Sexting with the Millennial Arlo Guthrie
Don’t swipe left, bro. Don't swipe right.
Two deaf girls walk into a folk show
The talking blues aren't always a comedy routine
John Craigie spent the better part of his early career without a fixed address, sleeping in his van and on couches, touring around the country, and self-releasing a spate of albums for his homespun Zabriskie Point Records. Based on the evidence of those early records, one could have been forgiven for pegging Craigie as a lesser light of the late-2000s indie-folk boom, a kind of itinerant cousin of the Avett Brothers or Langhorne Slim.
It was only with 2016’s Capricorn in Retrograde… Just Kidding… Live in Portland that Craigie fully captured what he was after. In addition to Craigie’s studio hits, his live performances feature topical, often slapstick tracks that usually take the form of the talking blues and affect a kind of charming millennial haplessness — Arlo Guthrie by way of Bo Burnham, maybe, without the latter’s cloying come-on. On “Pictures on My Phone,” a song about the pitfalls of …
Black Country
It's more than Shaboozie
Country Pride means Charley Pride
Beyoncé is an establishment hegemon who sells jeans
Readers concerned that America is spiraling into a permanently balkanized hellscape might find comfort in the Top 10 of the Billboard country chart. The cold robotic strum of the repeating acoustic guitar phrase in Morgan Wallen’s “Lies Lies Lies” competes with the icy hook in Dasha’s “Austin” for sheer lifelessness, while Kane Brown and the EDM producer Marshmello’s “Miles On It” is one of the year’s most perfunctory attempts at a big frat-party number. Jessie Murph at least finds a comfortable-enough pocket within the snares of the beat on Koe Wetzel’s “High Road,” while the year’s big chart-topper, Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song,” has been so ubiquitous for so long — as I write it has been #1 on the Hot 100 for 13 weeks — that it hasn’t mattered for a while whether it’s even all that good. The key thing is that hip-hop and country, superficially opposite racial and geographic poles of American folk …
An Angel Watches Over Him
Evan Dando hits the road with his scars
No longer just another Vineyard junkie
He lives in Brazil now, but is happy to visit St. Louis and sing ‘Barrytown’
The angel that watches over Evan Dando from heaven has been doing a bang-up job for the past thirty years or so. Dando remains the dream boyfriend who would rather be playing his guitar and doing drugs than cuddle up. He is the Bertie Wooster of ’90s rock stars, with his happy dolphin smile and greasy blonde hair falling down alluringly over his eyes. An airhead with the soul of a poet.
Evan’s love for music was always entirely real, though, even if his songs were built backwards, with choruses at the end instead of in the middle, the stoned warmth of his rock star voice insinuating itself into the listener’s head like a woolen blanket that gave comfort while you looked out the window on a rainy afternoon. At the very least, his songs were always approachable. “Into Your Arms,” a not particularly memorable by-the-numbers song that Evan wrote at the height of his fame with The Lemonheads, spent …
