Interviews

The last time I saw Justin Osborne, he was exhausted. After six years of touring, three full length releases, hundreds of shows, and tens of thousands of miles traveled, he was ready to go home. A true hustler in the best sense of the word: steadily grinding, pushing a dream – building SUSTO – with […]

Nina Yates is a healer. If you are fortunate enough to share even a little time with her you will surely feel her presence as it calms your nervous system and steadies your heartbeat. On Nina’s debut record, Mama’s Heart (out October 30th), eight of the ten songs were penned for a weekly Open Mic […]

Paul Collins, founding member of The Nerves, The Breakaways and The Beat, is easily one of the most important architects of the American Power Pop genre. And yet, mainstream success was always just outside of reach. Along with Jack Lee and Peter Case, he helped bridge the LA punk and pop scene in the mid-to-late […]

Mexico City band Los Blenders recently dropped their new album, Mazunte 2016, via tastemaker label Devil In Woods. Since the release of their 2015 debut Chavos Bien, the band has been steadily building up a loyal following of their fans in Mexico and abroad. Though they sing in Spanish, their music and messages connect on a […]

Considering a prolific career that stretches back fifty years, it should come as little surprise that when folk singer-songwriter Chris Smither recorded his 2014 album ­­­­Still on the Levee, there was much more material than would make the final cut. Fast forward to 2020 and now Smither has released the rest of the material from […]

David Shaw of The Revivalists gave us a happy surprise recently: he released not one but two solo singles, “Shaken” and “Promised Land.” Both contain that beat that is so embedded into the fabric of The Revivalists, a New Orleans based band that has long been hot on the festival scene, and both revolve around […]

Daniel Rodriguez is a listener. Inspiration knocks and he answers with a pad and a pen. For almost 20 years, the Colorado-based singer-songwriter has been touring, crafting, and delivering beauty in song for fans all over the world to enjoy. People have used these songs in times of trouble, celebration, birth, death, weddings, funerals, bar […]

When I interviewed Chris Hillman back in 2017, he mentioned writing a book about his life and joked that he was just “too lazy to go find anybody to work it – meaning that you have to find an agent to go to a publishing company.” Well, that book finally did come to fruition with […]

Cindy Blackman Santana is ready to get this party started. Although she had begun work on her new album, Give The Drummer Some, a few years ago, it finally dropped last week and at just the right time. With the world having been in lockdown, with no live concerts, having some new music that gets […]

Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the music scene was inundated by teen idols and swoonable dreamboat singers. It was before the Beatles but after Elvis. And songs were finger-snapping pop hits that the kids could dance to at sock hops and play on little record players in bedrooms across the nation. It […]

For those who thought Joe Bonamassa’s debut album, A New Day Yesterday in 2000, was the second coming of the blues, you have just been served an almost pure perfection update with A New Day Now to celebrate its 20th anniversary. With it, Bonamassa has done something so rare, which is to actually make a […]

The new action flick The 2nd, out today on VOD, pits Ryan Phillipe’s Vic Davis against Casper Van Dien’s Driver, an ominous character who’s known only by his job description. Or, part of it, anyway. Working for a shady, well-funded organization with a political motive in mind, Driver leads a team of bad guys into […]

Bonnie Whitmore has been singing and playing music since she graduated from diapers. She was born into a family of musicians with her mom being trained as an opera singer, dad a folk singer, and her sister Eleanor sings and plays violin as one half of The Mastersons. The running joke in the family was […]

When speaking with guitarist GE Smith, you get the distinct impression that he’s an everyday guy who just followed his passion. No big deal, right. Listening to tell him talk about his career, he shows no sign of braggadocio, although he’s played alongside Bob Dylan, Roger Waters and David Bowie, was the Musical Director for […]

Experimental dream pop group Jupiter Sprites – driven by songwriters Max Keena and Alicia Capp – hail from misty Olympia, WA, where late night recording sessions make for a lush array of compositions produced by Keena’s artful ear in his home studio. In the wake of a series of traumatic events involving two hospitalizations and […]

The day before the release of his first album in a dozen years, Brandon Curtis is sitting on his screened-in porch in Northern Vermont, miles from the Canadian border, with a seemingly endless sprawl of pine trees behind him that couldn’t make for a sharper contrast to his younger years. The Secret Machines came up […]

Billy Zoom is in his shed. Chances are, though, his shed is a lot cooler than my shed or your shed. I’m picturing a room with lots of cool guitar gadgets, perhaps a TV and a comfy chair, away from the bustle of a household that includes teenaged twins. With coronavirus out there in the […]

After twelve years of radio silence, most fans of The Secret Machines thought their time had come to pass. The last time they’d put out new music, George W. Bush still occupied the White House and both iPads and Instagram were yet to exist. It’s important to understand how much the world has changed since […]

The recording of Twelfth, the Old 97’s aptly titled, um, 12th record, was not without its “oh shit!” moments. The recording itself was sandwiched between a natural disaster and a global pandemic, with the band decamping to Nashville to record the same day a devastating tornado tore through the city and finished just days before […]

Twisted Pine is a Boston-based string band that takes that creatively mingles bluegrass and popular jazz, peppered with sprinkles of rock, funk, and country. Or in other words, its what Twisted Pine’s bass player, Chris Sartori coined as ‘neo-folk indie soul avant jazz jam grass-icana.’ Their latest album Right Now was released on August 14th […]