Nashville
Adam Sweeting
Hiatt's regular band play as if they're taking a road trip from Nashville to... well, California maybe, Hiatt's former home which he sings about eloquently on the wistful country-rocker "Adios to California". Despite its title, it's the Golden State that springs to mind once again when he sings "Detroit Made", a dust-raising automobile ode not a little reminiscent of Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" and its tale of a trip out west.Hiatt has some serious stuff in his sights too. He wrote "Down Around my Place" after freak flooding wreaked havoc in his home town of Nashville last year, and the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It may not be a particularly popular statement, but the financial black hole rapidly consuming the music industry undoubtedly has its fringe benefits. Five years ago Shelby Lynne would have toured the UK with a session band and played for perhaps 70 minutes. Last night, in the draughty deconsecrated church she immediately transformed into an intimate supper club, Lynne played for two hours with just a guitarist for company – and was spellbinding. Long may the pennies pinch.It’s over a decade since Lynne released I am Shelby Lynne, less a conventional album and more a delta where all the great Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Always renowned as an interpreter of other artists' material, Emmylou Harris has been a late developer as a songwriter. On 2008's All I Intended to Be, she successfully balanced cover versions with her own songs, but this time she has written eight songs single-handed, and three more in collaboration with Will Jennings. It's a sign of her writerly progress that her own work comfortably holds its own against the non-originals "Cross Yourself", composed by producer and multi-instrumentalist Jay Joyce, and Ron Sexsmith's slightly turgid title track.Hard Bargain was cut in a brisk four Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With k.d. lang's original "cowpunk" days of Absolute Torch and Twang now a distant memory, she has settled into the role of deluxe vocal stylist with a bit of heritage balladry on the side (for instance, her collaboration with Tony Bennett, A Wonderful World). This batch of new material, most of it co-written with co-producer Joe Pisapia, rings familiar lang-esque bells. We're barely into the first track, "I Confess", when shades of her idol Roy Orbison become discernable in the vertiginous melodrama of the arrangement, and the late, great Patsy Cline frequently takes a peek over lang' Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alison Krauss hasn't made an album of new material with turbo-bluegrass combo Union Station since Lonely Runs Both Ways, from 2004. Having filled some of the time in between by co-starring with Robert Plant on the mesmerising (and Grammy-guzzling) Raising Sand, she returns here to her familiar pastures of hard country and raw bluegrass, with a sprinkling of winsome balladry to sugar the pill.The four-man Union Station are peerless in their field, each of them trailing a clutch of industry awards to go with their lists of performing credentials, but they always find a distinctive mood when Read more ...
neil.smith
Hollywood stars are well known for bragging they do all their own stunts, often at the expense of the genuine daredevils who risk their lives on their behalf. With the advent of CGI and motion-capture technology, though, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make such an idle boast. What’s an icon to do to prove their mettle? The answer, it would seem, is to do all their own singing, even when they are patently ill-equipped to do so.Gone are the days when Audrey Hepburn’s lips would part and Marni Nixon’s voice would waft out, as was notoriously heard to happen in My Fair Lady. Instead we Read more ...
howard.male
Last night was the third and probably last time this 21-year-old Nashville songstress will grace the humble Windmill pub in Brixton with her charismatic yet down-to-earth presence. Not because the gig wasn’t a sell-out and an unqualified success, but because of the radio airplay and unanimous critical praise she has received for her debut album Own Side Now from everyone from the Daily Mail to the Independent. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if by this time next year she’s performing at the Union Chapel or even the Barbican.I’ve never seen a Windmill crowd so attentive to an act before. Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“This song is for my kids – and all their Mommas.” Even at 74, Kris Kristofferson exudes the quietly satisfied air of experience of a man who has spent at least half his life drinking, shagging, smoking and strumming to his heart’s content, and now has a whole lot of good times (and plenty of bad) to draw from at will.A former military man, sports champion and Rhodes scholar, his talent for raising hell was always balanced by his more literate side, and the musician who provided the obvious visual inspiration for the recent Jeff Bridges vehicle Crazy Heart long ago eased into elder statesman Read more ...
graeme.thomson
A few years ago I wrote a book about Willie Nelson. Keith Richards supplied the introduction – a Kafkaesque saga which deserves a book in itself - during which he opined that Willie had a severe case of “white line fever”. This (for once) had nothing to do with exotic Peruvian powders and everything to do with the odd compulsion that keeps a man in his late seventies on the road for nine months of each year, rattling around the world in a bus while his wife and kids make hay in Hawaii.Last night I again realised how perceptive Richards’ words were. There are times during a Willie Nelson Read more ...
bruce.dessau
"So, we made it eventually." Having postponed this show two weeks ago due to the M1 doubling as a skating rink, Richard Hawley opened not with a song but an apology. It was hardly necessary. The sold-out Royal Festival Hall last night was prepared to forgive Sheffield's second-finest songsmith - after his chum Jarvis Cocker - almost anything.Making it eventually could also apply to Hawley's career. After two decades and little headway he finally hit paydirt with Coles Corner in 2005, bagging a Mercury Award nomination. If he trod a little water with 2007's self-conscious sequel Lady's Bridge Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Nashville is much more than the Grand Ol’ Opry, big hairdos and rhinestones, and I was looking for something beyond the occasionally enjoyable kitsch. I was failing to make much sense of the place and fell back on a technique which I’ve often found produces results when somewhere unfamiliar – ask the musicians themselves who they most respect. One name kept coming up – Guy Clark, who it became obvious was a city legend, a songwriters’ songwriter. I turned up at Clark’s house at 11 in the morning, and he offered me a drink from an already open bottle of Bourbon. I asked him for an Read more ...