Nick Cristiano

It’s remarkable, really: Dion DiMucci is not only the last of the pioneering rock-and-roll greats of the 1950s, but, at 86, he remains creatively vital. In recent years he has been turning out some of the best music of his seven-decade-plus career, and he’s doing so with an

Robert Finley titled his first album Age Don’t Mean a Thing. The singer and guitarist was obviously aiming to make a point, since that 2016 debut came when he was 62 years old. And what a debut it was, introducing a soul-blues man whose music burst with a raw

On his first two albums, Alex Williams delivered bracingly hard-edged honky-tonk and country-rock with attitude and heart. And his original songs – especially on 2022’s Waging Peace, where he unflinchingly faced up to his demons — revealed him to be a fresh new voice. It was hard not to view him

Jim Kweskin plays old stuff. And it never gets old. Since the singer and guitarist came to prominence with his jug band during the folk boom of the early ‘60s, he has essentially been doing the same thing — mining vintage material, especially early jazz and blues, and filtering it through

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