Don’t beat yourself up if you missed psychedelic rockers the Myrrors’ debut, Burning Circles in the Sky, way back in 2008. The album was released in scant quantities around Phoenix — a run of about 50 hand-burned CD-Rs exist — but the young band showed promise, enough so that in…
Joel Robinson is a young man with a clear view of his heroes, artists like Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart, and the Meat Puppets, musicians who followed their own singular paths. As band leader of experimental jazz combo Sunn Trio, Robinson’s goals are lofty: music reflecting the desert and addressing no…
Chow Bella took a bite out of the holidays earlier this month with our annual “Eating Christmas” event at Crescent Ballroom. No worries if you missed it — catch the essays here through the holiday season. My grandma is tired, she explains, and this Christmas it’s going to be real…
Gilgongo Records founder James Fella smiles mischievously as he pulls a record from a sleeve and puts it on the turntable. “This is incredible,” he says, dressed unassumingly in a button-down, blue jeans, and New Balances. The youthful-looking 32-year-old brushes his hair to the side as haunting sounds emit from…
Elmo Kirkwood recently got a haircut. It’s a standard barber cut, short on the sides but with a dramatic swoop of curly brown hair combed over that serves as a constant reminder of his familial heritage, that of the brothers Kirkwood, his father Curt and his uncle Cris, two of…
“I adore Southern food, that’s my favorite thing,” Sean Brock tells Chow Bella over the phone. “It’s what I crave, that’s what I grew up eating. If you can approach cooking that way, it just makes you a better human being.” Brock’s career testifies to his statement. The Virginia-born chef…
Authenticity is a loaded word when it comes to country music. Nearly every modern country act likes to shout out “real country fans” in arenas, even the ones pumping out bombastic party anthems about red Solo cups, shaking asses, and jacked-up pickup trucks. Then there’s the historical struggle of standard…
It’s said you have your whole life to write your first album. Tucson songwriter Billy Sedlmayr would probably laugh — one of the distinct, wheezing chuckles the Tucson songwriter punctuates most of his statements with — at that sentiment…
In the “about” section of the Violent Femmes’ official Facebook page, under the “description” header, it currently reads: “Violent Femmes are currently touring in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the release of their first album.” It’s an album worth celebrating; recorded by a trio of Milwaukee folk punks –…
For as long as the folk songs of hillbillies and Appalachian wailers have been called “country songs,” the genre has been the province of those tip-toeing between grace and damnation — Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, the Louvin Brothers, and others for whom the pursuit of holiness often…
The six members of Take Over and Destroy and Bob Hoag are gathered in the lobby of Flying Blanket Recording, the 1947 house in downtown Mesa that producer Hoag has converted into a studio. All focus is on the middle of the room, where two stacks of comic books lean…
Nils Lofgren’s ranch in Scottsdale almost feels hidden. It’s not far from the city, from the clubs of Old Town and the shops at Scottsdale Fashion Square, but his large plot shares none of the bustle. It’s secluded and quiet, with mesquite trees rustling in a soft breeze…
In this week’s cover story, we speak with Phoenix-based guitarist Nils Lofgren about his new collection, Face the Music, which documents 45 years of Lofgren’s solo work. But his work as a sideman with some of the biggest songwriters in music history — including Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Ringo Starr,…
Songwriter Tyler Broderick has a knack for discussing big themes in a small way. “I’ve been here before / And I’ll be here again,” he sings on “Wide Range,” the opening song from Always Room, his second album with pop outfit Diners. It’s a line True Detective’s Rust Cohle might…
Dereconstructed, the sophomore album by Birmingham, Alabama’s Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires, opens with a greasy guitar riff and a gospel-inflicted howl from Bains: “Yessir, tell me why, tell me why.” The drums and bass kick in and it’s pure boogie, undeniably “Southern rock.”…
Lee Bains III is a white, Christian Southerner and, yes, knows exactly how that reads. Over the course of the 10 tracks on Dereconstructed, his sophomore album with his band the Glory Fires, he chews on and wrestles with the idea of Southern identity, reflecting on a place where segregation…
Bobby Bare Jr. wants to make something very clear: Undefeated, his latest long-player isn’t a “breakup record”; it’s a “getting dumped” record. Written and composed following the parting with the mother of his youngest son, the record documents the end of a relationship, one that didn’t end on mutual terms…
Mississippi songwriter Jimbo Mathus sounds as though he was ripped from the pages of Jack Kerouac or Mark Twain, like a blues allegory or some half-remembered hillbilly hero from lore. The former leader of vaudeville act Squirrel Nut Zippers, a band that crested to fame on the wave of the…
Bobby Bare Jr.’s new album Undefeated is a mixed bag stylistically, jumping from power pop to R&B, punk rock to cosmic Krautrock, but at its core the 47-year-old songwriter says it’s “all country.” Born to Country Hall of Famer Bobby Bare and singer Jeanie Bare, his Western roots make perfect…
You could easily be forgiven for mistaking More Primitive, the new LP by Seattle-based blues trio Lonesome Shack, for a mid-’70s recording from the North Mississippi hill country, the fertile blues scene that gave listeners artists like R.L. Burnside, Fred McDowell, Jesse Mae Hemphill, and more. But no, singer/guitarist Ben…
Lonesome Shack may be based in Seattle, but you’d be forgiven for mistaking the band’s Alive Records debut, More Primitive, for a mid-’70s recording from Mississippi’s fertile Hill Country blues scene, owing much of its elegant boogie to the droning styles of R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, and Fred McDowell. But…
Bandleader Sergio Mendoza was born in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, but crossed the U.S./Mexico border to the American side of the city (in Arizona) when he was 8 years old. He moved north to Tucson at 18. He formed Sergio Mendoza y la Orkesta in 2009, banding together a group of…
