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Peter Blackstock

Mickey Newbury: 1940 to 2002

"The dancing stops, but the music goes on." In the deepest blue of night, in the wee hours of September 29th, Mickey Newbury drifted off to dream at his home in rural Oregon, and never came back. His passing was no surprise, as he'd been battling

Silos - Cuba

In mid-September of 2001, about a week after that fateful day, I drove a couple hours north to Richmond, Virginia, having heard that Bob Rupe was planning to sit in for a few songs with the Silos at Poe's Pub. This was a rare occasion; Rupe and Silos

Mickey Newbury - A Long Road Home

"Do you still have your dreams?" Mickey Newbury drops this question about halfway through his new album's title track, one of two songs on the disc that clock in on the long side of ten minutes. Newbury has sketched plenty of three-minute vignettes ripe for radio

Uncle Tupelo - 89-93: An Anthology

More than a decade, now, since an old friend at Waterloo Records started raving about a new album they'd just gotten at the store. Roscoe was probably the world's biggest Replacements fan (that was his bootleg cassette they swiped and disseminated as The Shit Hits The

Various Artists - Poet: A Tribute To Townes Van Zandt

Back in February 1992, in a telephone interview for a daily-paper concert preview, I asked Townes Van Zandt if he tended to benefit from the covers of his songs that occasionally popped up amid the big leagues of country music. I meant it in a financial sense, related to publishing

Bob Schneider - Lonelyland

More than a year after it went on sale at Waterloo Records in Austin -- where it eventually sold more than 10,000 copies, at a single store -- Lonelyland finally received a nationwide release via Universal in March. The ultimate big-fish-in-a-small-pond story, Schneider has been king of the Austin

West Texas rivers and wind-blown campfire tunes

Driving west on I-10 from Austin, the desert creeps up on you, gradually revealing itself mile after mile after mile until the entire landscape has changed. The winding rivers, lazy lakes, scrubby trees and colorful flowers of the Texas Hill Country finally give way to barren creekbeds, rocky outcroppings, desolate