Posts by Sheryl Hunter

It’s been a significant year for chamber-pop band Winterpills. The Western Massachusetts quintet recently marked their 20th anniversary with a remixed reissue of their debut album—complete with a pair of bonus tracks—and now they’ve returned with This Is How We Dance, their eighth album and first release in nine years. Across these 12 songs, the […]

The Universal Fire is Jeffrey Foucault’s first album of original material since 2018’s Blood Brothers. The Western Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter describes the album as a working wake to his longtime drummer and best friend Billy Conway, who passed away in December 2021. Before he teamed up with Foucault, Conway had made his mark in the music […]

Ten years ago, Lake Street Dive released its fourth album, “Bad Self Portraits,” which proved a game-changer for the jazzy pop quartet that met when they were students at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. The band first gained attention when a video of a street performance in which they played a jazzy […]

Ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro achieved prominence when a YouTube video of him playing George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” went viral and propelled the native of Hawaii to stardom. That was in 2006 and since then he has released numerous albums and toured the globe  (he’s huge in Japan),  and in the process has […]

Seth Glier isn’t the only songwriter to take pen to paper during the pandemic, but he may be one of the few to come away from the experience with a feeling of optimism. On “The Coronation,” the title track off his sixth album for MPress Records, he expresses his belief that we can now all […]

Matt Lorenz, the western Massachusetts-based musician who tours and records as the one-man band The Suitcase Junket, calls the music on his new album “The End Is New” ‘doom folk’, a fitting genre name for 2020 it there ever was one. “The End Is New” is Lorenz’s sixth album and first for the new Americana/roots […]

Don’t even try to tag a label onto the music of the Boston based band, Twisted Pine. The group’s bass player, Chris Sartori gave it a try and the best he could come up with was ‘neo-folk indie soul avant jazz jam grass-icana’  -a phrase he admitted doesn’t easily roll off the tongue. If you […]

Sitting on the lawn of a beautiful vineyard and listening to the smooth jazz-swing music of Rachael &Vilray was the perfect way to spend a hot summer afternoon, one made only better by the fact that the show was the first live music that many of us had experienced since the COVID-19  lockdown in early […]

Rufus Wainwright views his new album Unfollow the Rules as a bookend to his 1998 self-titled debut. That critically acclaimed album launched a career that found Wainwright veering from the pop world to cover Judy Garland, compose two operas and release a collection of Shakespeare sonnets. These musical detours alienated some fans, but the American-Canadian […]

Sarah Jarosz was hailed as a bluegrass prodigy long before she even graduated high school. It was her skills as a multi-instrumentalist that initially gained her attention but she has since gone on to achieve success as a singer-songwriter. The Texas native has released four solo albums, won three Grammy awards, and most recently garnered widespread […]