what had been an ongoing concern. Ending feels more like a deliberate act calculated to ensure something ever happens again. Of course, a stop can turn out to be an [...]

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Miked - Live Reviews from Issue #64 July-Aug 2006

Gary Louris & Mark Olson – Aladdin Theater (Portland, OR)

This reunion show was as on-key as it was low-key. Gary Louris and Mark Olson quietly walked onstage about 8:05 p.m. (there was no opener); Olson saluted the crowd, and they both sat down on stools to embark on the first of two sets. (Louris: “Per the management; first time we’ve done two sets since [...]

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Miked - Live Reviews from Issue #57 May-June 2005

Alejandro Escovedo / Jon Dee Graham – Fitzgerald’s (Berwyn, IL) / Mark Olson & Gary Louris – Maintenance Shop (Ames, IA)

Rarely do club shows seem to have as much at stake as a pair that braved the February freeze of the midwest. For Alejandro Escovedo, the highly-anticipated, sold-out performance at Chicago’s suburban FitzGerald’s marked a return to the road after a couple years of convalescence. Over the course of his recovery following his April 2003 [...]

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Miked - Live Reviews from Issue #56 March-April 2005

Mark Olson (and Friends) – 400 Bar (Minneapolis, MN)

The sight of Gary Louris’ beloved Gibson SG guitar sitting on the stage of the 400 Bar in Minneapolis before a scheduled New Year’s Eve solo show by Mark Olson, his former Jayhawks partner, seemed to confirm the rumors of a “Jayhawks reunion” that had been running rampant ever since an “act of plumbing” forced [...]

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The Long Way Around - Feature from Issue #44 March-April 2003

Gary Louris – We just wanted to make a record that felt right

Whether the Jayhawks’ day in the sun will ever come seems perhaps a moot point today. In a perfect world, one could have envisioned the Minneapolis band reaching the same kind of commercial peak as, say, the Counting Crows, but the ever-elusive big break never turned their way. Yet they’ve hung together for close to [...]

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Miked - Live Reviews from Issue #42 Nov-Dec 2002

Gary Louris – Slow Bar (Nashville, TN)

By now, it should be apparent that Gary Louris can exist in all sorts of different habitats. A member of the Jayhawks since the mid-late 1980s and the group’s kingpin since 1996, he’s seen the band through multiple lineup shifts and a gradual sonic shift from edgy, slightly twanged-up, harmony-drenched roots-rock to layered, lovely, expansive [...]

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From the Blogs

  • Brittany Holljes on the Origins of Delta Rae and Her Healthy Fleetwood Mac Obsession
    Delta Rae might sound like the down-home name of a backwoods country singer but it’s really just Greek to Brittany Holljes. “I think there are a lot of ‘Delta’ bands out there, too, so we kind of get that ... people get confused,” said Holljes, the whip-smart singer of the North Carolina-based sextet (like Deborah Harry used to say about Blondie, Delta Rae i […]
  • Crowd-sourcing to crowd-pleasing: The rise of Kat Edmonson
    If Kat Edmonson ever becomes a household name, she can put it down not just to her talent as a jazz singer, but to some decidedly modern financing as well. The 29-year-old Texan, an old-school chanteuse with a contemporary lilt, has funded production of her second album via a community workshop and through… […]
  • When to get your ass saved and when to drown
    How does the co-writing song process differ from the alone songwriting process you just wrote about? Co-writing is quite different from writing alone. When I'm working on something alone I have complete freedom. Freedom to experiment, to make mistakes, to try things I'm quite sure won't work and the freedom to reconstruct whatever has come bef […]
  • CD Review - Fiddleworms "See The Light"
    The ambitious new album See The Light, from Alabama quintet Fiddleworms is a cavalcade of styles with literally a parade of guest musicians including the University of North Alabama marching Band. The eleven original tracks are interspersed with snippets of radio sound effects and spoken word segments that flow from jazzy blues to stomping country rock fusio […]
  • Interview with Raul Malo from the Mavericks
    May 2013 There are very few singers or bands that have a 100% distinctive Trademark sound; but The Mavericks achieved that very early in their career and in the UK you still can’t go to a Wedding without being corralled onto the dance-floor as soon as you hear the opening bars to Dance The Night Away. After breaking up in 2004 lead singer and songwriter, Rau […]
  • The Great Escape, Brighton, 2013: day one
    So, here we are again, tramping the streets of Brighton, squeezing into someunfeasibly small spaces to see bands we've never heard of... I'd been feeling somewhat underexcited by this year's Great Escape because it the only one of hundreds of names on the bill that I knew I liked was Billy Bragg, who appears at the Dome tonight. But a quick bu […]

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