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Grant Alden

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: When Boredom Blooms Into Creativity

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: When Boredom Blooms Into Creativity

A measured portion of boredom remains an essential part of any artist's regular diet. Getting that portion right is tricky. Too much smacks of indolence and indulgence; too little suggests an unseemly devotion to career over craft. Our late sequestration during two years of COVID provided an overabundance

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: The Missing Years

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: The Missing Years

These days, alas, there is no danger of wobbling late Friday night 10 blocks over to Peaches Records and looking for love in the cut-out bins. (Oh, but that Legendary Christine Perfect album.) The habit never entirely leaves, even as it becomes more difficult to justify what sneaks through the

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: The Judds Tribute, Jon Dee Graham, and More

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: The Judds Tribute, Jon Dee Graham, and More

Perhaps we should reconsider last column's comment about the manufactured consent of celebrity and commerce so as to add a needed caveat, borrowed from a children's book by Lloyd Alexander: The work doesn't care who does it. And the best work, the work which

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: Drive-by Truckers, Malcolm Holcombe, and Others Doing the Damn Work

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: Drive-by Truckers, Malcolm Holcombe, and Others Doing the Damn Work

EDITOR’S NOTE: Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden were the original editors of No Depression, launching it as a print magazine covering alt-country (whatever that is) in 1995 and steering it through 75 issues until 2008. While they’re no longer part of the staff, they’re still very much

Ray Price's "Night Life": An appreciation

Every once in a while, it is necessary to obsess about a song. And so I have come here to confess that Ray Price's 1963 recording of "Night Life" is so extraordinary as to be out of time, a singular event, a startling sound across the

Ruby Johnson: A glorious (re)discovery

The twenty sides Ruby Johnson recorded for Stax/Volt in 1966-68 were finally released in something like album format in 1993, assembled under the title of the first track, I'll Run Your Hurt Away. It appears to have been reissued subsequently -- somewhere -- with seven additional tracks

The revival of Chip Robinson, backslider

In the shadows of memory I remain convinced that once I saw the Backsliders, of Raleigh, North Carolina, perform. This is probably not true, because generally I associate such things with specific venues and other oddments. In my memory, they were on the fateful bill with Whiskeytown at SXSW, that