Once again, it’s a sort of apprenticeship with Woody Guthrie that’s drawn Billy Bragg into a new realm. Thirty years since his debut, the seven-song Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy, Bragg is back with a new album, Tooth & Nail, out this week on Cooking Vinyl. Bragg calls…
Once again, it’s a sort of apprenticeship with Woody Guthrie that’s drawn Billy Bragg into a new realm. Thirty years since his debut, the seven-song Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy, Bragg is back with a new album, Tooth & Nail, which came out Tuesday on Cooking Vinyl. Bragg…
With his 12th solo album set for release, it’s as good a time as any to revisit the question: Who is Bob Schneider? It’s not an easy question to answer, however. Though Schneider has carved out his own unique niche as an artist, he’s always been difficult to define, straddling genres, finding a bit…
Ryan McPhun of The Ruby Suns describes the tour for his latest album as “a live rock band approach to not-live-band rock music.” His fourth Ruby Suns album, Christopher (released in January on Sub Pop), is indeed a synth-laden futuristic pop album, highly polished and danceable. But McPhun made the…
The debut album from Seattle’s Pickwick is a shot of gritty, soulful rock ‘n’ roll, with sharp guitar stabs, light organ fills and a groovin’ rhythm section, all hung out on the line of Galen Disston’s passionate vocals. But it wasn’t always so for the band. Pickwick’s first incarnation was…
Go ahead and call The Growlers “beach goth.” It’s not only an apt term that hints at the Orange County band’s sound — dark psychedelic rock with a slacker, surfer edge — but when The Growlers put together a big homecoming show in October, they called it a “beach goth…
For musicians, there are songwriters you like — the songwriters you try to emulate — and then there are the songwriters who live as kindred spirits. Tucson’s Al Perry says he and Kevin Daly, whose 30-plus-year music career in the Valley has included elements of rockabilly, honky-tonk, blues, and punk,…
[Editor’s note: In this week’s issue, Eric Swedlund chats with Swedish singer/songwriter Jens Lekman, and explores his critically acclaimed new record, I Know What Love Isn’t. Here, Swedlund breaks down the title track. Lekman is scheduled to perform Friday, November 9, at Crescent Ballroom.] Love isn’t about faking a marriage…
Matters of the heart exist, of course, in an emotional realm, but for singer/songwriter Jens Lekman, heartbreak has a bit of a scientific component, too. For his follow-up to 2007’s Night Falls Over Kortedala, Lekman didn’t want to make an album about a difficult breakup. But the songs had other…
Maybe you hear it directly, maybe you don’t. But there’s a spirit that sits in between the notes on Algiers, a spirit that guided the record, some decades-old essence of a converted Baptist church near the Mississippi River that Tucson’s Calexico drew on like a well to record its seventh…
Metric @ Marquee Theatre| 10/10/12The moment the word “escape” crossed Emily Haines’ lips, it’s hard to go back. In concert Wednesday, as it is on the band’s latest release Synthetica, “escape” comes in the first verse of the first song. If there’s a time to think about what that means,…
It’s a small, stripped-down EP, but Songs from the Stratton Sessions encapsulates just about everything Jon Rauhouse stands for musically. And oddly enough, there isn’t one lick of steel guitar, the instrument he’s made his name with. There’s the joy and spontaneity of creating: Rather than stick to the few…
The intertwined impressions of night and space that hover about The Helio Sequence’s latest album are no accident. Recording for the first time in their much larger studio — and on a totally different schedule — the Portland, Oregon, duo channeled their isolation into Negotiations, both in words and music…
“New York had lied to me. I needed the truth.” So sing The Lumineers, who fled the city, stifled by the hard realities of high rent, limited practice space, and constant demands on their free time. Songwriting partners for years, Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites moved to Denver, where The…
Somewhere north of Apache Junction, there’s a long road leading to a rock on the edge of the Salt River that Jesse Elliott still needs to see. For a songwriter who makes the most out of near-endless traveling, that rock represents just another one of those tempting little side roads…
Kelly Hogan knows the audacity of favors. But if you’re going to make an album, starting with a fantasy batch of songwriters and ending with a fantasy band is a hell of a way to go about it. For I Like to Keep Myself In Pain, her first solo album…
A truck is on fire in the desert, black smoke billowing in the sky. Two years ago, on tour through the desert west of Phoenix, Shearwater’s van came upon a tractor-trailer on fire in the middle of the road. . The band members saw the smoke long before its source. The…
Irene, simply put, is an enabler. Ostensibly a duo, Cincinnati’s Bad Veins are able to augment their indie-pop performances with a vintage reel-to-reel player, such a crucial element to the band that it’s been anthropomorphized, sort of as a do-it-all female multi-instrumentalist (complete with her own Twitter: @thereelirene). “Irene does…
Two years ago, when Frankie Rose started talking about following her breakthrough debut album with a synth-pop record, friends assumed she was joking. As the drummer for Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and Dum Dum Girls, Rose was at the center of a 1960s girl pop revival even before her first…
To clear her mind after a lengthy stretch of touring, songwriter Erika Wennerstrom hit the road again, this time alone, finding both solace and inspiration in the wide-open spaces of West Texas rangeland. What came from Wennerstrom’s peaceful isolation is the Heartless Bastards’ fourth and best album, Arrow, a stout…
When he’s touring in Europe, Gabriel Sullivan keeps an eye out for Gypsies with instruments. “It’s a constant search for that common theme of necessity in the music,” says Sullivan, whose band, Taraf de Tucson, sets Balkan brass and Peruvian cumbia side by side, combining Latin rhythms and exotic melodies…
Editor’s Note: An abridged version of this article appears in this week’s issue, featuring 100 Songs that Defined Arizona. In celebration of Arizona’s centennial, we spoke with Eric Swedlund, a writer, photographer, editor, and all-around-good-dude in Tucson, Arizona, about “We Got Cactus,” sort of an unofficial Tucson anthem, which coincidentally…
