Interviews
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The Artistry of Audacity: An Interview with the War on Drugs’ Dave Hartley
The War on Drugs had a big year last year. Marijuana legalization jokes aside, the band\’s album, Lost in a Dream, made — or topped — more than a few critics\’ lists. For an album that documented in song the emotional turmoil and torment that frontman/songwriter Adam Granduciel had been going through, that\’s no small…
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Five Questions: James McMurtry
Somewhere between Texas, Virginia, Arizona, and Alaska — that\’s where James McMurtry looked for himself and his voice as an aspiring young singer/songwriter. By the time his 1989 debut, Too Long in the Wasteland, came to pass, he\’d found both and was back in Texas where it all began. Since then, McMurtry has released another…
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Nothing to Prove: An Interview with alt-J’s Gus Unger-Hamilton
a group of English and fine arts students at Leeds University came together to form an art-rock, for lack of a better genre descriptor, band. When they graduated, the guys (Gwil Sainsbury, Joe Newman, Thom Green, and Gus Unger-Hamilton) moved to Cambridge and really got down to it, signing with Infectious Records and releasing an…
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Five Questions: Pokey LaFarge
Pokey LaFarge may have been a slow kid, but he sure is a quick study. Growing up in Normal, Illinois, he found inspiration in guys like John Steinbeck, Muddy Waters, Ernest Hemingway, Willie Dixon, Jack Kerouac , and Bill Monroe. After high school, the aspiring songwriter hitchhiked his way around the country. Add all that…
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One Eye Forward, One Eye Back: An Interview with Andrew Combs
Maybe there\’s something in the water in Nashville — or, more likely, in the draft beer at the Red Door Saloon — but quite a few young artists are making records that recall a bygone era, a time when great songwriters doubled as great artists. Forty-something years ago, folks like Paul Simon, Mickey Newbury, Jim…
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Five Questions: Joe Pug
Though he hails from Maryland, singer/songwriter Joe Pug has bounced from Chicago to Nashville to Austin in his search for a place in the world. But that\’s just geography. Pug, long ago, found where he fits artistically, and it\’s somewhere down the line from Bob Dylan, John Prine, Steve Earle, and John Hiatt. Like those…
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Squared Roots: Gretchen Peters x Mickey Newbury
In the early 1960s, when Mickey Newbury returned home from three years of Air Force duty, he lived and traveled the Southland in a \’54 Pontiac, chasing his songwriter\’s dream. He would play gigs, when he wasn\’t working on a shrimp boat, and made his way to Nashville, where he signed his first publishing contract…
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Five Questions: Pine Hill Project
Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell have both enjoyed lengthy, prolific, and acclaimed careers in the singer/songwriter world. Even as solo artists, though, they shared an artistic kinship that neither could deny… nor could their fans. So, when the two finally realized their long-time dream of collaborating as a duo, the Pine Hill Project was born.…
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Transformation and Translation: An Interview with Laura Marling
With her fifth album in seven years dropping later this month, Laura Marling is about as prolific as musicians come. And, being cut from the same cloth as Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, she\’s also as out-of-the-box as singer/songwriters get. That combination has garnered her multiple accolades, to be sure, but it has also brought…
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Five Questions: Elana James
Elana James has been playing music since she was four years old. At that very young age, she took up her mother\’s instrument — classical violin — and continued those studies while getting a degree in comparative religion at Columbia University. Along the way from there to here, James switched over to fiddle, worked as…