Conspiracy theories are well-worn highways in popular culture. They serve to fill in the blanks in our gaps of knowledge so that we feel like we have complete and interesting world-views. Can’t understand how a man can become as successful as Jay-Z? He must be part of the Illuminati! Don’t…
BLACKBONE is operating at a different frequency. A collective of poet/neo-jazz provocateur Eboneé A.D. and producer DISCIPLINE99, the duo has carved a place in the musical landscape of 2020 with their first music video release, for “COLD REIGN” from their upcoming EP, 5G. With the song’s video, the band aimed…
Local neo-soul outfit Bree & the Fellas’ sophomore album It Be Like That Sometimes…, released via State Fair Records, runs the gamut thematically from relationships to escapism to civil rights. Songwriter Breanna Parker weaves these themes together with her trademark conversational songwriting, each song feeling like a back-and-forth with the singer…
Halloween, the high holy day of spooky season, has a sort of Spooky Scale™ that runs the gamut from the casual black cat, full moon, or harmless jack-o’-lantern to the extremes of disembodied corpses, chainsaw massacre enactments or, even scarier, the thought of paying bills every month under the terror…
Psychedelic music has become almost omnipresent. It was birthed out of the marijuana and mescaline-fueled writings of the Beat Generation, distilled into the powerhouse of surrealistic expression with the advent of LSD and the hippie movement and lives on today. The genre, it seems, will endure long after our high has…
If all of this world is a stage and men and women merely players, as Shakespeare suggested, then Will Schutze is a director. While most of us remain unaware of our various stages and roles, Schutze builds his and dreams up the beings to populate them in puppet form, whether they…
Sidewalk objects such as stairs and benches can seem commonplace, or even an impediment, on our everyday walks. Through the eyes of a skateboarder, however, those same objects can take on a sort of mythology. Such has been the case since skateboarding’s rise from street hobby to an integral part…
In space, a “double star” is created when two stars circle each other and appear close to one another when seen from Earth. In Dallas, when two music scene stars circle each other through collaboration, that union is called “Velvet Dos.” The band name refers to the collaborative project of…
Dallas-based graphic designer, visual artist, and “professional doodler” Christina Moreland is fighting a war on the side of good for the soul of humanity. The weapons in her arsenal? Cartoons. Her latest assault on ignorance is a series of aphorisms in cartoon form through a series called Daily Tips for…
Dallas pop-folk musician Ryan Berg woke up one morning in this new world we call “Dallas-under-COVID” and saw that one of his favorite songs was playing, a tune called “Best Part” by pop dynamo Daniel Caesar and H.E.R. As Berg stood, donning his quarantine bandanna — which acts as a functional face…
Dallas folk duo Penny & Dime first met in the summer of 2016, through a Craigslist ad. The meeting culminated in what may be one of the best albums of 2020 with the band’s eponymous debut EP. “Because we were both transplants to Dallas, we didn’t really know where to start,” Kylie…
Say you wake up to find yourself in an early-1970s Pontiac GTO convertible, driving down an empty, boundless highway toward wherever your favorite band is playing. You have now entered the world of Nick Snyder & The Real Deal. The band’s self-titled debut EP is painted with shades of late…
In the course of Justin Pickard’s musical pilgrimage, his songwriting has covered a gamut of subjects: smoking to drinking, the ins and outs of grave-robbery, love and loss, and UFOs that resemble bananas. His subjects fall somewhere in between old cult movies from the turn of the century to vintage…
When spoken in a Texan accent, the words “soil” and “soul” basically become homonyms, and it may be no coincidence that those two things (admittedly, in a very simplified way) are what make up singer-songwriter Meredith Crawford’s music. The “soil” is the deep reverence and appreciation she has for her…
Half a decade ago, Jay and Jo Indigo started producing a unique brand of psychedelic bluesy hip-hop in a back-house Oak Cliff studio. The pair found a musical rock to stand on with the addition of Sneedless Indigo on bass and Tito Indigo on drums, and thus were born the…
Outlaw country was born from a musical exodus that happened in American country music during the ‘70s and ‘80s, when country musicians — disillusioned or outright rejected by the meat-grinding money factory that Nashville’s Music Row area had become — moved away from the city, for the most part, into Texas. This…
