Joy Williams is finally back on the Front Porch. Her aptly title new record chronicles the comfort generated in returning both to her Nashville home and to the acoustic, folk-driven music she would play on her own front porch. Intimacy…
In ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ Bob Dylan sings, “But even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” and on Undress the Felice Brothers have taken that notion to heart. Ian Felice makes it…
Ben Cooper is amazingly well adjusted. The force behind Radical Face grew up in south with nine siblings. Barely above the poverty line, his mixed-race family seemed normal, until he realised that not everyone was brought up the same way…
In League With Dragons is the seventeenth album in twenty-five years from the Mountain Goats. What’s surprising is that John Darnielle, songwriter and frontman for the band, decided to give up control and let one of his old collaborators, Owen…
Craig Finn is a master of the short story. In three and half minutes he can tell you more than most people tell you in a lifetime. On I Need A New War, Finn concludes a trilogy of music that…
Gentle graces. There is something essentially soft and tender about Carrie Tree’s latest record, The Canoe. Underneath the placid exterior are musical depths one doesn’t always associate with folk music, instruments like balafon, ronroco, ngoni, and jarana. Allow the music…
Daniel Norgren is an anomaly. If you close your eyes and listen to a song like ‘Let Love Run The Game’, you’d almost swear it was The Band, but with an unidentifiable vocalist. The music choogles along, sounding like something…
Life gets messy and Field Medic embraces the mess in all its rambunctious, unruly glory. Recorded digitally, fade into the dawn sounds nothing like your standard digital album, largely because Kevin Patrick Sullivan decided to record each song in a…
Lovely and strange is the perfect way to describe Wild Sight, the debut album from Swimming Bell. Enthralling vocals layered one upon another combine with simple instrumentation, treated to create otherworldly blends unlike virtually anything else. Katie Schottland, who records…
Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman has the kind of curriculum vitae that most writers would kill for. Scribe for Rolling Stone, author of On The Road With Bob Dylan, co-writer of memoirs for Howard Stern, Anthony Kleidis, and Mike Tyson, lyricist for…