I didn’t have time to write a full on review of the new Molly Tuttle & The Golden Highway Album, Crooked Tree, but the album is too good for me to wait. Tuttle is known predominantly as a bluegrass artist. That’s too small a box to put Tuttle in and Crooked Tree makes that clear. While there is an abundance of bluegrass and old-time music […]
Ryan Adams is often lumped into the amorphous category of alt-country. That is, in part, because he was previous in bands that were much more obviously “country” and some of his solo output is fits the country, or at least folk country, mold well. His latest album, Chris, makes it pretty clear that Ryan Adams can also be a rock performer. He may be classified […]
Unlike rock stars, most country artists have great voices. There are outliers whose voices were more unique than great, such as Johnny Cash, but the vast majority of country artists have control, tone, and timbre that rock stars often do not. Orville Peck’s voice stands out even among the country greats. He has a warm baritone with a big range that sounds somewhere between The […]
I very much love Sarah Shook. Her music is a mix of traditional country, americana, and rock; She is as close to a throwback as exists in modern country music. Her songs are filled with heartache, sadness, and longing but also resilience. Her best work revolves around lost and traumatic love. To listen to Sarah Shook is to dive deep into the morass of the […]
I’ve made no secret of how much I love Sarah Shook and the Disarmers. Sidelong was one of my favorite albums of the late 2010s, Years was an excellent follow up (no sophomore slump here), and her set at the Great Blue Heron Festival was one of the highlights of my entire 2019 summer. So, when she recently started dropping some new tunes I was […]
The Zac Brown Band, and its eponymous lead singer, are something of an anomaly in modern country music. Super star country artists tend to fall into two buckets – Americana and country pop. The latter is the successor to the Nashville Sound that proliferated in the 1970s and 80s. Zac Brown is, arguably, not modern country. Much of the band’s output is actually southern rock. […]
Let’s get something out of the way right now. Suzanne Santo has a very rich and evocative voice with a natural vibrato similar to Emmy Lou Harris. That is what makes her special. Her song writing can be anywhere from pulling your heart out to a collection of tropes and cliches. Her singing is her superpower, and it makes even mundane songs sound wonderful. This […]
Last week, August 2, 2021 to be precise, I had the opportunity to see Amethyst Kiah in concert at the Chautauqua Institute. Once of the great things about Chautauqua, is the opportunity to see bands one might not think to go see otherwise. Due to COVID, the crowd was much smaller than it should have been but that added to the intimacy of the show. […]
It’s been a while since we heard from the Heartless Bastards. Their last album was in 2015, which is far enough in the past to assume they were defunct. Then, out of nowhere, in 2020 came a new single “Revolution”. Another one came out in early 2021 and now a brand-new single just this week. The new song “Photograph” came packaged with the other two […]
We are back into a cycle of singles again. Throughout May and into June we saw one great (or not so great) album after another bounding out onto the new music scene. These albums cut across genres, sometimes multiple genres, and included new and old artists. Whew. Since then, new album releases have slowed down to a less frenetic pace. Singles releases, on the other […]