Music history has a tendency to frequently favor the reputation of easily defined artists, but that’s at the expense of music makers as singular and strange as Chris Darrow. How do you pigeonhole a multi-instrumentalist who has traces of his DNA detectible in his own work with psychedelic purveyors Kaleidoscope in the ’60s, neo-trad practitioners [...]

[Editor's note: The following review appears in No Depression #77, the second in a series of "bookazines" edited by Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock and published by University of Texas Press. The bookazine can be ordered here.] When news began trickling out that the next Buddy Miller album — the first since 2004′s widely acclaimed [...]

When Bela Fleck released the first two volumes of Tales From The Acoustic Planet, the idea was merely to differentiate these returns to his newgrass and bluegrass roots from the electric jazz fusion of his work with the Flecktones. Now, for the third volume, Fleck realizes that the planet stretches well beyond just the United [...]

Growing up as a Philadelphia Phillies fan in the 1960s, I was drawn to Cookie Rojas, a jack of all trades on the field who once played all nine positions in a single game. Like his fellow Cuban-American, Raul Malo demonstrates a similar versatility as a vocalist and musician on Lucky One, his first album [...]

One of the great love stories of the rock era came to a sad end in August 2006, when Kim McLagan – beloved wife, best friend and muse to ex-Small Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan – died in a car accident in Texas. That’s a blow you wouldn’t wish on anyone, but especially the impish McLagan, [...]

Although Brigitte DeMeyer comes from the Bay Area, her music radiates with the sounds of the south. Red River Flower, the follow-up to her acclaimed 2005 disc Something Ater All, benefits from being recorded in Nashville with such ace sidemen as Buddy Miller, Mike Henderson, Al Perkins, Phil Madeira and Brady Blade (who again serves [...]

The Good Life, last year’s debut album from Justin Townes Earle, was a mixture of honky-tonk country stylings and confessional singer-songwriter material. Half of him was actively avoiding comparisons with his father Steve by going back to country before dad, and the other half was sticking close to the family template. On Midnight At The [...]

When Isaac Hayes emerged from the shadows of Stax Studios and his role there as session musician and hit-writer extraordinaire, he stepped into the glare of his solo career, and what a strange, unlikely figure he must have cut. Here was the consummate behind-the-scenes guy emerging as a buff, bald, flashy figure of African-American assertiveness, [...]

Bruce Springsteen once posited that “we learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.” After 24 years of listening to Chris Isaak, who never exceeds the four-minute mark and rarely even nears it, I can safely say I’ve learned love will inevitably fall victim to the fatal flaw within the singer, [...]

Has any modern band defied labels as successfully as the Nighthawks? They want it every which way – rock, blues, roots — and the ‘Hawks always get their way, and have for 36 years and counting. Such skillful genre-hopping is the reason their fan base ranges from mohawked skateboarders to dyed-in-the-wool Chicago blues purists. American [...]