North Carolina figures prominently into the music that the Weather Station and Hiss Golden Messenger make. Its musical traditions as well as its current scene have shaped their songs.
Charlie Parr and Gina Clowes both have a thing for banjos and dogs. And for pouring themselves into their songs.
At a time when both Colin Meloy’s America and Olivia Chaney’s England are experiencing similar convulsions of identity, the act of singing these old songs raises questions of appropriation and nationalism.
Like all of us everywhere, Lydia Loveless and John Paul White are in dire need of coffee. It’s early morning on a weekday, and they’re both out on the road: Loveless en route from Houston to a gig in Birmingham; White biding his time in Charlotte, North Carolina, before a show that evening. They’re both…
Bluegrass is a small community. Bryan Sutton and Billy Strings hail from opposite ends of the country -- North Carolina and Michigan, respectively. There’s about a 20-year age difference between them, with Sutton enjoying the crest of a long career and Strings (birth name: William Apostol) just starting out. Sutton just released his fifth solo…
It’s a wonder that we journalists ever get away with describing an artist as a singer/songwriter and leaving it at that, as though the meaning of the categorization is so simple, stable, and straightforward as to be universally self-evident. Singer/songwriters, themselves, conceive of what they do in vastly different and ever-evolving ways.Chastity Brown and Erin…
We usually think of musical traditions as being defined by their distinctive stylistic elements: the hard-driving string bands of bluegrass; the nimble, fingerstyle guitar figures of Piedmont blues; the rhythmically frisky washboard and squeeze box of Zydeco. It’s quite possible, though, for us to hear a kinship to country tradition in the music of two artists who serve…
On paper, the concepts behind new projects by Carrie Rodriguez and Paul Burch might sound a bit formalistic -- hers, a cross-cultural translation of generations-old Mexican ranchera songs and appreciation of her great-aunt Eva Garza’s overlooked recordings; his, a fictionalized musical memoir of pre-electrified pop star Jimmie Rodgers detailing, among other things, Rodgers's final, tuberculosis-hobbled trip to record…
