One of my discoveries at this year’s Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival up in Grass Valley was a San Francisco Bay Area band, Solid Gold Stranger. In addition to their sets on both the Main and ...
https://twangville.com/2024/07/25/solid-gold-stranger-closer-to-the-flame/
If you’re a musician in California, you can feel a bit cloistered. Between Palm Springs and Lubbock there’s a lot of not much. So faced with an 8+ hour drive to the next gig east of the Mojav...
https://twangville.com/2024/07/25/lasers-lasers-birmingham-mystery-highway/
Some bands have a birthing moment, a specific date they first played together. Others form in what is probably best described as an organic fashion. The latter is the case with Santa Cruz’s AJ ...
https://twangville.com/2024/07/18/aj-lee-blue-summit-city-of-glass/
A couple of years ago, at AmericanaFest, one of my highlights was seeing a trio that later called themselves Wonder Women Of Country; Kelly Willis, Brennan Leigh, and Melissa Carper. I was famili...
https://twangville.com/2024/07/11/melissa-carper-borned-in-ya/
Back in the day, the normal way to make an album was for the vocalist to go into the studio with musicians that did little else besides play on recordings being made for the name on the cover. Wh...
Over the years I’ve developed a knack for figuring out if I’m going to like a record pretty quickly. If it doesn’t pull me in after 10-15 minutes, another listen or two isn’t going to cha...
One of the by-products of our social media driven lives is that nothing can be just OK anymore. You can’t be good at something, you have to be fantastic. There’s no such thing as a bad day; i...
https://twangville.com/2024/06/20/matt-hillyer-bright-skyline/
Back in the mid-90’s I went to the Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival on a whim. I was staying nearby, didn’t have plans, and I like bluegrass. Voila. Now, thirty years later, the festival is ...
https://twangville.com/2024/06/20/2024-fathers-day-bluegrass-festival/
A friend of mine noted earlier this year there has developed a tiny silver lining to the Cat 5 hurricane of the pandemic. He observed that anyone still in the music business now is in it because ...
https://twangville.com/2024/06/12/cosmic-guilt-palace-of-depression/
Sound-color synesthesia is when a certain sound causes you to see things in a certain color. I don’t have it, but I experience a related effect when I listen to the latest from Portland, Oregon...
https://twangville.com/2024/06/05/jenny-dont-the-spurs-broken-hearted-blue/