A fortysomething from the Chicago ‘burbs with a killer bio — he spent thirteen years as a doorman downtown before trading it in for this much less reliable career path — Ike Reilly has spent three albums honing his literate, loose rock and its icepick-clever focus on the peaks and (mostly) horrors of everyday living. [...]

Since 2001, Jason Isbell has served admirably as the Drive-By Truckers’ junior senator, the third arm in a guitar/songwriter onslaught that also stars Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. Theirs was a lineup to rival the glory-days Yankees, or that time Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage teamed up. But in April, Isbell and the Truckers finally [...]

While he was out on his ragtime detour last year, Bruce Springsteen became something of a trend story. Bands such as the Hold Steady and the Killers dished up, irony-free and with wildly varying degrees of success, the major-chord ideals of bygone Bruce: anonymous train-track towns, idealized teenage love and the abandonment of same, the [...]

Jacksonville, Florida, is and always will be Van Zant country, but there are other voices swimming around down near the swamps. On their third album, JJ Grey & Mofro, hooked up now with Chicago’s Alligator label, sound more comfortable in their sound than ever, and Grey rasps and roars through a platter of tasty front-porch [...]

One cannot help wanting to like Joe Grushecky. There’s the agreeable simplicity of his major-chord rock, his day job teaching special-ed classes, his personal and sonic ties to Bruce Springsteen, and, of course, his name, a phonetic 16-lb. bowling ball that couldn’t denote his working-class interests more if it were Punchclock McWastewaterplant.
Such goodwill benefits Grushecky [...]

The little prince takes on the wonders of true love in The Letting Go, which means that his eerie, atmospheric lamentations sound…well, not much less lamenting than usual, just with a few more spots where the sun bursts through the fog. Bonnie “Prince” Billy has been many things under many names, but here he’s just [...]

Like his beloved and tragicomic Cubs, Chicago singer-songwriter Steve Goodman has never quite gotten the acclaim he deserves. The reasons certainly differ: The Cubs don’t because they’ve been the doormat of the National League for nearly a century, while Goodman enjoys the much less damning legacy of being known more for winking numbers like “You [...]

Grace Potter is sometimes compared to Norah Jones, and though there are parallels to be drawn between their lightly smoked vocals, they only work on the slow songs. Where Jones tends to smoothly smooch her notes, Potter prefers to drive a nice sporty coupe into hers, and when she and her groovy blues-gospel-rock outfit rev [...]