We have heard from our readers and subscribers all over the world, and one thing is clear: You want to keep the spirit and community of No Depression alive. So do we. To that end, while the reality remains that this is the end of ND as we know it, we have some promising news [...]

Dear Friends: Barring the intercession of unknown angels, you hold in your hands the next-to-the-last edition of No Depression we will publish. It is difficult even to type those words, so please know that we have not come lightly to this decision. In the thirteen years since we began plotting and publishing No Depression, we [...]

This issue’s Screen Door piece on the reopening of Houston’s venerable Cactus Records store got me to thinking about a lot of the other record stores that have meant something to me at one point or another over the past few decades. Some are long gone, others were more recent casualties of the industry’s shifting [...]

A dozen paces behind me, in a double closet filled with camping gear, winter coats, a box of stray patch cords and, perhaps, the family of mice our declawed cats chase in the midnight hours, there lurks a cheap acoustic guitar, left behind by another man long ago now. I do not play. Twice a [...]

“Back in Seattle, the sun is setting over the Sunset and Tractor Taverns on Ballard Avenue, over Puget Sound and the ferryboats motoring to the islands, over the Olympic mountains silhouetted in the western sky. It’s been an unforgettable nine years, sheltered beneath the sentinel that is Mount Rainier. But I hear Carolina calling.” So [...]

So it wasn’t enough that we went and put a chart-topping (well, #2 on the pop charts, anyhow) indie-rock band on our cover a couple issues ago. We had to go follow it up by putting a chart-topping mainstream-country artist on the cover of our last issue. And now — well, she’s not on the [...]

Confused yet? While I’m certain that few readers puzzle over the internal logic which guides our cover choices nearly as much as we do, I’m also confident that ours is the only magazine which might plausibly feature indie rock stars the Shins on one cover, and emerging platinum country singer Miranda Lambert on the next. [...]

Countless times over the almost dozen years since we began publishing this magazine, I have written or spoken as kindly as could be managed the following phrase: We try not to hold an act’s commercial success or failure against them. And we really don’t. If you browse back through our covers online you’ll find indie [...]

Occasionally my wife Lisa helps me update the logs I keep of all the music that arrives in the mail day after day, sometimes piling up until it’s hard to find a clear pathway to my desk. This weekend she was going through the most recent stack of discs and press releases, and she made [...]

In my mind’s ear I am still drawn to Don Williams’ 1973 version of the Bob McDill song “Amanda”, though it was Waylon Jennings who had the #1 hit in 1979 and it took a trip to the back room to find my misfiled vinyl copy of the original. Either will do, most of the [...]