While Elton John was picking up another bauble and tinkling the ivories in Paris, the world’s other Piano Man was heading to London and Wembley, where he last played three years ago. It was Billy Joel’s only British gig in a stadium tour that kicked off in Orlando in January and which saw him recently notch up his one-hundredth Madison Square Garden concert – as artist-in-residence he’s been playing one concert a month there since 2014. The boy from the Bronx done good and no mistake.Two Piano Men – "two gifted, idiosyncratic artists who exist... between pop and rock, where Broadway show Read more ...

Anyone familiar with Calexico and Iron & Wine will be unsurprised by Years to Burn. The 32-minute album (one track of which is a short instrumental) showcases lilting, mid-paced, reflective, country tinged and acoustic-bedded songs fleshed out with piano and Mexican-styled brass. The strongest are those where the up-front vocal blend conjures Simon & Garfunkel (“Midnight Sun”) and CSNY (“The Bitter Suite”). Furthermore, the mostly Spanish-language “The Bitter Suite” is the album’s most striking track. A portmanteau composition, it resonates with the impressionistic approach Read more ...

Only those who’ve just popped in from an early 20th century Tennessee cotton field will have recently observed more pairs of dungarees in one place than at Red Rooster. It’s a festival that prides itself on a rich diet of Americana alongside a defiantly retro aesthetic. Red Rooster offers up expertly curated, off-the-beaten-track sounds, but there’s a strong sense that it’s as much about hanging out, about having all day/all evening picnics soaked in bourbon cocktails while somewhere not too far away a banjo is twanged by a stetson-wearing someone you’ve never heard of.The festival runs from Read more ...

Was it imagination or did The Waterboys’ audience at London’s Roundhouse, invited to sing along to “The Nearest Thing to Hip”, really sing extra-loud and lustily on the line “in this shithole”? On a momentous day that seemed to push Britain further toward the perilous unknown, Mike Scott’s energetic performance of the song from the band’s 2015 album Modern Blues certainly struck a chord, and his recollections of youthful visits to London and lament of now long-gone delights surely resonated with many.There was the record store in Westbourne Grove where the teenaged Scott was invariably told Read more ...

Prufrock might have measured his life in coffee spoons but for many of us it’s rock albums, the money to buy them way back when scrabbled together from Saturday jobs and student grants  –  remember them? Many in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall last night for Mark Knopfler surely did and we knew precisely where we were when we heard “Sultans of Swing”, which caught the ear on late-night student radio  –  that open-tuning National Steel guitar, the story of George, “who knows all the chords”, delivered in a voice and style that seemed to mix Bob Dylan and Lou Read more ...

Better Oblivion Community Center may be a supergroup of sorts, but the name still draws less recognition that its members (Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes). Maybe it’s just too complicated to remember, because a packed Shepherd’s Bush Empire proved the band’s wide appeal – lairy lads and muso pensioners, side-by-side for a night of charm and angst.Oberst and Bridgers have very different voices, but her effortless tones melt through his fragile strains to form a sort of alchemy together. It worked surprisingly well on record, and perhaps more so live. There’s an honesty and Read more ...

Torso Hell tells the story of an American soldier whose limbs were blown off in Vietnam. Amazingly, he and his buddies survived, and in the ensuing medical chaos his arms and legs were re-attached to them rather than him. The narrator says “At the hospital, it’s so crazy and confused that when these guys come in, the doctors and nurses don’t know what from what … they just start sewing. The main guy stays a torso, but they put his arms and legs back on the other guys. Two guys each get one of his arms … two guys each get one of his legs.” It’s a typically bizarre Terry Allen set-up. Read more ...

There's a remarkable lightness to the way Norah Jones has glid through her career. She once told theartsdesk that even in her early 20s, faced with the global hyper success of Come Away With Me, “I think I was smart enough to know at the time that it was money in the bank: ‘You can do what you want now, so do it.’” And what she wanted, fantastically, was essentially to be the musician she already was only more so: steadily getting deeper into country melancholy, lounge jazz dreaming and other romantically-lit hinterlands of the American psyche. And now, 17 years on, well Read more ...

Guy Clark is among the favourite songwriters of Bob Dylan, a Grammy-winning giant of the so-called outlaw country music movement who lived hard and died of lymphoma in 2016. He made guitars and wrote songs such as the classic “Desperados Waiting for a Train” and “Texas, 1947” which, it has been said, “presents a view of life in post-war West Texas that is as true as Dorothea Lange’s best Dust Bowl portraiture”. Not bad!Clark provided hit records for Ricky Skaggs and Bobby Bare and was a mentor to Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle, who hitchhiked from San Antonio to Nashville in 1974 to meet Read more ...

In one of the award-winning club’s forays from its Camden Town home, Green Note welcomed International Women’s Day with a special one-off concert exploring and celebrating the many ages and stages of being a woman. Three generations of musicians were on stage at North London’s JW3. The youngest, The Rosellas, an a cappella trio who met at school and who are now making quite a name for themselves, before shortly dispersing (temporarily one hopes) across the country to uni.It was a life-affirming evening enjoyed by an audience that included a healthy Read more ...

Jason Mraz… How can someone so big slip under so many radars. Mine, the muso with whom I trek to all sorts of gigs, and that of a wide range of friends, most of whom are pretty au courant with the scene.Then you hear it. Of course, the big hit – probably on all our mental juke boxes – “I’m Yours”, which has clocked up sales of around 1.4 million, and which comes from his third album, We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things (2008). The single set what was then a record of 76 weeks in the Billboard Hot 100 chart and peaked at number six, going on to win a Grammy and to be named ASCAP Song of the Read more ...

“If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure,” observed Dave van Ronk, the late folk musician known as “the Mayor of MacDougal Street” in Greenwich Village.He was doubtless talking about composition itself, but it applies also to musical careers. What struck me most watching the last two nights of Joan Baez’s tour in which she bade farewell to the UK was the symmetry of it all. As has been her custom in recent years, she began solo: just her and her bespoke Martin guitar on “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” before introducing “my big band Read more ...