Tag Archives: Americana music

The Handsome Family’s Scattered

Scattered is the Handsome Family’s second collection of demos, B sides, covers and the like. The first was 2002’s Smothered And Covered. This new disc has a generous 19 tracks, fairly evenly divided between covers and originals. The covers include … Continue reading

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Eric Brace & Peter Cooper’s Master Sessions, Peter Cooper’s The Lloyd Green Album, Eric Brace & Last Train Home’s Six Songs EP, and various artists’ East Nashville, Vol. 3

There is so much beautiful music on these CDs, especially the first two, that it’s hard to know where to start. The names on the albums belong to Eric Brace and Peter Cooper. (Earlier in 2009 they collaborated on an … Continue reading

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Geoff Muldaur and the Texas Sheiks’ Texas Sheiks

Sometimes the best music is made when friends get together and play their favorite old songs. That’s what happened when Geoff Muldaur pulled together a one-off group he dubbed Texas Sheiks. It started as a way to help Texas singer-songwriter-guitarist … Continue reading

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Richmond Fontaine’s We Used to Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River

Between 2007’s melancholy western geography lesson Thirteen Cities and this year’s Richmond Fontaine release, Willy Vlautin’s mother died, and he broke his arm and couldn’t play guitar for a while. When he healed enough to play, he went into a … Continue reading

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Monsters of Folk’s Monsters of Folk

Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of … well, old music. As in, music from my own youth. It’s been a little hard to avoid, actually, what with the two big releases of the summer — Neil Young’s Archives, … Continue reading

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Buckwheat Zydeco’s Lay Your Burden Down

I thought I had given up on zydeco. I discovered it in the late 1980s in the person of Clifton Chenier, the King of Zydeco. Also at about that time, I was fortunate to see in concert some superb zydeco … Continue reading

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Chris Darrow’s Chris Darrow / Under My Own Disguise

I have been reading Chris Darrow’s name on records from my collection for 40 years. Originally a part of the legendary Kaleidoscope (a favourite of Jimmy Page’s), Darrow has appeared on albums by James Taylor, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Hoyt … Continue reading

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The Decemberists’ The Hazards of Love

For their fifth full-length recording, Portland, Oregon’s The Decemberists have made a sprawling epic of a record, a grand concept album the likes of which hasn’t been seen much in 30 years or more: The Hazards of Love. Frontman, lead … Continue reading

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Blind Pilot’s 3 Rounds and a Sound

For some reason Blind Pilot stayed below my radar in 2008; otherwise, their debut album 3 Rounds and a Sound would have been near the top of my Best-Of list. Don’t you make the mistake. Listen to Blind Pilot now … Continue reading

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Celilo’s Bending Mirrors

On Bending Mirrors Portland band Celilo incorporate the mythology, imagery and characters of this city of rain, rivers and bridges into their music, a noir-ish blend of psychedelia, alt-country and indie rock. It comes through most explicitly on “Wy-Am,” a … Continue reading

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