Vic Chesnutt - The Salesman And Bernadette
"I just want to be Aaron Neville," deadpanned Vic Chesnutt, the consummate wag, on "Sad Peter Pan", a song from his 1995 album Is the Actor Happy? Here, one suspected, was Chesnutt -- a quirky cracker whose creaky warble is but a chirp compared to Neville'
Connie Smith: Too Cool to be Forgotten
By 1979, after slowly weaning herself off the road, Smith quit the business to stay at home with her kids, who now numbered five. Feminists painted her as a reactionary, as a successful woman who had forsaken her career. Looking back now, though, Smith’s decision seems a gutsy one;
Junior Brown With The Last Mile Ramblers - Fiesta de Los Cerrillos (Cerrillos, NM)
The drunk guy bellowing, "Junior Brown! Junior Brown!" before the music started obviously was a relatively new fan of the deep-voiced singer who invented the guit-steel. Brown's longtime fans in these parts know him and refer to him by the name he now says
Souled American - Honing the art of self-cultivation
"You can magnify beauty, take it apart, see how it got to be so damn pretty. You take a song and you look at it real close, and what happens? Well, first of all, you have to slow it down a bit to really hear what's going
Emmylou Harris - Lookin' for the water from a deeper well
Emmylou Harris' latest release is a nearly accidental album. "Unplanned" as she puts it, Spyboy -- which came out Aug. 11 on Eminent Records -- began solely as an attempt to get a really good live-in-concert version of Daniel Lanois' "The Maker" as a
Whiskeytown / Neko Case - Highway 145/ My 63
Another big little idea from Bloodshot, the folks whove criss-crossed the nations byways seeking evidence of country music insurgencies, this split single straddles contrasting anecdotes in the epic love affair between North Americans and their cars.
Whiskeytowns Highway 145 is one of those songs you recognize the first time