Various Artists - Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection 1960-2000
You can have your recording studio, give me a field recorder any day of the week. Take the high technology and the complex sounds sculpted by sonic scientists in the hermetically sealed engineer's booth and on the sanitary hard drive, take 'em on down to the river
Willie Nelson - Milk Cow Blues
From its three years of incubation in Austin through its belated release on Island, this project has carried the generic tag of "Willie Nelson's blues album." The description is accurate as far as it goes. Yet ultimately it is no more helpful in mapping the sophisticated
16 Horsepower - Secret South
Speaking with 16 Horsepower frontman David Eugene Edwards earlier this year, two things struck me. The first emerged from comments he made regarding his group's fondness for "old things that have a timeless quality"; both 16HP's typically old-timey, sepia-toned sleeve art and its frequent
Various Artists - Badlands: A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska
As memories are sneaky, self-absorbed creatures who often excuse themselves from context in order to join the family photo albums, approaching a tribute album project -- one of nostalgia's natural breeding grounds -- on Bruce Springsteen, it would be tempting to overlook 1982's dark Reagan-era Nebraska
Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Picnic - South Park Meadows (Austin, TX)
You've been commissioned to organize Willie Nelson's annual Texas picnic. What's the first thing you do?
You get the beer.
But somewhere in the chain of command, that license was forgotten, and Willie's 27th picnic -- which was to return to Dripping
Porter Wagoner - The Thin Man
"Mama said I used to go out in the yard when I was around nine or ten years old. My dad had cut down this big oak tree and left a stump there, and Mama said I'd get up on that stump and pretend I was onstage,