Unexpected riches — like ordering basic cable but getting just about every channel there is — don’t come too often. For the Waybacks, once is enough. All the San Francisco-based band asked for was a fiddle player. What they got was 25-year old Austin, Texas, native Warren Hood, a skilled fiddler and considerably more besides. [...]

The Whipsaws may be the most popular bar band in Alaska. Certainly they have logged the most miles across the tundra, with the deepest repertoire of original music, routinely playing four-hour gigs in the live-music-starved watering holes of the hinterlands. In the process, they’ve engaged a broad array of Alaska’s more colorful characters, several of [...]

Call it the Lambchop conundrum, or perhaps the Willard Grant Conspiracy conspiracy. In bands with a large membership, oftentimes the music actually feels less cluttered than that of smaller outfits. The more players, the more room to maneuver; that has to contradict some scientific principle of expansion. But such is the case with Band Of [...]

Since the late 1950s, folkies have looked to the past for inspiration, and made connections between the popular rhythms of their day and the ancient excursions of their hip — and often unheralded — forebears. It probably doesn’t matter that this recovery process only got cooking around the time rock ‘n’ roll began to register [...]

While serving an internship as a sound engineer at Philip Glass’ studio in New York, Dawn Landes got an up-close-and-personal look at how the likes of David Bowie, Joseph Arthur, and Glass himself brought their compositions to life. She kept mum about her own aspirations to do the same someday. “I would never tell anyone [...]

Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes owes a hefty aesthetic debt to Oklahoma. Not the actual state, but the landmark 1943 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical. When Pecknold was young, musicals taught him to sing out and feel at ease onstage. “Doing school plays and local productions of Annie or Oklahoma! — that was where it started,” [...]

Hope Nunnery has a name, a voice and a story that all seem in their own ways too good to be true. At least until you hear her talk about them. Then, like the songs on her first album, Wilderness Lounge, they just seem natural, and inhabited. First, that name. “I got Hope, because my [...]

You want to talk first-rate pedigrees, the Rite Flyers have connections to some of Austin’s biggest and best bands of the past two decades. The group’s genealogical chart goes all the way back to key 1980s-era Austin acts including Big Boys, Doctors’ Mob and Wild Seeds; to ’90s hitmakers Fastball; and most recently to modern-day [...]

In Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon’s classic road chronicle, the author “took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.” As it turns out, the band Blue Highway travels that same open road. And their music resonates with the sounds of [...]

The Felice Brothers are not making this up. It’s all true, or most of it, anyway. The Brothers really did record parts of their new, maybe-breakthrough album — a mournful, lo-fi countryish-folk self-titled disc due out March 4 on Team Love — in a chicken coop in the woods of upstate New York. They all [...]