Not that long ago, Jack Ingram was an SMU college kid with a guitar, a major Robert Earl Keen jones and a Tuesday night gig every week at Adair’s. Starting there in the early ’90s, he drew the blueprint for countless other collegiate types to follow in his wake and…

Years ago, a charming fellow named Michael Timmins called from Toronto about this EP his band, the Cowboy Junkies, had self-released called The Trinity Sessions. When he followed up to ask what I thought, and my answer was “very good, liked it but didn’t knock my dick in the dirt,”…

“The world doesn’t need any more pretty good songs,” says Mary Gauthier. And at a time when too many singer-songwriters scribble greeting-card copy and pep-rally cheers, Gauthier meets her mission statement with incisive and literate slices of real life. Her burnished voice bears the mark of her personal history; given…

Leave it to a Texan to blast away the stylistic strictures of spinning, mixing and scratching and to do so with a Lone Star twist. Appearing as part of a long national tour with Of Montreal, Grand Buffet and MGMT, DJ Jester–aka The Filipino Fist, aka Mike Pendon–sees just about…

Mike Love, the only original Beach Boy in the group touring under the band’s moniker, would be better named Mike Hate. He recently sued Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson for using the band’s sound and songs in his solo re-creation of the legendary Smile album, the irony of which would…

Bill Monroe might scowl at it, but the rise of newgrass (the instrumental and stylistic tenets of bluegrass mixed with modernist touches) still remains true to the spiritual mountain-music root. Its leading purveyors are the maturing and blossoming Nickel Creek, the Dixie Chicks on Home and the aptly-named Greencards–two Aussies…

Back in ’99, the Damnations were that year’s shiny new model when they debuted with Half Mad Moon, a spunky set of truly alternative country with a rock-grrl kick. Since then, the Austin foursome led by sisters Deb Kelly and Amy Boone have matured and settled into their sweet spot…

Which of the following is an omen of the impending apocalypse? A) The Sex Pistols playing Dallas’ Longhorn Ballroom, once the home of Bob Wills, in 1978. B) The re-formed Sex Pistols playing the Trump Marina Casino during their 2003 tour. C) The Sex Pistols Experience– a tribute band that…

Luther Dickinson and his brother Cody come genuinely draped in Southern musical kudzu, being the offspring of renegade producer and artiste Jim Dickinson (whose adventures span from playing piano on the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” to producing the most kick-ass Replacements album, Pleased to Meet Me). As members of the…

Bruce Springsteen may be the mythic New Jersey hero, but the true soul of the Garden State is manifested in Bon Jovi. Hear me out. At first blush, in the mid-1980s, with their shopping mall mullets and suburban rock dude drag, they were far more everyman than the proletariat of…

“Looks like Sting, sings like Bing” was how SCTV ribbed Billy Idol in the early 1980s when his punk-goes-pop rise to MTV fame stoked much derision. In the ’90s, he tumbled into self-parody thanks to his debauched romps through the L.A. party scene and highly publicized overdoses. But contrary to…

“You’ve got to keep those roots and branches growing and pray they’ll always be,” sings Tim O’Brien on Two Journeys, the 2001 album on which he celebrates his Irish heritage. And few if any contemporary musical artists have so beautifully balanced the disparate poles inherent in the notion of neo-traditional…

Love him or hate him–there rarely is a middle ground–Pat Green is the biggest thing to come out of Texas since, well, George W. Bush. And now that Green is entering his second term as a major-label artist with his Lucky Ones CD, it appears that quite a few of…

In a South Austin coffeehouse, Patrice Pike locks eyes with her interviewer as she talks about herself and her career. It’s a gaze that’s direct but intense, with a warmth that feels almost seductive. It’s similar to the way Pike, a seasoned performer at the age of 33, addresses an…

It’s not easy being Hank Williams. Number one suffered a pained back and an ambitious hellcat of a wife in Miz Audrey, among other travails, before shuffling off this mortal coil. Two took a header off a mountain onto his face after years of being dressed up and paraded across…

Just when the Texas blues-rock sound as exemplified by Stevie Ray Vaughan felt like a dull old saw, along come three young Mexican-Americans to sharpen its teeth. The brothers Garza–Henry (guitar), Jojo (bass) and Ringo (drums, natch)–have been playing since their youth, first backing their father and then stepping out…

This South London collective of delightfully cracked and activist musos and DJs serve up wickedly ingenious music that smashes genres with every pummeling drum beat. Then they slather the crust of their sinfully delicious concoctions with canny commentary and observations, keen literary allusions and a firm grip on musical history…

Lyle Lovett is a Zen master of cool and calm, no doubt about it. But on this particular occasion he is just a wee bit ruffled. An article in The New York Times recounting a motorbike ride he took with a reporter through the Hill Country got botched in the…

It’s been a good quarter-century-plus since punk rock raised its snarling li’l head and slammed out those loud, fast chords and rimshots heard ’round the musical world. So, like, dude, time to grow up already, right? Hardly. As the folks who make Vans will happily (and profitably) tell you, punk…

Blue Man Group is the goof heard ’round the world. From such simple elements as whimsy, gobs of blue greasepaint and a cobbled-together assortment of drums and PVC pipe instruments has been launched a modern entertainment and marketing juggernaut of proportions as stunning as the dazzling shows they present. These…

Like many bloated genres in these times, the singer-songwriter thing could use a good pruning, if not a merciless cull. After all, how many of these–from John Mayer to Kathleen Edwards to Frat Green–either aren’t genuine singers or can’t compose anything new or fresh or even maybe just inspired and…