Nick Cristiano

Kinky Friedman’s posthumous album opens with the title song, “Poet of Motel 6,” a tribute to a fellow late legend of the Texas troubadour tradition, Billy Joe Shaver. “He’d stay up all night/ He would drink and he would fight/ Ah, but every song he’d write was

Paul Thorn opens his new album, Life Is Just A Vapor, with a terse but timely sermon. “Tough times don’t last, tough people do,” the 60-year-old Tupelo, Miss., native sings over a loping, horn-accented R&B groove. Then he goes on: “If they can do it, maybe we

The last we heard Charles “Wigg” Walker on record was more than a decade ago, when he fronted the Dynamites, a soul and funk outfit whose big, horn-infused attack can only be described as explosive. Walker was nevertheless a commanding presence, his grit and power reflecting the strengths developed over

“I’m a rovin’ soul,” Joe Ely confesses on the haunted opening to “Drivin’ Man,” the number that opens and sets the thematic tone for his sparkling new album, Driven to Drive. Since bursting out of Texas in the ‘70s like a Lone Star Springsteen, his rocking dynamism colored by

Not that they needed any introduction to roots music fans, but on the title song of their first collaboration, 2018’s Downey to Lubbock (ND review), Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore succinctly laid out their long-established musical personas and points of origin. The guitar-slinging Alvin: “I’m a wild

Nobody blends groove and gravitas quite like Chris Smither. The folk-blues master leads off his new album with the title song, “All About the Bones.” Over a seductive mid-tempo rhythm burnished by his own deftly picked guitar, Chris Cheek's late-night sax, and BettySoo’s ethereal backing vocals, Smither