Televised Tune: Ben Harper & Charlie Musselwhite on Leno
Ben Harper with Charlie Musselwhite on Leno, DIIV on Letterman and more music on TV this week
Ben Harper with Charlie Musselwhite on Leno, DIIV on Letterman and more music on TV this week
If you want to know what it’s like to be young and following your dream in the music business, look no further than Texas-native Tyler Bryant. He is the epitome of youth with a grounded sense of who he is and how he can not only be the best guitar player he can be but be the best person he can be. With a solid foundation of family, friends and mentors, twenty-one year old Bryant has been able to go from wanting to be Elvis while in first grade to actually playing guitar like his idols Stevie Ray Vaughan and Lightnin’ Hopkins. He may be young at heart but his heart has been fermenting in the old blues.
Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell will embark on series of tour dates this March with co-headliner Richard Thompson. The tour is in celebration of the duo’s new collaborative album, Old
Camper Van Beethoven’s eighth album and first in eight years revives the character study of American oddities the band’s reunion record, New Roman Times, hatched way back in 2004. On La Costa Perdida, Camper keeps the crazies confined to small-town California in this second ode to scandal and scoundrels, among them a fugitive speaking broken Spanish and harboring a secret he can’t outrun. This “half-aware-o caballero” of the album’s upbeat title track kills off his woman and goes on the lam, all the while snarling a half-sinister warning: “You don’t wanna know.”
With Wolf’s Law, The Joy Formidable have released what is sure to be a contender for year-end album best of lists. These might be bold words for an album that is only being released in January, but Wolf’s Law improbably fuses together epic rock with gorgeous melodies, swelling choruses, singer Ritzy Bryan’s both pixie-ish and ethereal vocals and all the dramatic sweep and scope of a concept album without imploding under its own weight like most concept albums do.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Sister Sweetly, Big Head Todd and the Monsters are set to play the entire record front to back at Red Rocks on June 8th,
Watch the Sound City Players tackle classics by Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks, Rick Springfield and Creedence Clearwater Revival
Phil Lesh has announced another batch of West Coast Rambles at Terrapin Crossroads
See how Fox used Phish’s Tweezer Reprise to introduce its coverage of the NFC Championship
Watch as New Jersey’s Yo La Tengo covers The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion) by the Grateful Dead at Amoeba Records in San Francisco