There’s been too much of this lately. Doug Ferguson, the musician behind Yeti and Ohm, passed away February 23 after slipping into a diabetic coma. J. Bone Cro, a friend and occasional collaborator, says that Ferguson wasn’t even aware he was diabetic until it was much too late; when Ferguson…

No one was really interested in Sarah Shannon anymore. That much was clear to her. The interest ended in 1997, as far as she could tell, when her band, Velocity Girl, splintered apart. When Shannon decided to resume her career as a full-time musician, it wasn’t long before she realized…

Old 97’s guitarist Ken Bethea is up and running with his new solo project, The Scrap Hotel. (Apparently, it’s a metaphor for your brain. We still prefer to call ours The Jack Daniel’s Museum of Bad Ideas and Cloudy Memories. Same idea, we guess.) Haven’t heard a note yet, but…

Because she covers Hank Williams (“Cold Cold Heart”) and songs made famous by Nina Simone (“Turn Me On”) and Hoagy Carmichael (“The Nearness of You”), because her debut comes courtesy of revered jazz label Blue Note, because Come Away With Me was produced by Arif Mardin (who’s worked on albums…

Travis Morrison could have this job if he wanted it. If he felt like giving up his day (and night) job fronting The Dismemberment Plan, he could step into a gig talking and writing about music with no trouble, with little discernible change in his routine. It’s something he would…

Todd Lewis and Taz Bentley probably could have interested a bigger label in their new project, The Burden Brothers. After all, Lewis was, until last August, the front man for the Toadies, and for years Bentley supplied the big beat for Reverend Horton Heat. Instead, fed up with the bureaucracy…

John Dufilho = The Deathray Davies. Until The Deathray Davies recorded their third and latest album, the just-released The Day of the Ray, that statement was more or less fact, unless you felt like showing your work, in which case it would look more like: The Deathray Davies – live…

On February 2, Rich Soul got in bed next to his wife, Renee. Their son Julian was in his room asleep. None of this was out of the ordinary for the young family. What happened next, sadly, was; Rich Soul never woke up, passing away quietly during the night. He…

After one listen to N.E.R.D.’s debut, I immediately thought of something Mos Def told Spin awhile back, when the magazine gave him a chance to right the rap-rock wrongs of the past few years. Forget the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of, “Fred Durst so wants…

If anyone happened to catch MTV’s Total Request Live last week (whoooo!), then you might have seen Corn Mo, doing what only Corn Mo can. Apparently, on Monday, as Corn Mo (Jon Cunningham to his parents and anyone who doesn’t feel like using his stage name) was bringing home his…

Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to have “motherfucker” tattooed on the side of your neck. Don’t even think we have to get the churchgoers out there to back us up on this one. Tattoo? No problem. On your neck? Kinda sketchy. “Motherfucker?” All signs point to no. But that’s…

The last time we saw Shawn Francis he was walking around the streets of Austin during South by Southwest wearing a badge around his neck that identified him as “DJ Muppetfucker.” (The badge actually belonged to his friend and fellow DJ Noah Lee, who now goes by the moniker DJ…

Listen to enough musicians talk about being musicians, with their anecdotes about shows with a dozen people in the audience and broken-down vans in faraway places and scraping up enough cash to record a few songs, and it won’t be long before you’ve heard them all. Fact is, there aren’t…

El Gato will celebrate the release of its first full-length, We’re Birds, on January 18 at the Gypsy Tea Room, with a shindig featuring performances by Hi-Fi Drowning and French Touch. (The disc hit stores January 15.) The group will also toast to its own accomplishment on February 2 at…

A week before his show at the Gypsy Tea Room, Nate Fowler said he was finally “ready to get back in the park and play ball,” and many of his fellow players had turned up for his return to the field. Most of them, after all, had suited up with…

Best sign that program director Scott Strong and the gents over at Susquehanna Radio Corp. have given up on the station located at 93.3 on your FM dial: 93.3 The Bone Classic Texas Rock that ROCKS. OK, so maybe it’s a little early to declare the new incarnation of the…

For the past few years, we’ve polled the Dallas Observer’s stable of music writers to determine how full of shit the bottom of the barrel was over the past 12 months in an effort to arrive at the 10 most pointless uses of studio time and jewel cases. Below, you’ll…

It was a strange year, no doubt about it. Think about it: 2001 began with word of the first Toadies release in some seven years. By August, the album was here (March’s Hell Below/Stars Above), but the band wasn’t anymore. At the end of December, word began spreading that the…

This isn’t as easy as it should be–as it would have been, say, four months ago. I listen to records for a living–that’s how my folks see it, anyway–so ticking off a list of the music that moved me in 2001 shouldn’t be a big deal. Piece of cake, could…

Recently, there have been scattered reports that the Old 97’s were splitting up, after an eight-year run of fight songs and satellite rides. Some say the truth is this: The Old 97’s have been dropped from the Elektra Records roster, even though it was reported as recently as a couple…

In a perfect world, the club would have been full of fans. There would have been a line out the door, snaking into the street. The first notes of each song would have been greeted with enthusiastic, knowing applause, each chorus met with a sea of closed eyes and a…