Peter Aaron

For Corey Smith, one of the best things about making music has always been getting the chance to hang out and have a good time with his friends. And it’s still that way, more than 10 years after his early days of playing the bars around Athens, Georgia. The big difference now? Well, it seems [...]

It’s a red-dirt sound. That parched, wide-open kind of country that comes from nowhere but North Texas. A time-tested, both-boots-on-the-ground kind of music. One that usually has to be earned; the big reward that seems to ripen only after decades of slugging it out for rowdy oil field workers in sawdust honky-tonks from Amarillo to [...]

Anyone who experienced New York’s gritty, exciting, and gloriously vibrant music scene in the 1970s, ’80s, or ’90s will tell you the same thing: Their city is gone. Wiped out by a Stalin-esque, Disney-driven coup and replaced with a staid world of theme restaurants and karaoke bars. It’s as if when the soul was sucked [...]

Not many blues artists can call themselves “the Doctor of the Blues” without a whole stretcher-full of the idiom’s winking big talk. But Marshall Lawrence can, and with only the slightest bit of irony. The award-nominated Canadian bluesman actually holds a doctorate in psychology, and he knows how to use it—just as he knows how [...]

Fuzzy electric and strummed acoustic guitars swirl together with bass and drums in a spacey, spooky mix. Weird electronic blips pulse and percolate amid the haze. Ghostly male and female vocals materialize, harmonically converge, and then disappear back into the infinite mist. You feel warm. Dizzy. Disoriented. This is very much a mysterious, alien place. [...]

There’s just something about the Catskills and great music that go together. An energy that radiates from the mighty, life-giving nexus of the Hudson River and courses through the mountains and the tall pines, between the dozens of old stone houses; a beacon in search of creative spirits to embrace and nurture. It’s a light [...]

The words come through your speakers. Tense words. Sharp words. Hypnotic words. Words couched in grinding guitars and thudding drums, words thick with emotional desperation that also reveal the strangely paradoxical beauty in suffering; the diamonds in the cave, waiting to be mined. The words are those of Lauren O’Brien, one of the most exciting [...]