Erik Thompson was once a real wild fucker. When he first arrived on Denton’s doorstep in 1991 he came sporting a mischievous grin and a roguish gleam in his eyes. You could tell right away he was trouble—relatively harmless, but trouble nonetheless. Fifteen years later, escaping permanent capture or total…
Since arriving on the music scene as a young teen in 1954 as a featured singer with country legend Hank Thompson, Wanda Jackson has blazed a trail that women in the music business are still following today. In 1955, when rock and roll was in its infancy, Jackson was the…
Given his eternal front-pew presence in the Mother Church of True Country Music, Alan Jackson’s delivery of an album that evokes such adjectives as “crossover” and even “progressive” might seem like heresy. Yet it’s his fealty to the genuine country spirit, ironically, that makes Like Red on a Rose such…
The last of the original Lemonheads, Evan Dando has been through a lot in the last decade or so after becoming yet another casualty to the “next Kurt Cobain” hype machine. He got clean, got married, released a widely underappreciated solo effort (Baby I’m Bored) and even fronted the MC5…
The “thinking-man’s metal” tag that hangs on Isis seems bad for business, but guitarist/vocalist Aaron Turner and his comrades don’t appear to mind. After all, the jacket of their new CD includes the quote “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” that inspired the album’s title, as well as a quasi-footnote…
To make their swinging parties even more happening, ’60s fetishists the Lollipop Shoppe came up with the perfect shiny accessory for their groovy thrift-store dresses and go-go boots: a compilation CD. Lollipop gal DJ TigerBee, aka The Shapes’ singer/bassist Patricia Rodriguez, recruited some of her favorite retro-rock acts—all Texan except…
After fumbling a few chords and forgetting more than a few words, a weary and weathered Kris Kristofferson paused briefly during his performance at a New West Records day party during SXSW 2006. He then humbly mumbled, “Just imagine this beautiful thing that sounds as good as Bob Dylan.” The…
White Ghost Shivers may sound like the house band at an old speakeasy, but they shred like a Brazilian speed-metal festival. Effortlessly leaping from western swing and bluegrass jazz stomps to calypso ballads and vaudevillian hamming, the Austin octet follows in the footsteps of fellow Capitol City residents the Asylum…
Is “happy hard-core” on its way out? We can only hope, but first we will need a few good angry men such as These Arms Are Snakes. As part of the emergent clan of art-laden hard-core groups like those found on the Hydrahead label, this Seattle troupe believes in texture…
Among the bands to explode from the Bright Eyes-anchored Omaha indie-pop scene in recent years was Tilly and the Wall. To those who haven’t enjoyed the treat of listening to the sweet melodies and guy-gal vocals of 2004’s Wild Like Children (the first release from Conor Oberst’s Team Love label)…
Yes, today’s young country can also sometimes rock without it sounding silly and forced, and few acts in that realm do it with as much punch and polish as these two. Dierks Bentley leans far enough outside the Nashville tried-and-true to eschew a cowboy-hat topper and play an electric six-string…
The laws of music journalism state that when a precociously good new band comes along, one must harp on the members’ ages. So, OK, blah blah blah, the four members of Nashville’s Be Your Own Pet are all teenagers, the oldest just barely legal. Great—now that’s out of the way…
Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck were not in London in March 2003, when Dixie Chick Natalie Maines told a Shepherd’s Bush Empire audience, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” The filmmakers wanted to be there—they had begged to be there, in…
The beauty of Regina Spektor is in her balance, between high and low art, classical and popular music, the profoundly poetic and the utterly mundane. This idyllic synthesis is what makes the Moscow-born Jewish singer-songwriter both as graspable as the street-savvy girl next door that parties with the Strokes and…
If there is such a genre as ambient Americana, then Tom Freund is its standard bearer. First gaining attention as a touring member of pioneering roots rockers the Silos, Freund has parlayed a decade-long friendship with Ben Harper into a series of atmospherically rustic releases that culminated in 2004’s Copper…
I’m beginning to think every band in Dallas should be a tribute band. It’s not that we don’t have our fair share of delightful groups, to be sure, but at last weekend’s Double Wide Halloween tribute show everyone seemed to be having such a damn fine time—so many fists pumping…
Oklahoma-born, occasionally Texan (he’s spent some years in the Lone Star State), songwriter Jimmy Webb has a history as a musician’s dream. Webb wrote some of the great classics of the modern era—”Up, Up and Away,” “Galveston” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”—deceptively poppy hits that actually comprise…
The subculture of tribute bands is a dark and mysterious one. It seems that lurking beneath the surface of every local music scene is an undercover army of musicians who, for whatever reason, spend their time honing their craft, toiling away for hours upon end to become living extensions of…
The following events have been irresponsibly fictionalized for dramatic effect. However, the names have not been changed. The Dallas Banjo Band claims to have formed back in 1989, and you’d be hard pressed to find any history on them prior to that. At first, it would appear as though this…
Les Claypool has always understood that without a good dose of humor, instrumental virtuosity can produce music as empty as Eddie Van Halen’s noggin. As leader of Primus, Claypool successfully melded his overpowering bass-guitar skills with a keenly sly wit and thrilled an unlikely demographic of air-guitar-playing frat boys and…
This doesn’t sound like a Willie Nelson record, and it doesn’t sound like a Ryan Adams record; dunno what it sounds like, to be honest, save for some show-offy mash-up that does less to pump up Shotgun Willie than shoot his legs out from under him. Not that pairing Nelson…
Wherein Tom Waits cleans out the closet, holds a garage sale and finds the crowd begging for more, more, more. Hence the 26 soundtrack-compilation-etc. familiars and 30 “new” songs that sound like all the old ones, spread over three discs that glibly and ably summarize the career thus far: “Brawlers”…
