Email Author Roy Kasten

2005 Stories by Roy Kasten

• The Round-Ups/Monads/Whiskey Don'ts

  published December 28, 2005

  All country music is drinking music, but no sub-genre owns the drinking song quite like cow-punk. Even when the Round-Ups, the Monads... More >>

• Freakwater

  published December 14, 2005

  Catherine Irwin and Janet Bean, a.k.a. Freakwater, have reunited and released their first album in six years, Thinking of You... .... More >>

• Mound City Music Fest

  published December 7, 2005

  On paper, the lineup for the second annual Mound City Music Fest looks like a bummer. Live, it may well be the show of the year. Jay Farrar... More >>

• Matchmaker, Matchmaker

  published November 30, 2005

  A Million Miles Away Milemarker and My Chemical Romance are from different worlds. The former is an... More >>

• The New Lou Reeds

  published November 16, 2005

  The New Lou Reeds If The New Lou Reeds (who split their time between Cleveland and NYC) lived their songs and sound, they'd practice... More >>

• Marah

  published November 2, 2005

  The title of Marah's fifth album, If You Didn't Laugh You'd Cry, might refer to sales of their previous effort, 20,000... More >>

• Danse Macabre

  published November 2, 2005

  Like faded postcards of watercolor scenes scrawled over with words of longing, Athens, Georgia's Phosphorescent maps inner and outer landscapes... More >>

• Kate Earl

  published October 26, 2005

  Unburdened of the marked-for-death, gentle-rock stigma of James Taylor, Carly Simon and Phoebe Snow, a new generation of singer-songwriters... More >>

• Big Star

  published October 26, 2005

  Big Star founder Alex Chilton escaped hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, but apparently the masters for In Space, the band's first studio album... More >>

• The Avett Brothers

  published October 19, 2005

  As a general rule, young, male rockers who dabble in acoustic instruments and bluegrass harmonies wind up on one of two paths: They either give it... More >>

• Amy Ray

  published October 12, 2005

  "I'm the dyke who will give it to you," sings Indigo Girl Amy Ray on Prom, her second solo album. But Prom isn't a vagina... More >>

• The Frames

  published October 5, 2005

  In the 1991 rock & roll film The Commitments, Frames vocalist/guitarist Glen Hansard plays Outspan Foster, the sincere young... More >>

• Big Noise from Springfield

  published September 21, 2005

  Ever since Red Foley and his Ozark Jubilee put Springfield, Missouri, on the country map in the '50s, a host of rockers and twangers have made... More >>

• Song Sung Blue

  published September 14, 2005

  The history of rock is the history of stupid band names. None, though, are dumber than the moniker Slobberbone. Last year, after bassist Brian... More >>

• Chuck Prophet

  published September 7, 2005

  As an unlikely guitar hero, a subgenre co-inventor and a rock & roll cultist's Kool-Aid king, Chuck Prophet was the unacknowledged... More >>

• Steve Dawson

  published September 7, 2005

  Between the lines of Steve Dawson's Sweet Is the Anchor, there's a riot going on -- albeit a contemplative one, impelled by the... More >>

• Kelly Joe Phelps

  published August 31, 2005

  Like the sound of some impossible invention built from theremin, pedal steel, saw, omnichord, sitar and the whir of hummingbirds, the sound of... More >>

• Shelby Lynne

  published August 24, 2005

  Shelby Lynne won a Grammy for Best New Artist in 2001 -- as though some illegitimate twin of hers had been stalking the country charts... More >>

• Loretta Lynn

  published August 17, 2005

  "People forget that I'm a songwriter," Loretta Lynn once said. "They think of me as just a lady up on the stage, with a band backing her... More >>

• John Lee Hooker Jr.

  published August 10, 2005

  Wondering what relevance the blues might have for your life? Take heed of "Blues Ain't Nothin' but a Pimp" by John Lee Hooker Jr.: "The... More >>

• Bruce Springsteen

  published August 3, 2005

  As some would have it (notably The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones), the lapidary narratives of Bruce Springsteen's Devils &... More >>

• Ry Cooder

  published July 27, 2005

  A concept album about McCarthyism, UFOs and the building of Dodger Stadium in the late '50s couldn't possibly be a landmark of American music --... More >>

• Rosie Flores and the Falcons

  published July 27, 2005

  Rosie Flores has never been much for the costumed and coiffed wannabillies, and they've never been much for her. Their loss. She had her... More >>

• The Neville Brothers

  published July 20, 2005

  American roots music isn't about to pass from this earth. But if that was the case -- and only the first family of New Orleans R&B, the Neville... More >>

• Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson

  published July 6, 2005

  In 1966, when Bob Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde in Nashville, Willie Nelson had just made it into the Grand Ole Opry. Their... More >>