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Rediscovering Bob Martin, for the first time

I'm not sure what prompted me to play Bob Martin's Midwest Farm Disaster when I came across it while cleaning my office this fall. I knew that I'd never heard of Martin and that I couldn't remember the promo advance arriving in

John Doe & Kathleen Edwards

At the conclusion of John Doe and Kathleen Edwards' November 8 performance at Carnegie Hall's elegant Zankel Hall in New York, the duo stepped in front of the microphones and monitors they had been using all set, walked to the edge of the stage, and unaided by

Jackson Browne

On the song "A Piece Of The Pie" from his new album Harps And Angels, Randy Newman assesses the state of our nation this way: "Jesus Christ it stinks here high and low/The rich are getting richer, I should know/While we're going up

Robert Forster - The sun's gonna shine in my back door someday

It could be the sun coming through blinds as you play a record (so it's sun on the music). It could be the sun coming through as you practice in the loungeroom of a large Brisbane house of a certain era...It's sunshine imposing on inside

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.

Eric Heywood - Trace elements

Pedal steel guitar is a lot like a movie soundtrack in that the more you notice it, the less effective it is. In its overwrought variation, waves of pedal-steel weeping is one of country music's hoariest cliches. But if wielded with taste and restraint, it can add just

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