Aaron Watson compiles a hefty 20 tracks on his towering double album Red Bandana, a number that bears some sentimental significance: There’s a song here…
Luther Dickinson has spent more than 30 years as a session player, singer/songwriter, record producer, and ringleader of the North Mississippi All Stars — so…
Our new monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition…
Maybe it’s a response to the meat-and-potatoes austerity of guys like Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell; or maybe it’s simply a case of history being…
There are a couple of ways to apprehend Mule Variations, the twelfth studio album from Tom Waits and the second to be co-written almost entirely by…
Speed has always been central to the Della Mae value proposition. When the group formed in 2009, they turned heads not just for being an…
Timing always seemed inscrutable and capricious in the life of Leo “Bud” Welch, the Mississippi bluesman who began his recording career when he was 81,…
There’s historic precedent for No Saint, the debut album from Texas-born singer/songwriter Lauren Jenkins — but it may not be what you’d expect. The album was…
Our new monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition…
The music of Ray Charles always sounded like freedom. On his early sides for Atlantic, he was a man unencumbered by the conventions of genre, gleefully innovating…
Hayes Carll made his reputation as a wiseass — so when he came down with a serious case of the blues on 2016’s Lovers and…
It’s often said of dynamic live acts that their albums don’t fully prepare you for the concert experience. That’s undoubtedly true of Tedeschi Trucks Band,…
Our new monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition…
One of the brainiest guys in jazz, Brad Mehldau is likened to classical composers as often as he is boppin’ piano men; he is famous…
An oft-stated yet just as oft-forgotten fact about Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music? Chronicle of backwoods American weirdness though it may be, it’s also…
Perhaps sensing that he couldn’t push his electric mayhem any further, Bob Dylan retreated from his wild, boozy rock and roll with John Wesley Harding, returning to largely…
They could have called it Young, Gifted and Black, were the name not otherwise in use. Not until Robert Glasper convened his Black Radio sessions in 2012 would…
Purple Rain begins with a funeral, but not with mourning: It’s a celebration — a gateway into new life and a new world, where “you can always see…
Though the cumulative impact of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is considerable, and its achievement is towering, it remains a strangely difficult record to discuss by way of…