Folk music has always provided a bastion for aching slices of real-life tales to be digested by a greater audience. In this sense, it’s always been ‘street music’, wherein troubadours brought their stories near and far for all ears to…
Belonging to a very specific scene can be a double-edged situation: everybody knows what to expect from you in terms of sound and style; also, especially when this scene is very localized (in time and/or space), there will be a…
Benjamin Dean Wilson’s newest single, ‘The Smartest Person in the Room’, opens with a compelling swirl of the fiddle. Its warm, full sound may indicate that more of the type of chestnut folk or bluegrass music that you’ve grown up…
Every so often, an artist emerges from the woodwork with music so brilliant that you can just tell that they are headed places. Such was the case with the likes of Orange Room-era Ed Sheeran or Hozier from the moment he dropped…
We have a saying here in Tucson that’s reverberated throughout much of our artistic community, and that’s to “Keep Tucson weird!” We may not be as big as Phoenix or as affluent as Scottsdale, but we make up for it…
If the story of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs is anything to go by, sometimes you don’t even need to leave the comfort of your own garage to deliver something innovative to the world. Now, that isn’t to say that…
Sometimes, artists burst out of their respective scene with a real humdinger straightaway. Most of the time, however, music takes time to settle into and own, regardless of passion. For every Jackson 5 bursting out of the scene in preadolescence,…
In her pursuit of music and magick, Arden Leigh has taken a multi-folded path in life. What seems to converge these paths more than even the creative light between them, though, is a search for passionately expressed truths. You can…
There are records which, from the moment you start listening to them, let you enter their unique world, connected but different from the real one. During a recent workshop on digital trends in the music industry, the producer drew a…
In recent years, two labels have stood out as the greatest representatives of quality Americana: Paradise of Bachelors for ‘band’ Americana, and Mama Bird for ‘solo’ Americana. When I discovered that I Need To Start A Garden was being released…