It may be time for the Flatlanders to give Rob Gjersoe a bolo and make his membership in the group official. In the early going at Chicago’s Old Town School Of Folk Music, before a characteristically sedate crowd, the band sounded a bit tired. When a tune as catchy as “Julia” doesn’t click, you know [...]

Appalachian preachers who pray over the dead before the wake, the ones who absorb earthly misdeeds before the body can be mourned in public, are called sin eaters. Justin Townes Earle is a sin eater. He’s hovered over the bodies of Hank, Buck, and damn near his own. The difference between Earle and others who [...]

News that Neko Case’s latest album, Middle Cyclone, reached #3 on the Billboard charts upon its release last month signaled the arrival of a new phase in the singer’s gradually building career. No longer is Case a nightclub act; she’s reached the theater/concert-hall circuit now – thus her appearance at the home of the Raleigh [...]

Seven-time IBMA award winner Rhonda Vincent is nothing if not a consummate professional, but even pros have nights when everything doesn’t quite click. This particular show, the second of two on the same day, was one of those. Vincent and company still put on a highly entertaining show, proving that even on an off night [...]

Talking with Bill Lloyd and Radney Foster before this much-anticipated reunion gig, the capper in a series of fund-raising shows for the Americana Music Association at the storied club, we were trying to scope out how long it has been since the innovative country duo had performed together like this. There had been, they recalled [...]

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, I forgive you. Before the commanding performance by Billy and band on a Monday night at the jam-packed Vaudeville Mews (capacity 230, but it seemed like every tattooed hipster in greater Des Moines was there), I’d occasionally found Will Oldham’s affections – the changes in billing from various incarnations of Palace to [...]

“That one hurts my hand a little bit,” Jake Shimabukuro confided as he shook his fingers to cool them down after playing his original composition “Blue Roses Falling” a couple songs into his early-evening set at the fabled Iron Horse nightclub in Northampton, Massachusetts. Watching Shimabukuro cast his four-stringed spell for about an hour and [...]

Despite change at the top – tremendously satisfying change from my perspective – optimism can still be an elusive commodity. At work, people are getting laid off by the tens of thousands every day. At play, the national pastime has a stain that might never wash out. And somewhere in between, music websites can’t stay [...]

Van Morrison relishes being a musical enigma. There is no other way to explain Saturday night’s once-in-a-lifetime concert at the FailedBank Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The show was billed as one of a handful where Morrison would perform, in its entirety, his brilliantly abstract 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks – an [...]

When the Country Music Hall of Fame honors an act with the request that they be its single annual “Artist In Residence” – the featured performer and producing ringmaster for a series of special shows at the Hall – the selection itself implies that the artist is comfortable as an emcee. In the case of [...]