Five Country Albums To Drink Beer With

While there’s certainly an eclectic mix at this weekend’s third annual Homegrown Festival, you’ll want to keep an eye on Robert Ellis. The Houston musician has been kicking around for a couple of years, but his 2010 New West debut, Photographs, provided the lengthy-maned Ellis a national profile, and his…

Instruments Are Not Vantastic

Harmony is great. Singing is great too. People with beautiful vocal instruments are great. But the idea of grown men singing together in an a capella group doesn’t seem so great. It seems pretty off-putting, what with all the smiling and snapping that seem to be mandatory. Perhaps the names…

Ray Wylie Hubbard Through The Lens Of a New Generation

Country icon George Jones famously asked “Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes” back in 1985. For the most part, modern Top 40 country isn’t terribly interested in the footwear of elder greats, given the way radio playlists have tossed aside so many aging legends over the past 20 years or so…

Friday Night Lights and Road Trip Insights

Thanks to television and film adaptations, the phrase “Friday night lights” has become part of the pop-culture vernacular. Of course, before the movie and the successful series was the best-selling book from 1990, and before the book there was its author, Buzz Bissinger. In his latest book, Father’s Day, the…

Support Local (Country) Music: Four North Texas Albums You Need

In recent months, the North Texas country community has produced some solid albums, and future months will witness the release of anticipated records from Somebody’s Darling, Grant Jones and Ronnie Fauss. While vets like Eleven Hundred Springs, Tejas Brothers, the King Bucks, Nate Kipp and Mo Robson continue to release…

Canadian Comedy Plus Duct Tape Equals Funny

The Canadian’s sure know how to turn in some decent sketch comedy, eh? For the many American comedy fans who have missed it on PBS, The Red Green Show is a treasure trove waiting to be unlocked. Veteran actor Steve Smith, who plays the titular character, comes off as a…

One Love Fits All

The title of Dallas-area resident’s Jennifer Porter Kennard’s play, A Big Girl’s Guide To Love, wouldn’t have exactly been an appealing name had her production been a plain, old how-to book. Come on, do most of us, regardless of body mass, really need any help dealing with bad dates, nosy…

Seven Mainstream/Top 40 Country Acts That Don’t Suck

For almost as long as country music has lived as a genre, the argument about what makes a song, album, singer or group “country” has existed. Depending on who you ask, over time, and especially in the past couple of decades, country music has either splintered into dozens of wildly…

Tell ‘Em About That Time You Lit The Lawn On Fire

If honesty and authenticity is required for art to truly blossom, then Nicole Stewart’s Oral Fixation series of open-chested spoken-word performances from folks sharing personal, sad and humorous stories is indeed a fully formed rose. Operating off a single phrase, a handful of brave and entertaining participants take the stage…

Mmmm…Beer

Last year’s inaugural North Texas Beer Festival showed signs of an event with the right idea and a good heart, but still wasn’t quite sure how to hit one out of the park. The fest offered long lines for brew samples in a section of the Plano Centre that seemed…

Meat Puppets at Dan’s Silverleaf

It’s hard to gauge how influential an album truly is. The Meat Puppets’ 1984 LP, Meat Puppets II, is often cited by musicians as a seminal work, released during the halcyon days of SST. It’s a ragged masterwork of country and rockabilly-infused punk, which, at the time of its release,…

Turkey Legs, Blown Glass And Falconry, Huzzah!

Oh, good morrow, ye turkey leg and man with non-ironic leggings and non-ironic, odd beret-like cap upon his furry face! It’s that time of year again, Metroplexians! It’s time to run into that backed-up-out-of-nowhere traffic on Interstate 35 South near Ennis, where you eventually say to yourself, “Oh, crap, it’s…

A Family Affair

The largest accomplishment for Modern Family, the best sitcom to emerge on network television over the past few years, isn’t the fact that it’s racked up trophy after trophy for its genius. The most notable achievement is how the mock-doc style show has become the most consistently enjoyable half-hour on…

Dallas Film Fest Brings More Wattage

The Dallas international Film Festival has earned a respectable spot among American film fests. Recent years have seen stars old and new walk the red carpet to their premieres while the residents of the eastern section of the city have packed the theaters that host new documentaries, foreign features, shorts…

Remembering Coach Joe Avezzano: Cowboy and Music Fan

So many got to know former Dallas Cowboys assistant coach Joe Avezzano as a hard-nosed, foul-mouthed, award-winning special-teams coach during his days roaming football sidelines, which began in 1968 and ended yesterday, after Avezzano died of an apparent heart attack while in Italy coaching the Seamen Milano of the Italian…

Moore Gogh-s To Great Lengths For Laughs

Wit and intelligence are a couple of characteristics that many claim to have, or at least wish they possessed. Novelist Christopher Moore seems to have been granted the shares of both prized traits that boorish dolts lack. Moore is promoting his latest work, Sacre Bleu, in which the death of…

Bongos Bring Good Karma for Food Trucks

Hah! Food trucks. Those’ll never take off. They’re just a fad that will be forgotten in a few weeks. C’mon, it’s not like any new ones are sprouting up or people have been lobbying the city to make laws more conducive for trucks selling high-quality food. If food trucks were…