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Peter Blackstock

Sunshine Club - Sorry, no KC here

It's a rainy winter night in San Francisco, but all is warm and well inside the Hotel Utah. The long, narrow room spills forth with spirits -- both distilled and historical, a sense of decades-old legend and lore looming unspoken within these walls. Tucked away in the back

Jayhawks - Sound of Lies

The situation is eerily similar, when you think about it. Both bands formed in the mid-'80s in the Midwest and had co-leaders who generally wrote separately yet shared songwriting credits on all their material. Both drew caringly from the deep well of country music's legacy, though

Richard Buckner - Devotion & Doubt

In the liner notes to Devotion & Doubt, Richard Buckner says he originally wrote "Song of 27", the album's final track, "as a theme of sorts for an album I wanted to make based on my own family's characters. I abandoned the project

Jimmy Webb - Ten Easy Pieces

For better or for worse, I must own up to the fact that my record collection contains approximately 250 different versions of the 10 songs on this disc. And while it may say something about my sanity (or lack thereof) that I spent countless hours in 1993 and '94

Whiskeytown - Faithless Street

"I'll ride with you tonight, I'll ride forever/There's no way to predict this kind of weather." It's the kind of opening line that sets a tone, sticks with you, serves as a harbinger that something significant is looming on

Jeremy Tepper - By Products, When a producer isn't exactly a producer

Editor's note: A few months back, I made my first visit to New York's modest, humble, yet quickly-becoming-famous Lakeside Lounge, a bar co-owned by Eric Ambel, who's profiled elsewhere in this package of articles about producers. Ambel was gone that day, off in Chicago

Martin Zellar & The Hardways - Self-Titled

Perhaps my hopes are just too high for Martin Zellar, given that his former band the Gear Daddies seemed ultimately one of the best (if most underappreciated) bands the mid-late 80s Minneapolis scene produced. Lost in the shadow of their harder-edged brethren such as the Replacements, Husker Du and Soul