Reviews

Shannon Slaughter offers a little bit of everything and almost everybody on his new album, Ridin’ Through the Country.  One thing is unchanged from his previous efforts, though—it is dyed-in-the-wool bluegrass to the core. There are 15 songs on the album and Slaughter wrote or co-wrote nine of them.  There is a long and impressive…

Mescalito Riding His White Horse: Insipred by The Musical Adventures of Peter Rowan is part Rowan biography, part author Mike Fiorito’s autobiography, part Peter Rowan interview, part Fiorito dream journal, part song lyric analysis, and part exploration of Buddhism.  All of that makes this book a fairly wild ride, but Fiorito is able to weave…

This ensemble from the hills of western North Carolina has a unique and exuberant groove that is, at once, musically sophisticated yet determinedly rustic. It tends to draw listeners right in. On Pretty Little Goat’s third album you can hear this distinctive sensibility on traditional numbers like “Uncle Joe/ Leather Britches” and “Fisher’s Hornpipe,” as…

Unless banjo pickers frequent  the most advanced musical circles in Nashville, they are unlikely to walk into their local bluegrass jam and find someone calling out a tune from Wes Corbett’s recently released Cascade album.  So why the need for a book notating—in painstaking detail—each of that record’s ten ambitious tracks? Corbett, a current member…

Midwest band The Barley Jacks do things a little differently. Their third album, Coming Down the Mountain, is out—10 years after their previous album.  To get the album, The Barley Jacks joined a growing number of musicians and crowdfunded the work. At the time this review was written, Coming Down the Mountain had brought in…

The growing number of performers writing songs and developing their own sound within bluegrass and elsewhere face a couple of choices when preserving those carefully nurtured songs beyond a simple smartphone video or voice memo. If you want to overdub instrumental or vocal tracks, there’re several choices, including doing your overdubs and mixing directly on…