Category: Entertainment

Blind Boys of Alabama, Atom Bomb. As the new century started almost 17 years ago, one of America’s most venerable gospel groups turned a page in their playbook. The Blind Boys of Alabama signed to Peter Gabriel’s Real World label and took off for new territory. Atom Bomb was the last of four records done...

Daniel Foose, of Waters and Ghosts. Talk about inspired: bassist and composer Daniel Foose grew up in Austin with deep Mississippi roots, went to college in Denton, Texas and then lit out for New York. Once there, he worked his way into the jazz world and, also, performed with Lady Gaga. Why not? On Foose’s...

If ever there was a case of the media building up and then knocking down a band, it was the one involving Fleetwood Mac in the late-’70s and early-’80s. The critics cheered when the group—newly energized by the addition of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks—delivered its chart-topping eponymous album in 1975 and the even better...

Hayes Carll, Lovers and Leavers. It’s always a promising sign when the phrase “Produced by Joe Henry” is on an album. It means the music inside will be deserving of the pinnacle of production that Henry brings to the studio. With Hayes Carll, that would never be in question. He is such a one-of-a-kind singer-songwriter...

The “supergroup” label—which critics and fans first applied to such late 1960s outfits as Cream, Blind Faith, and Crosby, Stills & Nash—has arguably since been overused. But if ever an outfit deserved the supergroup tag, it’s the Traveling Wilburys, whose members’ reputations loom so large that it’s difficult to believe their collaboration actually took place....

Joseph Arthur, The Family. Have mercy. How does someone like Joseph Arthur continually top himself? He’s one of the most free-range rockers the world has seen the past 20 years, and just when you think Arthur can’t take it any farther, wham. There he goes again. Joseph Arthur turns his laser soul on his past...

Eric Clapton, I Still Do. It’s highly likely that if Eric Clapton was only allowed to play one style of music (as if such a thing were ever possible), it would be blues. There is something about his past that makes blues the salve for all that ails him. When he tears relentlessly into songs...

Bob Dylan’s Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), which contain covers of old folk and blues tunes, should have come as no surprise to anyone who’d paid attention to his career. Way back on his eponymous 1962 debut, after all, he had headed pretty much in the same direction....