Reviews

Fans of the band High Fidelity won’t be surprised to hear that frontman Jeremy Stephens credits older generations for most of the influence on his music.  With a new solo project titled How I Hear It, Stephens has produced an album with a bounce and vocals that hark back to an earlier time. Stephens called…

Rising mandolin star Scott Napier’s career and life are on an upward trajectory. He’s just joined Wildfire as their new mandolinist, and he’s married to the stellar Lauren Price Napier of the Price Sisters, one of the top players and teachers of the pure Monroe-style bluegrass mandolin embodied by the likes of Mike Compton and…

Paolo Ercoli is a resonator guitarist from Brianza, Italy who has performed with many artists such as Eric Anderson, Malcolm Holcombe, Steve Forbert, and Kevin Welch, to name a few. Ercoli also plays mandolin, guitar and pedal steel, but he is best known as a square neck resonator guitarist, having been influenced by the playing…

Boar Hog Bluegrass 3408 Bluegrass icon Jack Tottle has a ton of stories to tell, I’m sure. Here, he unfurls a bounty of wonderful, inventive original instrumentals and other tunes to let those stories shine. Buoyed by the floational flatpicking guitar of Tim Stafford, Tottle presents 13 original and traditional tunes here in a mostly…

The Henhouse Prowlers have spent the last eight of their 17 years together as “cultural ambassadors” for the U.S. State Department. In this capacity, they’ve played everywhere from Siberia and the Middle East to various points in Africa and the Americas (75 countries, all told).  As their new album attests, they are worthy representatives indeed….

Billy Blue Records Doyle Lawson recently announced that he will be retiring from touring at the end of 2022, but it’s clear with his new album out that he plans on exiting with a bang.  Roundtable is a collection of a dozen songs that can simply be described as what you’d expect from Lawson and…