Articles
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Where I’m From
Silver Mind
My infant Silver naps beside me in his stroller. I can’t help but look for breathing just as a mosquito finds his thigh and produces the answer I am seeking,…
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Features
Without Getting Killed or Caught: Country Music in L.A.
However, the glitz and glamour — regardless of realities — seem antithetical to country music’s near-religious dedication to the perception of authenticity. And this is especially true of those just…
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Community Profile
The La Honda Sound
By doing things their way since the start, the pair have slowly curated the La Honda Sound. It is a sound pursued not because of its commercial appeal but because of its personal appeal.
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Features
Bard of the Prairie
Today’s artists have both a greater freedom and burden to find the authentic West. No one is succeeding at that task better than Colter Wall.
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Features
Crooked Time with Riddy Arman
Now that she’s on the road again, it feels like she’s picking up right where she left off–on an extended run of momentum ignited by her powerful debut album. Arman’s…
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Community Profile
Emma Delevante in Focus
“I don’t know what to have you do,” Delevante said. “Do you want me to play my guitar?” Childers offered kindly. “Yeah! Play!” She responded enthusiastically. What she expected to…
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Features
S.G. Goodman is the Keeper of the Time
Modern neuroscience has taught us that trauma rewires our brain, and in turn, reorders our body. When exposed to it, we are more susceptible to feelings of rage and anxiety,…
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Back Page
A Cemetery Song
I taught myself math by calculating people’s ages at the time of their death. This is a fun game when you’re six, until the grim knowledge confronts you that, while…
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Features
Queer Country, Deep in the Heart of Texas
Creekbed’s storytelling grabbed me immediately. He told the story of Willie Nelson’s commercial jingles, penned in the 90s for Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, and then sang “Woman With the…
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Features
Logan Halstead: Wreck on the (Appalachian) Highway
Many people told me that the energy surrounding this country revival reminded them of earlier, underground rock music scenes. Some went even further and asserted that the contemporary rock genre…
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Back Page
Breaking News: Everything is Not Dying
The DHS post was my reward for having been a capable communications staffer on Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. When I started in the role, I didn’t know much about crisis…
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Community Profile
W.B.’s Talkin’
“W.B. is a hero of mine,” Colter Wall tells me from a landline in Southwestern Saskatchewan. “I’d be hard pressed to find anyone who cares about music and cares about…
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Features
The Kitty Wells All-Stars
Equally wondrous, the song that propelled her, It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels, was a ferocious howl of feminism. Ten years before the notion of “women’s liberation” even…
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Where I’m From
Visions of Dallas
I still have visions of Dallas. Plenty of places shaped me as a musician. New Orleans, Mendocino, New York, lonesome highways, street corners, subway platforms. But Dallas shaped me first.
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Features
Can You Hear Them Knocking?
Summer Dean probably shouldn’t be here, out on tour to support the upcoming release of her new album, The Biggest Life, produced by country music icon Bruce Robison. In the small Texas town where Dean grew up, young girls with professional aspirations aimed at the bank, courthouse, or classroom. Her mother was a teacher, and Summer followed in her mama’s footsteps, earning an education degree and teaching elementary school for 10 years. On a familiar and predictable trajectory, gravity’s rainbow should have done the rest.