In a band where a guitar and a saxophone can use one another as camouflage, what good is absolute allegiance to six strings, anyway? Extra Stars is Uhlmann's most inquisitive and assured record yet, a 14-track playground where he uses every instrument at his disposal to pursue an obsession with curious sounds and the memories and emotions they can quickly conjure.
Now it's become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don't find interesting at all. I think it's a little bit boring for me to write about myself. Even if I've had a really interesting day, I feel like I've already lived that, I don't need to go through it every time I sing this song.
I was too embarrassed to sing in my apartment, he says on a video call. But my roommate at the time was dating the preacher's daughter, and had keys to the church across the street. In the dead of night, the madcap bassist and singer took his recording equipment to the empty church, set up on the podium, and first sang his anti-war song Too Many Puppies.
"As time wore on I found myself increasingly turning to my guitar instead of other people in times of loneliness and sorrow and confusion," a spoken passage from "Pathol O.G.," is not a line you'd expect to hear from the author of "Cold Blooded Old Times." But familiarity with the full sweep of Callahan's catalog gives his uncharacteristically direct expression power.
With Portland sextet Abronia, you sort of have to listen past the spectacle. Forget about the overtly Jodorowsky-Morricone vibes, the tenor sax and the pedal steel guitar, the contralto vocals, the gigantic bass drum, the legend of co-founder Eric Crespo's desert vision. What's really going on here?
He looked it too, hiding under a mop of hair, hunched over a well-worn acoustic guitar with no bandmates to fall back on. But in truth, he had nothing to fear - the seated audience of a few hundred people, mesmerized by Owens' rambling guitar fingerpicking, forgave a clumsy chord here or there as they sat in rapt silence for most of the set.
Fans of Ariel Pink, aka Ariel Marcus Rosenberg, either willfully ignore his troubling politics and avid troll-y nature, or they celebrate them and complain that critics just aren't in on the "joke." But any person who would go on Tucker Carlson's show in the wake of being cancelled, post January 6th, to whine about how he couldn't book gigs all of a sudden, is pretty much asking for trouble, and is arguably a little touched to begin with.
In October, Oklahoma country music stadium draw Zach Bryan garnered attention at the highest levels of government when he posted a snippet of a track called "Bad News" in which he sings "ICE is gonna come bust down your door." By the end of the week, United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem rebuked him on conservative personality Benny Johnson's The Benny Show: "I hope he understands how completely disrespectful that song is, not just to law enforcement but to this country."
People created headlines from one quick, simple comment I made on a podcast not long ago, it's crazy. I've got to be careful about what I say about it. But I've got a lot to say about it and I've been just trying to figure out how and when, to go about really articulating it.
Rut took piano lessons in grade school, but they didn't stick. He asked his parents for a guitar because he wanted to be Ace Frehley of KISS. When his guitar teacher told him the members of KISS "weren't real musicians," he stopped playing-until high school. "I found a friend who knew all the classic rock riffs. That's when I started hearing songs in my head," he said.
Tiny Desk Radio co-hosts Bobby Carter and Anamaria Sayre present performances from the next generation of Americana music: Sierra Ferrell, whose sound is firmly planted in the roots tradition; Wyatt Flores, an Oklahoman "red dirt" country singer; and MJ Lenderman, an indie rocker who doubles as the guitarist for the band Wednesday. Sierra Ferrell: Tiny Desk Concert Wyatt Flores: Tiny Desk Concert MJ Lenderman: Tiny Desk Concert
