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No Depression has been the foremost journalistic authority on roots music for well over a decade, publishing 75 issues from 1995 to 2008. No Depression ceased publishing magazines in 2008 and took to the web. We have made the contents of those issues accessible online via this extensive archive and also feature a robust community website with blogs, photos, videos, music, news, discussion and more.

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Shorter Artist Feature

Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #75 May-June 2008

Waybacks – Fit as a fiddle

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. [...]

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Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #75 May-June 2008

Whipsaws – One up on the Lower 48

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 [...]

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Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #75 May-June 2008

Band Of Annuals – Space in numbers

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 [...]

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Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #75 May-June 2008

Carolina Chocolate Drops – Digging back, driving forward

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 [...]

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Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #75 May-June 2008

Dawn Landes – Inègnue engineer

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 [...]

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Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #75 May-June 2008

Fleet Foxes – Beyond the basement

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,” [...]

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Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #75 May-June 2008

Hope Nunnery – Holler of the mountains

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 [...]

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Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #75 May-June 2008

Rite Flyers – No need to throw things at them

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 [...]

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Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #74 March-April 2008

Blue Highway – At the mercy of the song

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 [...]

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Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #74 March-April 2008

Felice Brothers – Palaces on wheels

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 [...]

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From the Blogs

  • A Tribute to The Doors Ray Manzarek 1939-2013
    "You don't make music for immortality, you make music for the moment, capturing the sheer joy of being alive on planet Earth... Everybody should live it that way."    Ray Manzarek   In the summer of 1967 The Doors played the Anaheim Convention Center. I was 12 years old. I was completely transfixed by the band. Having an older musician brother […]
  • Jim Lauderdale: Americana's Country Journeyman Returns to L.A.
    With a career as diverse as the emerging genre we call ‘Americana,’ Jim Lauderdale continues on the same track toward collaboration, generosity and an imagination fused with the influence of Country and Bluegrass traditions. His December, 2012 release with musical cohort, Buddy Miller, is a collection of songs, some covers and some originals, that focuses on […]
  • CD Reissue Review: Irma Thomas - In Between Tears (Fungus/Alive, 1973/2013)
    Irma Thomas' lost early-70s soul sides After relocating from New Orleans to Los Angeles, soul queen Irma Thomas largely disappeared from public view for a few years. But a series of singles produced by Jerry Williams (a.k.a. Swamp Dogg) on the indie Canyon, Roker and Fungus labels led to this eight-track release in 1973. Williams had proven himself… […]
  • CD Reissue Review: Eddy Arnold - Complete Original #1 Hits (RCA / Real Gone, 2013)
    All twenty-eight of Eddy Arnold's chart-topping singles For most artists, a twenty-eight track collection of their biggest chart hits would be a fair representation of their commercial success. In Eddy Arnold's case, twenty-eight #1 singles only very lightly skims the surface of nearly thirty-nine consecutive years of chart success that stretched… […]
  • Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell at Sage Gateshead
    What can I tell you? I’ve been a fan of Emmylou Harris since I first saw The Last Waltz at the cinema in 1979 and Rodney Crowell ever since a friend gave me a copy of Diamonds and Dirt on cassette as a birthday present. So, finally seeing not only one of them in concert, but both together had made me nervously excited for weeks in advance. If you don’t know […]
  • Great Escape, Brighton, UK - Day Three
    By day three I'm starting to flag, but Canada House at the Blind Tiger looks intriguing: a line-up sponsored by music organisations from three of the western provinces. I'm off to Alberta at the end of July, so this could be a good warm-up. 'We're here to show you that Western Canada is about more than just wheatfields, gravel roads and k […]

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