country
Joe Muggs
Welcome to theartsdesk's first radio show with Peter Culshaw and Joe Muggs, recorded with the extremely able help of Brendon Harding at Red Bull Studio London.In the course of this show, Peter and Joe take a look at the depth and breadth of music covered by theartsdesk, playing some delicious tracks just out or about to be released (see below), and discussing the meaning of musical genre in a globalised world and asking whether it is still a useful way of bracketing artists. In amongst this you can hear an interview with the young Soweto-born musician Spoek Mathambo, now mainly residing Read more ...
Tim Cumming
He has been called “America’s sharpest musical storyteller” by Rolling Stone, and has enough talent to give Bob Dylan’s talking blues a run for their money. The East Nashville-based singer-songwriter, guitarist, yarn-spinner, troubadour and amiably agnostic stoner has 10 new stories on his 14th album, the title of which acts as a pretty accurate calling card for the Snider experience: Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables. He’s also got a raw new band behind him, at the same time as strapping on an electric guitar, blowing a mean, distorted harp through a handheld mic, and delivering some of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Civil Wars are one of those bands rendered suddenly white hot in the UK by a classy performance on Later with Jools Holland. They’re a photogenic country-ish acoustic singer-songwriter pairing whose style is just un-country enough to fit neatly alongside James Morrison on Home Counties i-players, but whose very, very faint tint of Deep South gothic also has the hipsters intrigued. They have sold out the Shepherds Bush Empire tonight and arrive on stage to enthused applause and yells of appreciation. The crowd are in their early thirties and upwards, straight-looking, and they love this Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“I know what I was angry about when I wrote this,” Nanci Griffith told the crowd as she introduced “Hell No (I’m Not Alright)”, “but you can get your anger out about whatever you want.”It seemed a little odd that Griffith left the big hook (if the bold, sloganned t-shirts of the crowd are anything to be believed) from new album Intersection until after the house lights came back up for the first time, but back in her native America the song can lead to pandemonium. Delivered with gusto, complete with synchronised clapping from two burly roadies in matching sunglasses, its lyrics are not Read more ...
Russ Coffey
When an artist releases an album of new readings of old material, there’s usually cause for concern. But not with Lionel Richie’s new release, a foray into light country. In fact, given Richie’s recent efforts to stay down with the kids, maybe he should have tapped his archive before. Here he’s teamed up with (mainly) young country stars to rework his greatest hits with an Alabama radio pulse. The arrangements may sound crisp and contemporary, but the real fun comes from wallowing in the past and remembering Lionel’s evergreen Eighties.There are a couple of hiccups. But just that. One of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Tonight on Channel 4, a new music series begins with a fantastic premise. A group of music obsessives drive around the USA in a London black cab, finding interesting musicians and recording them performing and talking in the back of the cab. Sounds a little bit like the 2008 Stephen Fry in America series, doesn't it? Well maybe, except Black Cab Sessions has been broadcast online since 2007.Watch the Black Cab Sessions trailer:And there's the rub. BCS has now featured hundreds of acts in various cabs, from complete unknowns to top ten-bothering popstars, from gangsta rappers to Brian Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Something falls with a clatter from one of Dom Flemons’s pockets. The Carolina Chocolate Drops’s banjo player, guitarist and all-round picker and plucker has a lot of pockets. Earlier, he’d produced a pipe from one, a tobacco pouch and tuning pipes from others, but what has just dropped on the table are his bones. His musical bones. The ones whose rhythms are rarely far from the heart of his band. “You never know when you’re going to need them,” he says. “Sometimes you just get bored."This is the cue for the Chocolate Drops’s newbie Hubby Jenkins to get his bones out, and the pair begin Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nanci Griffith, the Lone Star State’s dirty realist, has done much of her better work with a Democrat in the White House. I remember interviewing her once soon after the first Gulf War, when she was glum about the prospect of George Bush Snr walking the next election. She turned out to be wrong about that, and the Clinton years confirmed her as the pre-eminent godmother of rootsy, narrative singer-songwriting. Then the next Bush, far from firing up her busy liberal wrath, ushered in an emotional downturn.This intoxicating set of songs finds her defiantly in recovery mode, never louder or Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Canadian singer-songwriter Lindi Ortega took to the stage last night in a rococo Edinburgh broom cupboard looking like a country-fried Amy Winehouse in widow’s robes. As with most first impressions, it proved misleading. The visuals might have screamed Camden boho chic by way of New Nashville, but the voice was pure Dolly.Ortega has been making fine music for over a decade. Between spells providing vocal back-up for the likes of Brandon Flowers, she has carved her own niche. In the time between her first album, The Taste of Forbidden Fruit (2001) and her third, Little Red Boots (2011), she Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The makers of this short history of country music had done a good job of rounding up interviewees, who included such veterans as Ray Price, Merle Haggard and Charley Pride alongside the offspring of several country legends. We met Shooter Jennings (son of Waylon), Hank Williams III and Georgette Jones (daughter of Tammy Wynette and George Jones). Trouble is, by the time their interviews had been diced into small fragments and lobbed in with an additional list of pundits and critics, their impact had dissipated.The solution? This should either have been a longer film or the first of two (or Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Creative time travel is very much in vogue. For musicians especially, it appears that death is not so much The End as an opportunity to extend the possibilities of the franchise. Early in 2012, American alt-country type Jay Farrar and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James will release New Multitudes, an (excellent) album of new songs based on some of the thousands of unrecorded lyrics left by Woody Guthrie after his death in 1967. It’s just the latest in a line of high-profile collaborations between the living and the dead.Already in 2011 Bob Dylan’s Egyptian label has released The Lost Notebooks of Read more ...