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Peter Blackstock

ALBUM REVIEW: Son Volt Finds a Truer Sound in Song Selection for Doug Sahm Tribute

ALBUM REVIEW: Son Volt Finds a Truer Sound in Song Selection for Doug Sahm Tribute

The roots of this album stretch back even further than Uncle Tupelo’s 1993 swan song Anodyne, which featured a glorious cover of Doug Sahm’s “Give Back the Key to My Heart” that helped introduce Sahm to legions of younger fans. Before their 1990 debut album, No Depression, Uncle

Best of 2014: Sturgill Simpson - "Metamodern Sounds in Country Music"

Best of 2014: Sturgill Simpson - "Metamodern Sounds in Country Music"

When No Depression launched as a print magazine in 1995, its positioning as an alternative-country quarterly was intended to be squarely in contrast to the dominant acts on mainstream country radio at the time. The magazine championed the organic sounds of Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks while the likes of

Luluc: A Life in Many Movements

Luluc: A Life in Many Movements

Preface: Nineteen years ago this month, Grant Alden and I were deep in the midst of creating the debut issue of No Depression magazine, which launched in autumn 1995 in Seattle. Nearly two decades later, our lives are much different. Grant and his wife run a bookstore and coffee shop

Model Rockets

(Editor's note: About a year ago, Model Rockets ringleader John Ramberg dropped me a line to let me know that the band was planning a small-scale reissue of this album, which came out in the fall of 1994. Ramberg had apparently appreciated a review I wrote of the

The Weepies - No time to cry

"I don't differentiate all that much between movies, music, TV -- it's like all these companion pieces that go along with your life." --Steve Tannen Deb Talan and Steve Tannen of the Weepies are having a bit of a disagreement. Speaking by phone cross-country

Son Volt - The Search

"We'll know when we get there/If we find mercy," Jay Farrar sings in "The Picture", the second track on The Search, Son Volt's fifth album. If in fact the record's title is a clue as to its journey, that

America - Here & Now

These things tend to be just a bad idea -- bands two or three decades removed from their prime trying to recapture what made them successful back in the day. Often such reunions are not much more than dressed-up moneygrabs, a rehash of moldy oldies augmented by a handful of