Leonard Cohen - Dear Heather
If life is a riddle and death is the punch line, Leonard Cohen enjoys the last laugh with Dear Heather. Though I don't mean to suggest the Canadian bard is in any hurry to join Johnny Cash across the great divide, Cohen's latest offers a series
Kenny Buttrey: 1945 to 2004
If alternative-country has ever had a definitive drummer, it would be Kenneth A. Buttrey. After a long battle with cancer, Buttrey died at his Nashville home on September 12, 2004. He was 59.
Buttrey brought the mercury to the thin, wild sound Bob Dylan captured on Blonde On Blonde,
Laurie & John Stirratt - Out of the blue
When Laurie Stirratt launched her new life in 2002, it was like going home. Chicago welcomed her like a prodigal daughter, she got a job at the Hideout (a favorite watering hole among Chicago music scenesters), and she began writing and recording with her twin brother, Wilco bassist John Stirratt.
Iris Dement - All that living will allow
Singers celebrate the human voice. Their lyrics are words. But animated by voice those words are subsumed into sounds....In most songs the drama or tension results from the fact that the singer moves between word (sense) and note (song). At one moment the song simply "says" something.
Gene Austin - The father of southern pop
As astronomers will tell you, stars often come in pairs, one obvious to the eye, the other unseen. Telltale evidence of interactions between the two is often spotted first in photos -- the obscure binary companion detected in changes in the brighter, noted star.
For over 75 years, the hand-tinted
Jean Ritchie - Mountain Hearth & Home
It seems likely that Jean Ritchie was the first woman other than my mother with whom I fell in love. I would have been about five years old and have no memory of what she looked like; worse, I fear she was replaced in my affections by the Peruvian-born