Song of the Decade – Josh Ritter's Thin Blue Flame
There are a zillion posts and articles out there expounding on the best this and that of the decade, and personally I don't give two wits about most of it. But I do feel it's necessary to offer my two cents on Song of the Decade.
E.C. Ball's Gift to A Frowning World
It's now a commonplace that geography is destiny. If stolid mountains and excitable weather can mock mere politics and war, then surely they can imbue a man with an interior geography, a sense of his own purpose and place. E.C. Ball was a man of a particular
Scowlin' with Dexter Romweber
If rockabilly had things like elder statesmen, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better candidate than Chapel Hill, North Carolina's Dexter Romweber. With deeper, more thorough roots than The Cramps’ Lux Interior — and all-around superior musicianship than the cheeky Brian Setzers of the world — Romweber first garnered
Leonard Cohen at the Isle of Wight
By Leonard Cohen
DVD directed by Murray Lerner
Review by Douglas Heselgrave
After five days of sleeping outdoors in the wind, cold and rain with little to eat, the crowd of 600,000 people who gathered at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival were more than a little shifty and
Focus on the song: "Look at Miss Ohio"
Yesterday, after hours of engrossing myself in the new Dave Rawlings Machine album, A Friend of a Friend, I turned to my Gillian Welch collection. I got caught up on "Look at Miss Ohio" - a song I've certainly heard a thousand times before.
It was
Wendy Bird hatches a small "Wonder"
I try to cling tenaciously, perhaps naively, to the belief that in music, quality will always win the day; that the good stuff will bubble to the surface and find an audience. It isn’t always easy to hold firm to that notion.
The recent release of Wendy Bird’s