Cara Gibney

I’ve just watched footage of Mean Mary James as a six-year-old singing “Long Tall Texan” live on the  Country Boy Eddie TV Show back in ‘86. Wide brimmed hat, guitar larger than her torso, a drawl and a charm and a stage presence buoyed by a fascinating mix of

The music of roots artist Kaia Kater boasts numerous layers that glue it together. There’s the integral part that folk music played on the young Kater as she grew up. There was the music her father would send, helping to forge her tastes and her interests. The music camps

In his novel The End Of The Affair, Graham Greene held that “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” In 2016 Willy Vlautin announced the end of the chapter for Richmond Fontaine.

Seems the fat lady hadn’t sung after all. 2016 brought down the final curtain on Richmond Fontaine after two decades, 11 albums, unremitted touring, minimal staff changes, and an international fan base that grew unswervingly in number and devotion over both those decades. Theirs was a special kind of

Singer-song writer Gregory Alan Isakov was in Belfast last December when I spoke with him in a room, within a warren of rooms, way back stage at the Waterfront Hall. He had been supporting Passenger on a European tour for the previous two and half months, and this support slot

It was a natural thing. The excited, jovial, unaware chatter from the bar had been slowly building all night as the Real Music Club crowd at the Errigle Inn had eased into a gig we’d been waiting for since way last autumn. James McMurtry was on stage playing “These