Patty Mitchell - These Are The Good Old Days
Listeners with an ear for a sweet yet powerful voice and with a good memory may recall Patty Mitchell as the singer whose talent earned her an upgrade from scratch vocalist to featured duet partner with Ralph Stanley on his award-winning Clinch Mountain Sweethearts album. Before that, she was
Chris Smither - Honeysuckle Dog
Recorded with producer Michael Cuscuna in two sessions -- Woodstock, December 1972, and New York City, Spring 1973 -- this was to be Smither's third album for Poppy. Soon after it was finished, the label folded, parent company United Artists took over the masters, and the album was shelved. The
Eddie Spaghetti - The Sauce
As it turns out, a lot of the Seattle class of 1992 (or whatever) is still finding ways to make music -- whether their mostly accidental swing at the big time hit or missed. As one of their ex-girlfriends said, the Supersuckers moved to Seattle from Tucson because they could
Lloyd Cole - Music In A Foreign Language
The title song to Lloyd Cole's Music In A Foreign Language is so exquisitely written, so proficiently executed, that it makes even the most mannered singer-songwriter sound slovenly. Not just poetic, the lyrics are rendered like a poem -- sung, not just written, in a kind of iambic
Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter - Oh, My Girl
With Reckless Burning, their 2002 debut, Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter elicited gushing comparisons to such slo-core practitioners as the Cowboy Junkies, Mazzy Star and Low. Those are all apt reference points, to be sure, but Sykes' sound -- languid, ethereal, and spiced with echoey forebodings just this
James McMurtry - Live in Aught-Three
Perhaps partly because of his bloodline, James McMurtry enjoys (or endures) a reputation as the most writerly of Texas singer-songwriters, one whose material highlights literary qualities such as an eye for detail, a strong sense of place, a shifting narrative perspective and a keenly calibrated irony. Along the way,