Abigail Washburn has resisted categorization from the start of her relatively young career. She plays banjo with the traditionalist all-female string band Uncle Earl, but released a solo album in 2005 that included, alongside old-time chestnuts, a couple of songs written and sung in Mandarin Chinese. That year she also put out a deceptively modest [...]

John Darnielle has been sketching out a stubborn, frenetic career arc for seventeen years now, and he’s been successful enough that the top result on a Google search for “mountain goats” gives you him (instead of, you know, mountain goats). But the same things that get him noticed have kept him at cult stature: his [...]

I have never quite loved the Drive-By Truckers. For one thing, I have always been a little put off by the awkward self-awareness of Patterson Hood’s ambitions. God knows the moral and cultural geography of the modern south cries out for cartographers, but it’s one thing to talk about a map — he talks about [...]

It has been quite a summer of Thompsons. Richard released his latest album, Sweet Warrior, in May. Son Teddy followed in July with Upfront And Down Low, a collection of country classics. And the first week of August brought an archival release of In Concert, November 1975, a live recording of Richard and then-wife Linda [...]