Best of 2014: Hurray for the Riff Raff - "Small Town Heroes"
There was a time, before Hurray for the Riff Raff had built anything close to a national audience, when frontwoman Alynda Lee Segarra and longtime fiddler/drummer Yosi Perlstein would hop trains, busk on street corners, crash with scruffy, activist punk kids, and perform at an annual queer and trans
Goodnight Texas - Uncle John Farquhar
The San Francisco-based quartet Goodnight Texas have taken the idea of “retro music” a quantum leap further. Their sophomore album Uncle John Farquhar, released in August of 2014, is set up as a scrapbook of tales from the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
The album's 13 songs
Sunny Sweeney: You Had to Go and Prove Yourself
Sunny Sweeney is grinning, leaning across the conference table at her publicist’s Music Row office to display an image on her phone. She’s pulled up her website and navigated to a particular T-shirt she sells as merch. “There it is,” she declares. The photo shows a black
To Live Is to Fly - Remembering Townes Van Zandt
Days, up and down they come
Like rain on a conga drum
Forget most, remember some
But don’t turn none away
Everything is not enough
Nothing is too much to bear
Where you been is good and gone
All you keep is the getting there
To live is to
Jeff Buckley's Influences and Inspirations
The year 2014 marked the 17th anniversary of Jeff Buckley’s passing, the 20th anniversary of the release of Grace (his only fully realized studio album), and this November 17th brings what would’ve been his 48th birthday.
For the most recent anniversary of Jeff’s untimely death, I wrote
Joe Fletcher - You've Got the Wrong Man
As a 31-year-old woman whose favorite musicians, for the most part, stem from her grandmother's generation, it is a rare occurrence to have an “I was there” story. But, about five years ago, I came across a YouTube video of Deer Tick at a tiny club