Posts by Leslie Michele Derrough

  The last time Chris Shiflett (Foo Fighters) slipped on his cowboy hat and recorded an album, 2013’s All Hat & No Cattle with the Dead Peasants, it had a very traditional, almost homage feel to his classic country idols. Granted, it was an album of covers, but he elected to stay in that vein from […]

Just three shows into Bryan Ferry’s new tour, the atmosphere backstage was quite giddy in New Orleans. There was singing in the halls, laughter, the vibe of excitement that always comes with the early days of a brand new tour. But for guitar player Chris Spedding, he was cool as a cucumber, having done this […]

Bryan Ferry cast a spell over New Orleans on Thursday night with his unmistakable musical incantations of love. In a world of sequins and tattered jeans, the 71 year old British gentleman still chooses to perform in couture-ish finery and an ambience of Sinatra elegance. Therefore playing in a theatre such as the Saenger as […]

In a world where the term pop music leaves a bad taste in your mouth, if you look back at the early sixties, the Beatles was considered pop music and it was a good thing. It harkens up happy melodies with lyrics usually about girls and hot rod cars and puppy love and hanging out […]

His name is synonymous with guitar-driven rock & roll. Since his earliest days as a teenager in the Scorpions, through his years in UFO and variations of his solo band, Michael Schenker has kept his focus on what he can do on his guitar. He has never wavered from his mantra of “pure self-expression” by […]

Singer Joe Sumner is a man in the middle of a musical transition. The former angry young rocker, who led Fiction Plane through four albums starting in 2003 with the release of Everything Will Never Be OK, has found the message is not always in the shouting. Although his father is Sting, Sumner’s musical awakening […]

When Sting shouted out, “I want to hear you New Orleans!” the crowd shouted back in unison. While the city is in the midst of their Mardi Gras season, Sting brought that same kind of jovial fun to his set on Wednesday night at the UNO Lakefront Arena, performing with bass in hand just about […]

For a band to last forty-five years, it has to be nurtured from the inside. Henry Paul, for just about the last half-century, has been that guiding hand for The Outlaws, a group he helped form in 1972. A major part of the southern rock explosion following the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Marshall […]

Quinn Sullivan has been hailed as the new savior of blues guitar since he was probably eight years old. That’s when the legendary Buddy Guy put the young boy on his stage for the first time and let him roar. Even before that, he had appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, calm and completely at […]

Guitar genius Steve Hackett has been on a quest. After a lifetime of traveling the world and learning about new cultures, he has seen the changes that have befallen our nations. Today more than ever, he finds the distress amongst the people unsettling and sad. So much so, it has infiltrated into his new music. […]

For The Rolling Stones, playing Cuba last year may have just been another notch on their fifty-plus year old touring belt, but its historical nature was significant and it was all caught on film for Havana Moon, the latest addition to the ever-growing DVD releases by one of the greatest rock & roll bands in […]

Troy Andrews (Trombone Shorty) may be the focal point when he takes the stage with his band Orleans Avenue but when he turns it over to his guitar player Pete Murano to do a solo, the electrical current in the room goes way up. “As a guitar player he can do it all,” bandmate Joey […]

For Tommy Stinson, there were two things that were very important to him when he went to record his next record: for it to be recorded live as much as possible, in the studio with the musicians together, and for it to be a band, not just him banging out the songs on different instruments. […]

If there is one stop on the Red Hot Chili Peppers new tour you needed to go to it was this past Tuesday night in New Orleans at the Smoothie King Center. Why? Because when they did their encore of “Give It Away,” nothing came close to when they brought out local musicians George Porter […]

While most music fans breathed a sigh of relief when the year finally ended, Heart decided to jubilate with a live DVD celebrating a career highlight. For the female-fronted band from Seattle who were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 2013, it was their first-ever show at one of London’s most […]

Life is a journey full of highs and lows and how we react to them is what makes it truly our own. For Jake Clemons, he chose a piece of his journey and set it to a musical rhapsody that he has titled Fear & Love. Releasing later this week on January,13th, the saxophone player […]

For British-born guitar player Chris Green, he loves living in the South – especially at this time of the year. When he first moved to America he lived in Chicago. “For five years I dealt with four or five foot snowdrifts outside my door, digging out my car, digging out the garage and all of […]

For the band Extreme, they have always been about making rock & roll multidimensional, never sticking to the same formula for every song. To them, rock & roll is a blank canvas and there are a million colors just waiting to be splashed upon it. So when a bare bones harmonic ballad leapt to the […]

It’s been almost a year since Mötley Crüe ended their farewell tour. Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neil and Nikki Sixx have moved on to other projects while the dust settled over the grave of the band that began thirty-five years ago in a seedy section of Hollywood. As a thank you to fans, they are […]

Lee Fields is living proof that doing what you love does not have an age limit. “I feel that every human being’s purpose is to do what their inner voice says to do,” Fields (65) said in a press release earlier this month. “And my inner voice, my driving force, wants me to put out […]