It’s been some years since Carlene Carter began her music career consorting with Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds and The Rumour back in 1979. In fact, Stronger is her first album of original material since 1995, a work of renewed creativity inspired in its own way, like that of sibling once-removed of Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac, by personal tragedies to which the cd title refers.
Mudcrutch is not a Tom Petty album. Nor is it merely a novelty. It is rather the rebirth of a band that met an untimely end when coincidence and circumstance brought together what would later became Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers.
Steve Winwood has had a most successful solo career for over a quarter century, beginning in 1981 with Arc of A Diver through 2003’s About Time. Yet no album has so accurately reflected his versatile talents or vividly echoed the pinnacles of his past as Nine Lives.
Higher Ground certainly deserved to commemorate their anniversary April 15th. The Burlington area Vermont venue, originally housed in a former Denny’s in Winooski strip mall and now in a former movie theater a couple miles away in South Burlington, has made a name for itself over the last decade, alternately nurturing up and coming talent (Derek Trucks, Soulive), welcoming established acts (Gov’t Mule, The Black Crowes, Sonic Youth, Wilco, John Mayer, Modest Mouse) while providing a regular tourstop for musicians as wide-ranging in style as Charlie Hunter and Hot Tuna.
What’s it say about the legacy of The Clash that a truncated version of Revolution Rock was broadcast on public television prior to the release of the DVD? Somehow it makes the English quartet seem less insidious in their influence than they would want their legacy to be.
With four albums, Jackie Greene, 27, hasn’t really come out of nowhere, but he reached a whole different level of visibility when he joined Phil Lesh and Friends in the summer of 2007. Greene’s diverse skills have allowed him to become this group’s de facto front-man, a role to which he has conveyed a commanding stage presence as he sparks both his band-mates and the audiences who come to see them.
If it’s true absence that makes the heart grow fonder, it may also be true that absence makes the band grow stronger. Judging by Vorcza’s second set at Burlington Vermont’s Red Square March 28th, that would seem to be the case.
If you want to talk about tragic irony in rock and roll, you can’t ignore the story of Lynyrd Skynyrd. On the threshold, and deliberately so, of capturing the mainstream audience with which they flirted via the popularity of “Sweet Home Alabama” in 1975, a plane crash took the life of three bandmembers in 1977 merely days after the release of Street Survivors, compelling the label to pull the album and re-release it with new cover art in place of the original version which depicted the band in flames.
Each of Jackie Greene’s albums, from 2002’s Gone Wanderin' to 2006’s American Myth, has marked a definite progression for the young Californian and Giving Up The Ghost is no exception.
The second album in a triptych that includes My Aim is True and Armed Forces, This Year’s Model is now available in a deluxe two-Dd edition, compiling the various b-sides and singles Costello released around this time, as well as a full concert from 1978 with his band The Attractions,
