The B-52s With The Wild Crowd (Eagle Rock) Rating: Nobody throws a party like this Athens, GA quartet so it’s unclear why it has taken 35 years for them to release a full length live album. Recorded in a single night on their home turf, the generous career spanning 18 track, 76 minute platter hits [...]

Various Artists The Best of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum Live (Time/Life) Rating: Three songs into The Best of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum Live, the soul comes out, via one Rev. Al Green. He gives the performance of his life on “A Change is Gonna Come,” [...]

Daughtry Break The Spell (RCA) Rating: Daughtry seems to be in the midst of a musical identity crisis. Recently, Chris Daughtry proclaimed his band’s latest would sound completely different from its predecessors, but by the album’s second track, you will realize Break The Spell doesn’t live up to that promise. Instead, what you get here [...]

The Grateful Dead The Grateful Dead Movie Shout Factory! Rating: Relentless touring and nightly construction of the Wall of Sound (the band’s legendary PA system) cost The Grateful Dead their energy and stamina by the mid ’70s. If the wear-and-tear produced one good thing, it was the 1977 documentary, co-directed by Jerry Garcia himself, featuring [...]

One argument against Spotify has been that while its playlist-driven approach is great for discovering new music from friends, it’s not so great for learning more about said new music. In an Apple-style mystery press conference on Wednesday, Spotify CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek admitted, “We know that users want more information about the music [...]

This Friday, December 2nd, singer-songwriter Anya Marina will be joining us for an American Songwriter Twitterview at 3 pm CST. Marina’s song “Satellite Heart” was one of the highlights of the New Moon soundtrack. Her latest EP, Spirit School, captures her winning folk-pop sound, and documents the “time when I got out of my own [...]

Check out the charming, quirky new video for “Heart U 4 Ever,” off Kyle Andrews’ latest album Robot Learn Love. Says Andrews: “In a modern age where people share their love with one another through a technological onslaught of thoughts and ideas, this video  takes you back to a simpler time when surprise and whimsy [...]

Jake Kelly reviews the Fishman Blackstack Guitar Pickup.

Got an issue with our Top 50 List? Here’s 20 more albums that wowed us this year. 1. Middle Brother – Middle Brother 2. Ron Sexsmith – Long Player Late Bloomer 3. Smoke Fairies – Through Low Light And Trees 4. Bill Callahan – Apocalypse 5. Jonathan Wilson – Gentle Spirit 6. Eric Church- Chief [...]

“I decided to take my shotgun and take a long walk to Brooklyn,” is not the sort of statement you expect to occupy a song about Dan Aykroyd, if you expect a song about Dan Aykroyd at all. “John would always laugh, but he’s not laughing now,” goes the refrain of Timothy Showalter’s outrageous elegy [...]

If this Irish singer-songwriter and former Damien Rice sidewoman’s jarringly precise ukulele picking resembles needlepoint, well, that’s only the half of it. Hannigan’s first album Sea Sew had the entirety of the lyrics stitched into the linen of the album art courtesy of Hannigan herself. She sings pretty, too. <a href=”http://americansongwriter-october11.bandcamp.com/track/knots” _mce_href=”http://americansongwriter-october11.bandcamp.com/track/knots”>&quot;Knots&quot; by Lisa Hannigan</a>

As per the course for song titles that end in “___ Moon Rising,” this Smoke Fairies tune is a slide guitar-led expedition through the marsh. But that’s where Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies’ debt to traditional blues ends; the languid harmonies are closer to chamber music than back-porch hollering. Plus, blues songs aren’t known for [...]