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Grant Alden

Bad Livers - Blood & Mood

With release of their sixth album in ten years, the Bad Livers expect -- perhaps even demand -- a storm of criticism, for it is quite unlike any other record Danny Barnes and Mark Rubin have made in this guise. During that decade, they seemed eloquent, sometimes strident advocates of

Various Artists - From Spirituals To Swing: The Legendary 1938 & 1939 Carnegie Hall Concerts

The late John Hammond is credited with discovering and/or signing artists including Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Among others. For 60 years or more, this Vanderbilt heir set about making and changing musical history. Amid all that, little was as striking in

Tom Rush - The Very Best Of Tom Rush: No Regrets

Back in the early '80s, when hardcore drove me from punk rock for the first time, a savvy Seattle DJ took to playing a live cut called "Jazzman" from Tom Rush's Late Night Radio. His was a warm, expressive, soothingly sad voice, and the song

Bottle Rockets - Brand New Year

People stood in line to see Jeff Beck at South by Southwest this year. Maybe that should have been a sign. The next night, the Bottle Rockets took the stage in full Motorhead mode and tore off a 45-minute set of new songs. Not the same as the old songs.

Cynthia Gayneau - Sister in the sun

Nobody with any degree of hipness aspired to sing on Broadway in 1966, so when 16-year-old Cynthia Gano ruined her voice smoking cigarettes, she didn't much feel the loss of withdrawing from those classes. Thirty years later, she finally found time to sing what she really loved, and

Chip Taylor - Seven Days In May...A Love Story

Two years ago, when I first wrote about Chip Taylor's return to songwriting and performing, I titled the story "When A Man Grows Older," borrowing the phrase from an obscure Italo Svevo novel about an older man's unrequited love for a younger woman. It

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - Blackjack

Though hardly an unknown, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown has rarely been the beneficiary of the kind of elder-statesman adulation that has attended the waning years of John Lee Hooker. True, Brown's never had a hit the size of "Boogie Chillun", but more importantly, he'