November 2010 Articles

When Chip Taylor met Carrie Rodriguez at SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas in 2001, Carrie was performing and Chip, in the audience, was amazed at her playing. He sensed something else as well, something magical. Carrie tells the story: “I met Chip Taylor in 2001. I was just out of music school and playing at SXSW. He came out to the show. I started working with Chip and was shocked throughout the show by what he had written.

Alejandro Escovedo has been a fixture in music since the 1970’s when he helped build the cutting edge San Francisco punk scene in The Nuns. His 1980 band, Rank and File, bridged rock and country and moving back to Austin, formed The True Believers. Rather than the flash of a burst, Alejandro’s star has been consistent, rising and lighting all it touches, an inviting beacon. His dedication is a family tradition, “You just do your good work, and people care. I always believed, when I was a kid, that if you just worked hard, you would find fulfillment. I think I got a lot of that from my father, and my brothers. A working musician is all I ever wanted to be. Hard work, to stay true to what you want to do, and then eventually someone would notice for that very reason.”

For the past twenty years, Peter Mulvey has gone from sea to shining sea and beyond. Peter is a musician and a writer, his muse leads him down a path lined with jazz, modern acoustic, poetry, narrative and Americana stylings. Based in Milwaukee, his home is the road, the methods of travel moving him by foot, car, plane, train and bicycle.  The music bug was sparked in Dublin and the fire has never gone out, taking him back to the US, busking in Boston subways as a full time occupation, playing marathon days and fine tuning his art.

Sid Griffin’s roots are in Alt Country as one of the originators of the genre with The Long Ryders. He was one of the first in the second generations of Gram fans to come out of the closet, delivering a book, Gram Parsons: A Music Biography, and going on to write the liner notes for several Parsons re-releases and, more recently, was a part of the BBC broadcast, Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel (2004) .

Some names generate immediate recognition though the reasons are sometimes out of reach for the memory. I have found that with people when I mention Ms. Bettye Lavette. The woman is an American treasure, a soul singer that pits genres through her delivery and pours them out through a brand that is unique and identifiable in a heartbeat. Her most recent release, “Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook”, takes on classic rock standards from across the big pond.