Tag Archives: Americana music

Norman Blake’s Day By Day

I probably first read Norman Blake’s name on the extensive liner notes that came with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s landmark country album Will the Circle Be Unbroken, but I’m sure I first saw him perform a few years earlier … Continue reading

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Michael Nesmith & the First National Band’s Magnetic South, Loose Salute, and Nevada Fighter

The blue, red and white trilogy of albums by Michael Nesmith & the First National Band (plus one later release in much the same vein) remain among my favorite albums more than 50 years later. Nesmith wasn’t the first rock … Continue reading

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Asleep at the Wheel’s Half A Hundred Years

Not many bands make it to 50 years (we won’t get into the Rolling Stones, those great outliers). That’s what the Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel has achieved as of 2021, so of course they made a record … Continue reading

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The Felice Brothers’ From Dreams To Dust

On my first spin through The Felice Brothers’ new album From Dreams To Dust I found my new favorite song of 2021. The second track “To-Do List” is a rootsy, rocking romp through existential angst disguised as a humorous list … Continue reading

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Matthew Fowler’s The Grief We Gave Our Mother

Matthew Fowler’s The Grief We Gave Our Mother is a lesson in how arrangement and production can turn a collection of good songs into something more. Along the way a collection of confessional songs that started out as bare-bones acoustic … Continue reading

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Nico Hedley’s Painterly

Queens-based singer, songwriter and bandleader Nico Hedley has dubbed his first full length album Painterly. It’s an odd sort of adjective, but just one listen to the album’s first track and its first single “Tennessee” explains it succinctly and sufficiently. … Continue reading

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Trippers & Askers’ Acorn

This is an absolutely spellbinding record that defies easy description, so settle in. Jay Hammond, now based in Durham, North Carolina by way of Brooklyn, and his musical collective called Trippers & Askers, have created a layered masterpiece of spiritual, … Continue reading

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Michael Murphey’s Michael Murphey

Before Michael Murphey traded in his outlaw country cred and became Michael Martin Murphey, the Americana Adult Contemporary singing cowboy, he created a couple of my favorite LPs from the 1970s. Now that two of his first three albums are … Continue reading

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Gordon Lightfoot’s Don Quixote

Gordon Lightfoot and I go back quite a ways. Though he cut his first album in 1966 and quickly became the top folk singer in Canada, his first hit in the U.S. was the single “If You Could Read My … Continue reading

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The Flatlanders’ Treasure of Love

The Flatlanders have always been “more a legend than a band,” which is why that was the title of their first proper album in 1990, put together by Rounder from tracks they’d previously recorded in a career that stretched back … Continue reading

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