Posts by Peter J. Hoetjes

Willie Nelson spends the majority of First Rose Of Spring gazing back over his life with the nostalgic perspective of a man approaching ninety years of age. The placid tone of its title track sets the stage for this thematic arrangement. The simplicity of its structure and his emotional delivery evoke memories of the country singer’s first […]

The album isn’t anything revolutionary, but Songs I Can’t Live Without will please fans of Marshall Chapman, whose worldly crooning and sparse reimaginings of vintage tunes come off as a sort of auditory comfort food. It’s as if Chapman took a stack of records off a long-neglected shelf, blew the dust off of them, pinched the crumpled […]

The dawning of the twenties finds Matthew Barber holding steadily at a career crossroads. After struggling to break out during the first few years of the century, he hit gold with 2008’s Ghost Notes, establishing himself as a reliable songwriter whose honest, no-frills crooning gives his music a timeless appeal. Since then, Barber has worked relentlessly, […]

There’s something pleasantly cliche about a rock band reuniting after a solo album. It isn’t simply a matter of anticipation, but the hope that an old favorite, long resigned to a distant memory of what was, might be here to stay. The broad label ‘rock’ is being applied here, due to the fact that Meg and […]